Gamm regular Wendy Overly plays Grace with a blend of thundering intensity and wry wit that makes her appealing as well as exasperating; she's incapable, at least at first, of ever allowing the possibility that she might be mistaken, but there's a warmth in her bluster that makes it endurable, for her family as well as for us. Kyle Blanchette's Tom is, almost of necessity, a quieter fighter, yet we come to see that he has his own kind of strength.
The two of them are balanced and mediated in their battles by the (relative) moderates who love them. Jim O'Brien plays Grace's husband, Tony, with a sometimes uncertain accent but an unfailing pragmatism and good humor; he doesn't so much refuse to take sides as wish that there weren't such sharply divided sides to take. And Karen Carpenter gives Tom's girlfriend, Ruth, a calm intelligence and inner fire that prove her a worthy partner both for him and, in later struggles, for Grace.
But it's Grace, with her just-symbolic-enough name, who's the real focus here, of the action and of the attentions of her two authors, one a London playwright and director and the other a professor of philosophy at the University of London. The first scene shows Grace in a laboratory, donning a bright yellow helmet that will stimulate certain parts of her brain in an attempt to produce a religious experience. Grace's experiment with the "God helmet," as its researchers call it, is a funny and apt way of introducing the play's basic question: Is everything, including faith, reducible to natural explanations, or is there something beyond the world we can see?
After wearing it briefly, Grace insists that the helmet "didn't really work on me." But as we come to realize, and as hinted by a program note on the play's setting - "in the present and in memories of the recent past" - much of what we see in the next 90 minutes is, in fact, what Grace sees inside that helmet, or more precisely inside her own head.
