Lanford Wilson's Book of Days, written in 1999, opens in a style reminiscent of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, with citizens of a small Missouri Bible-Belt community spotlighted inside a circle of chairs as they take turns enumerating the place's assets and good points. But when Walt Bates (an excellent Larry Singer), the town's rich and respected "feudal lord," who owns the local cheese factory, is murdered during a tornado, the civilized veneer that masks the evil buried in hearts and minds of nearly everyone gradually crumbles.
Ruth Hoch (well played by Cara Hicks), bookkeeper at the factory managed by her gentle, idealistic husband Len (Lee Look), has been cast in a community theater production as Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan by visiting hotshot director Boyd Middleton (Rob Love), who is hiding some secrets of his own. Her stage role spills over into real life as she undertakes a crusade to expose Walt's murderer and tears the town apart. The small-mindedness of people she thought she knew, their dogged determination not to stir up anything that would call into question their fundamentalist religious teachings, and the pack mentality that shields them from outside influences and causes them to close ranks are forces with which Ruth must contend.
Playwright Wilson's scathing attack on the Christian Right, the play's core theme, parallels Shaw's condemnation of the church in Saint Joan.
As James, the ne'er-do-well son of Walt and Sharon Bates (Carolyn Lowery, highly effective in her transformation from grieving widow to fiercely protective mother), Clint Gill is masterful, seething with uncontainable anger and spreading devastation as he uses up women and bullies men. His ill-treated wife Louann (a well-shaded portrayal by Jennifer Shank) becomes a compliant victim of church conformity demanded by Reverend Bobby Groves (Tad Chitwood). An exception to the lockstep thinking around her is Ruth's irreverent, ex-hippie mother-in-law Martha Hoch, spiritedly played by Laurene Scalf. She, Ruth, and Len are beacons of sanity in their stifling environment. The play's resolution is profoundly disturbing, but The Necessary Theater's gripping presentation of Book of Days is profoundly satisfying.
