“If you’re an angel and you’re coming to earth, and you want to pick a body to be in, why not put a little flair into it? You know? Why go out and be some doof?” says Kevin Kling of one of the characters in his play Lloyd’s Prayer. “I wouldn’t. I’d pick somebody that’s got something going for them.” Kling brings a uniquely skewed logic to his story of a boy who’s raised by raccoons, exploited by a con man named Lloyd, and inadvertently seduced by an angel of the lord–a gum-snapping, small-town beauty queen. Taking the cultural flotsam of contemporary America as its setting, Kling’s play juxtaposes the sublime and the venal to darkly hilarious effect.
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Brushing his dirty-blond hair off his brow, Kling admits that he pays close attention to all that is kitsch and crass because “a lot of times the cheesier something is, the more somebody’s taking it seriously.” As an example, Kling cites a character in Lloyd’s Prayer who dresses up as a porpoise and solicits donations for the raccoon boy’s rehabilitation on late-night TV. The character, he says, was lifted intact from reality. “I saw ‘Porpy.’ It was a hot day in New York, 95 degrees, humid as could be. Out comes this guy in a foam-rubber fish suit–and he was white it was so hot–sweating through the whole day, smoking a cigarette in one of his fins, singing a song called ‘Fishing For Jesus.’ Evidently he was spiritually driven, ’cause nobody could have stood the heat he was going through.”
Kling says he decided on a raccoon-raised boy as his central character because he grew up in the country. “I had raccoons for pets, so I know how they wash their food, hold their hands, and chatter. The funny thing about raccoons: You could hold them, pet them, do anything you wanted–they were great. But as soon as you smiled, they would see your teeth and freak out. And they would attack you, ’cause you were baring your teeth. So Bob the raccoon boy never trusts a smile.” Kling pauses. “How many times would you have saved yourself a little bit of trouble if you did the same? Because a lot of times a smile coming at you doesn’t mean what you’d hope.”
“‘It is December.’
