By Sarah A. Spitz Photos by Jeff Lorch
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 9/8/2026 Playwright Samuel D. Hunter—perhaps best known for adapting his stage play, The Whale, into the critically and popularly acclaimed film of the same name starring Brendan Fraser—is having a moment in LA.
At The Ruskin Group Theatre’s new Santa Monica arts complex, his Grangeville has been extended four times, and my guess is that it will be a standout for 2026 theatrical awards. Now it’s nearing its last days, with only five performances left until final curtain on September 21st.
Director John Perrin Flynn (retired co-founding producing/artistic director of Rogue Machine Theatre) has a special affinity with Hunter’s plays.
The two actors in Grangeville—Jeff LeBeau and Tim Cummings—must be thoroughly exhausted by now, because this is a deeply emotional play about two estranged brothers. They must find a way to reconcile from across the globe to settle their mother’s estate. One lives in Idaho, the other in Holland, and their lives could not be more opposite. Both struggle to get past the individual and mutual traumas that have marked their entire lives while trying to reach a working solution.
Flynn’s latest direction of a play by Hunter opened at the intimate 30-seat Henry Murray Stage upstairs at The Matrix Theatre. In A Case for the Existence of God, another two-hander (which despite the title, does not invoke a theological discussion), two fathers under very different circumstances find a way to achieve empathy even without a fairy tale ending. 
As always in Hunter’s plays, hope and despair live alongside one another. While he isn’t writing autobiographically, he is pulling elements from his own life into his plays. In life, Hunter is a gay white man who has a daughter with his husband. He often writes about characters living in Idaho; he was raised in Moscow, Idaho.
In this play, Keith (Nicholas Anthony Reid) is a single gay black man living in Twin Falls, Idaho where he is a mortgage broker. Not his first choice of jobs but with a degree in English Literature and Early Music, what career was he expecting? He’s got an infant, daughter whom he is raising on a “foster to adopt” program.
Ryan (Carlo Mancasola) is a screwup. He never quite got around to learning about the things adults need to do in real life. He’s a dad with a job at a yogurt plant who is getting divorced. He has his heart set on buying back the land of his heritage to raise his daughter away from the corrosive effects of society. But it’s also where his great grandfather had “mental issues” and burned his homestead down, with himself in it.
While Ryan doesn’t recognize Keith, Keith recognizes him. In high school Ryan was big man on campus and Keith was just the gay black guy. They were treated very differently and Keith never forgot how Ryan treated him.
The play is complex, but simple: Two guys sitting in an office cubicle, talking. Ryan wants a mortgage loan, Keith can help lead him to one maybe…and out of this humble set up, they end up sharing the complications of their lives.
In Ryan’s case (and truer than fiction, Carlo Mancasola resembles Ryan Gosling!), there’s no way, with his credit score and lackadaisical approach to work, that he’s likely to get a loan, even with the strings Keith has pulled to get him one.
Keith is facing the removal of his daughter by the child’s aunt, due to the state prioritizing family reunification—even though the birth mother was using meth during her pregnancy and the aunt might be considered trailer trash. Thanks to his own life choices, Ryan faces the likelihood of having only occasional weekend custody of his daughter once the divorce reaches its conclusion.
There are a few triumphant moments for both men, but real life doesn’t always work out that way. And as performances go, both actors are topnotch and do a great job with Hunter’s script.
As director John Perrin Flynn writes, “In Sam’s work the dark and the light are always in battle, just as that battle is a constant in real life…In life as it is in Sam’s plays, the dark always seems the stronger. It seems the dark will surely prevail.
“Yet there is light, there is hope.” In this play, the hope comes in the future but to reveal how would be a spoiler.
At its core, it is a play about empathy, and as Rogue Machine Artistic Director Guillermo Cienfuegos writes in his program note, “I believe if we are all willing to share a small space together, to witness the story of two fathers, two human beings, choosing to show up for each other…that’s also case for the existence of God.”
A Case for the Existence of God runs through October 2 at The Matrix Theatre 7657 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90046. Reservations: https://www.roguemachinetheatre.org/ or for more information 855-585-5185.
