DETROIT, Mich.–The characters in Samuel D. Hunter’s A Bright New Boise, playing this week at The Boll Theatre at the downtown YMCA here, and produced by the University of Detroit Mercy, are quirky, fragile, a bit delusional and over-wrought.

The challenges the playwright gives the actors, though, is probably a good way for some of UDM’s theatre students to figure out how to elevate this material–a 2011 Obie Award for the play notwithstanding.

This play is set in the break-room of a Hobby Lobby, the arts and craft chain of stores that has become known in recent years as the company to challenge a mandate in the Affordable Care Act to provide employees with contraception meds (the privately-held company is owned by a right-wing Christian family). The lead character, Will, has arrived in Boise after fleeing a Northern Idaho town where the “rapture” church he was part of was forced to disband amidst a scandal.

Will (Joel Frazee) has made it to Hobby Lobby to try and connect with a son, Alex (Preston Cornelius), he sired out of wedlock and gave up for adoption about 15 years earlier. Alex’s older brother Leroy (Christian Plonka) is wise to Will’s past as soon as the former reveals himself to his long-lost son. Jammed into the mix is Anna (Nina Carlson) a young, nervous, misfit fellow employee who crushes on Will. Maggie Lorenzetti rounds out the cast as Pauline, the lonely, but Type-A, store manager whose whole existence has become fine-tuning the Hobby Lobby “eco-system” under her thumb. She is foul-mouthed, an ironic angle given the culture of the company that is wrapped up in the Ten Commandments.

Will is at the center of this banal life in Idaho, the home of the white potato and white copy paper. Could anything be whiter or starchier than Boise? Unless, of course, it is the Styrofoam balls, scrapbooking supplies and fake flowers that is the bread-and-butter of the Hobby Lobby fortune. Frazee’s Will has all the appeal and stature of spoiled milk–whiny and with a odor of being undrinkable and unlovable, not to mention creepy enough that you’d hesitate before hiring him as a dog walker.

The actors who capture attention in this production, though, are Plonka’s Leroy, the college art student and part-time salesman whose artistic expression manifests itself mostly on tee-shirts with large font cuss words. Plonka inhabits, rather than plays, the smart, rebellious, protective Leroy. LOrenzetti’s Pauline, too, is very watchable to the point where I wish the play was more about her life than Will’s.

I won’t go into detail about the scandal that has brought Will to Boise, but it suffices to say that Hunter is out to show the havoc that bullshit for-profit religious practices pretending to be Christianity can have on the lives of the blindly loyal, economically challenged and educationally deficient. That the actions of a hapless sap like Will can reverberate through a group of people he has just met is testament to the irony of a religion centered on something called The Rapture.

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