Set in rural Indiana sometime in the 1800s, Jim Leonard, Jr. follows his award-winning play The Diviners with another story of mysterious healing after the loss of a loved one in Anatomy of Gray which opened this weekend at the Way Off Broadway Theatre in Prattville.
Directed by Brady Walker, the action is bookended by its narrator June Muldoon [Margaret Lind] who begins the play with a fairy-tale opening line "Once upon a time..." to preserve for her baby sister the memory of her journey out of the town of Gray, Indiana, a place she calls "the most boring place in the world". She is mourning her father's death, and yearns to leave the town, praying to God to deliver a doctor to them so no one will ever die again. So, when a tornado conveniently delivers Dr. Galen Gray [Kevin Morton] by way of a hot-air balloon, June anticipates a way out. The town is no longer boring.
An ensemble of local residents' lives, both religious and secular, are heavily influenced by Pastor Wingfield [Eric Arvidson], who prefers faith healing to medical science. But the largely uneducated townspeople seek Gray's expertise when his treatments cure their various ailments, even though he is often misunderstood. -- And when mysterious "markings" appear on their bodies, and several of them die as a result, the citizens turn on Gray and accuse him as the cause of the plague. [No spoilers here, but the actual cause is revealed late in the second act].
Though modern medicine was still in its infancy in the 1800s, it is easy to see in Anatomy of Gray a corresponding reluctance to trust experts in science and medicine during the current COVID pandemic. Rumors spread from ignorance and fear lead to a lynch-mob mentality in the play that must be diffused; and it doesn't help matters when it is revealed that Dr. Gray is Jewish, or that he has an unexplained aversion to blood, or that his unconventional and experimental treatments test the fundamentalist beliefs of the townspeople. Nonetheless, June falls for Gray and becomes his medical assistant.
Some of the doctor's practices are played for humor, especially a hilarious treatment for the Pastor's kidney stones; but most are given more serious attention: June's mother Rebekah [Tammy Arvidson] is pregnant with her late husband's child and wants an abortion which Dr. Gray, having fallen in love with her, refuses on moral grounds; Belva and Crutch Collins [Janie Allred and Rodney Winters] don't understand their conditions; the Pastor's sister Tiny [Bre Gentry] succumbs to a fever; church choir director Maggie [Jan Roeton] is in denial, proclaiming "I can't be marked...I've not done anything wrong".
The only ones not afflicted are June, who so admires the doctor that she mimics all his medical precautions, and Homer [Gage Parr], a boy who has a crush on June and drinks only soda-pop. -- It is up to them to continue the circle-of-life, and the play ends as it began with June once again addressing the audience with her story.
Played on a simple open platform set with a rural painted backdrop, Mr. Walker's emphasis is on the inherent messages of the script that has compassion without passing judgement on its characters. Indeed, we could all benefit from trusting the experts and trying to understand one another better.
