What a gift that another Portland theater has brought us a production so well-timed for this moment. For anyone struggling to hold onto hope when fighting the whims of forces you don’t understand and can’t find a way to impact, Third Rail Repertory Theater’s excellent production of A Case For the Existence of God models a practice of empathy, solidarity, and holding open the big questions as wide as you can. 

The play’s two protagonists are a study in contrasts who, in most instances, would not find — indeed, have not found — a way to connect. 

Ryan (Isaac Lamb) has not distinguished himself in any way; he is under-educated, admittedly hopeless with money (having never had any), and scraping together a living doing factory work. 

Keith (Charles Grant) is an uptight mortgage broker with a dual degree in Early Music and English, prone to using words like “harrowing” that Ryan asks him to define. He navigates with ease aspects of finance and culture that leave Ryan at a loss. 

Ryan is white and straight; Keith is Black and gay. And both have spent their lives in Twin Falls, Idaho. But as Ryan observes after a few awkward interactions over his desire to obtain a mortgage, the two “share a specific kind of sadness.” The play invites you to witness them navigating that sadness and aspiring for what will give their lives meaning.

Doing justice to that well-executed invitation strikes me as tender work, given the generosity of the offering here. This play is not a light romp; it will tend to reward the quality of intention that audience members bring to it. But the artists here have held nothing back. They embody aspects of human struggle that are familiar and yet most definitely do evoke the ultimate questions suggested by the play’s title.

All of the action involves the two actors in tight quarters, negotiating their struggles, sometimes flailing, occasionally finding common ground. Their initial point of connection is as fathers to infant daughters, having met at the daycare their daughters attend. Ryan is seeking a mortgage to purchase a piece of a larger chunk of land lost to his family a couple of generations back through the failures of an ancestor. He hopes to demonstrate to the judge who will hear his marital dissolution case — and to himself — that he is ready to co-parent his daughter and offer her a legacy more worthy than the one his drug-addicted parents offered him. Keith is investing his efforts and hopes toward adopting the foster child he has parented since her birth, having already experienced the dashed hopes of a previous attempt to become a parent via surrogacy. 

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Each man seeks to wrest what feels like control of his life using the options he has available. Ryan mostly seems to be in his own way, lapsing into what is likely a pattern of hoping that his good intentions will persuade people to overlook his mistakes and limitations. He is prone to suggesting that a problem will be solved by some demonstration that he is a good guy, or to asserting that an apparently imminent danger won’t materialize because it can’t and that believing it can’t materialize will be enough.

Keith appears to be more accustomed to calculating, realistically, that the odds are not in his favor and visualizing worst-case scenarios, the most harrowing being that a newly interested relative of his foster daughter will ultimately be allowed to adopt her. His discipline and relentlessness no more ensure his success than Ryan’s good intentions and whiteness ensure his.

That the two find a kind of solidarity in navigating their struggles does not produce a complete case for the existence of God; that title is a big reach. But their struggle, as embodied by these artists and their collaborators, is illuminating. Their dialogue takes place in a small space — mainly Keith’s office — on a stage surrounded by interconnected lines, and overhead is a sort of window pointing outward. That thoughtful scenic design by Bryan Boyd functions as a sort of cathedral, directing our eyes, our intuition, out from the agonizing details of the struggles of two men to a world beyond them.

One views one’s struggles from inside just the one lifetime; one reaches for the solutions one can find within that lifetime. Commonly the avenues for control that one reaches for aren’t right-sized, and don’t allow one to transcend generational and systemic barriers. Ryan reaches for financial security that he’s not really in a position to attain, impacted by generations of trauma. Keith, with so few options for becoming a parent, seeks to work a system that wasn’t designed well to help him, let alone the child who knows him as daddy. 

But as the play’s very thoughtful conclusion suggests, one also can’t assess very completely from the perspective of the one lifetime what one has managed to transcend or transform, what movement one has managed to make or set in motion. And the gifts of solidarity aren’t only solace: They may also open our seeing.

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter has constructed an uncommonly wise exploration of deep spiritual themes while also creating two characters who are easy to care about. Empathy with these two men may well facilitate empathy for the elements of their characters that challenge us in others, and in ourselves. Isaac Lamb and Charles Grant embody them with a fullness and generosity that would hardly seem possible without the sort of deep grappling that does not come easily. 

Maureen Porter’s thoughtful direction, reflected in careful design choices and movement, clearly deserves credit for the resonance of this production. Perhaps the experience of joining their effort over the course of a performance can help us ground a bit, and inspire us to move our focus outward in hopes of glimpsing beyond our one life while still determined to give that one life our all.

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Third Rail Rep’s A Case for the Existence of God continues through March 16 at CoHo Theatre, 2257 N.W. Raleigh St., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.