‘The Saviors’ Off Broadway Review: Altar Boys Are Much Nicer Than They Used to Be

There’s an altar boy, Michael, who’s a very good Catholic. And there’s another altar boy, Paul, who’s a very good Christian. They’re best friends, but that divide between what’s good for the Church and what’s good for mankind splits into an enormous chasm in the aptly titled “The Saviors.” Bubba Weiler’s new one-act play received its world premiere Monday at the Atlantic Theater Company.

Whether God exists, or not, gets more stage time here than in a vintage Ingmar Bergman movie, especially when a homeless man (Stanley Simons) enters the altar boys’ modest church to take refuge from a winter storm. Sweden isn’t the only place where the temperature drops precipitously.

Paul (Julius Rinzel) welcomes the stranger; Michael (Ivan Howe) says he can’t stay overnight in the church. After all, there are rules. What keeps this drama moving at rapid speed is Weiler’s gift for comic dialogue, and that includes an introductory scene where the 14-year-old Paul and Michael talk about which saints they’ll pick for their confirmation names. Michael finds comfort in some of the Church’s most masochistic martyrs, and Weiler doesn’t miss an opportunity to send up that those medieval nutcases. Equally effective, Weiler turns Michael’s persnicketiness in the face of the homeless man’s dire condition into a great two-person comedy routine. It helps immeasurably that Howe’s timing and delivery are flawless; he has a way of a surprising us with a casual callousness that comes with every other utterance. And he looks like an angel while doing it.

Jack Serio knows how to direct adolescent actors, making us believe that they are real pros, which Howe and Rinzel definitely already are.

At only 90 minutes, “The Saviors” is one of those new plays that makes us wish there was more of it. And the brevity here is only half the problem. When the two altar boys aren’t discussing in gruesome detail how their favorite saints were tortured, there’s a lot of talk about community and the small, insular Midwestern town in which they live. Michael thinks it’s just great. Paul has dreams to escape, because he fears ending up like everybody else he knows.

Weiler gives us the homeless man, who may be the nicest, most loving homeless man ever to walk any stage. Which kind of makes sense, since the character is referred to as “Jesus Christ” at one point. There’s also Judy (Crystal Finn), a pillar of the church, who leads the choir, as well as a youth group to which only Michael ever shows up.

But where’s everybody else? First off, the church Weiler has envisioned (David Zinn’s austerely detailed set) gives Michael and Paul way too much responsibility. Are we to believe these adolescent boys open the church every morning, then lock it up every night of the week?

Today’s playwrights, unfortunately, have to write with the current state of theater economics in mind. But a play like “The Saviors” needs a few more townspeople, not to mention a working priest, to help us visualize that oft-mentioned community. It’s what we get in great community dramas like Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”

Weiler provided that group of characters in his recent play “Well, I’ll Let You Go.” Those friends and relatives are sorely missing in “The Saviors.”