LLOYD’S PRAYER
O’Hare’s got that great raccoon tick sound, like an overwound egg timer or a squirrel on a wire. He’s got the quick gestures and the spastic yawn, the cocked head and the curious eyes. He’s got the little shivers; and those moments of pure, surprised absorption in whatever odd thing he happens to have noticed his hands doing.
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Which otherwise might have just floated away, lifted on angel wings of cuteness. Written by Kevin Kling and first performed at Louisville’s Humana Festival, where all of America’s simpiest plays seem to get their start, Lloyd’s Prayer is unrelentingly adorable in an implacably zany way.
Two-bit though he may be, however, Lloyd realizes that there’s big money to be made in religion. So he transforms his freak show into an evangelical crusade, with Bob cast as the poor damned soul who needs your prayers and pledges if he’s ever going to slough off his bestial ways and stand in God’s light. This pisses God off. The Lord sends an angel, who inhabits the body of a small-town beauty queen, to set things right.
That’s why Denis O’Hare’s raccoon is so important. O’Hare takes the one character most susceptible to the Kling/Petrarca sweetness treatment and turns it into a baby. Not a cootchy-coo baby–but one of the real sort, who looks around himself with endless intensity and need; incomprehension, amazement, true innocence, and an animal desire to grab hold. Troubled, and offered completely without irony, O’Hare’s performance is at once harsher than anything else onstage and more truly funny. O’Hare gives Kling the qualities he didn’t even know he needed. And so makes his show worth seeing.
