You can see ‘The Saviors’ and maintain your faith—both in God and the power of theater

There’s a sinking feeling that will be familiar to any churchgoer, or even to any moderately religious person, as we watch a popular narrative set in a church or depicting devout believers: We’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. How long, we wonder, before the characters are exposed as hypocrites, nutjobs or outright villains? We can usually see their crisis of faith coming long before they do.

In the case of Bubba Weiler’s affecting new play “The Saviors,” now running at the Atlantic Theater, the warning signs flash from the start: The play begins with two teenaged altar boys preparing a small church for Mass. As they race to complete various tasks—light the candles, stuff the bulletins—their banter is about saints and missionaries, with the irrepressible Michael (Ivan Howe) epitomizing a very recognizable brand of bubbly church nerd and Paul (Julius Rinzel) his drily tolerant sidekick.

So it comes as a profound relief that, though conflict and crisis do indeed visit these innocent boys, it does not arrive by the routes we might expect. There is no abusive priest on hand, for starters. Church authority is instead represented by Judy (Crystal Finn), a middle-aged mom trying to start a youth group with little success. And the show’s test of faith comes in the form of a homeless addict, Julian (Stanley Simons), who stumbles into the church for warmth and a little prayer, and who presents Michael and Paul with both a moral challenge and a cautionary tale.

Though piercing doubts and discontents surface in “The Saviors,” and the play inevitably stress-tests the childlike simplicity of Michael’s faith, one never gets the sense that Weiler, who attended an all-boys Catholic high school in Chicago, has an anti-clerical axe to grind. Indeed, if his play can be accused of following familiar narrative pathways, they are thankfully not along the lines of the typical secular takedown, but more in the vein of the classic religious drama in which a believer’s faith faces a clarifying trial. Whether they end with their characters harrowed or humbled by a deeper sense of God’s mystery (“Silence,” “Diary of a Country Priest”) or sincerely, heartbrokenly alienated from the church (“The Nun’s Story,” “Doubt”), these narratives don’t treat religious faith lightly or dismissively. And they leave room, as “The Saviors” does, for both believers and non-believers to see themselves, and above all to not feel preached to.

The form that Michael’s crisis takes is hinted at by the play’s title. Taught to see the divine in the actions of people around him, he is fatefully predisposed to read human failings as earth-shaking betrayals. As he tells Judy late in the play:

Like my whole life I’ve been looking for God and really trying to see him.
Like actually see him and have any sort of like help in believing that he even exists at all and it’s—
And so everyone says to find him in people and so I tried to do that.
And I had Paul and I had you.
And now…

The notion that we are Christ to one another is not (my editors tell me) a comprehensive understanding of Christ’s presence in Catholic theology. But it makes sense in the context of how Catholics understand the mystical Body of Christ. We each have unique roles to play in God’s will; not any one of us by ourselves carries or stands for its entirety. One of my (non-Catholic) pastors even talks about faith this way: that we may not all believe everything the church teaches all the time, or at least not every time we pronounce the creeds, but that together we hold each other in a shared confession.

For Michael and the other characters in “The Saviors,” as for all of us, the lesson that we desperately need each other is a hard one, taught as much by our estrangements as by our bonds. To its great credit, Weiler’s play does not paper over irreconcilable discords nor tidy up every narrative thread. And as he did with Weiler’s previous play, the mournful drama “Well, I’ll Let You Go,” director Jack Serio gets performances from an excellent cast that feel both disarmingly natural and spikily distinctive. As Michael, Howe in particular stands out, somehow capturing both his character’s supreme self-confidence and his utter confusion in one exuberant, nervy package.

Indeed, lest I make it sound like the play is all heavy religious talk, rest assured, Weiler’s dialogue throughout is as sharply witty as it is piercing. If nothing else, “The Saviors” is enough to maintain one’s faith in the power of theater.