The Constantly Talking Groundskeeper

Samuel Gentle has been walking in his sleep again. Come morning, his wife finds tomatoes stacked up in the dish drainer, the couple's things in disarray, and plants from the garden dug up and lying on the living-room carpet. It might sound funny, but to the somnambulist this stuff is disturbing--these nocturnal forays feel like the acts of a shadow self one barely knows. Most of all, for the sleepwalker, his or her lack of control feels like an inner betrayal by a corner of the self that might not be up to dealing with the trials of the waking world. Heather McDonald's An Almost Holy Picture turns the plight of minister-turned-gardener Samuel into a compelling and profound metaphor for suffering and acceptance that measures out hope and despair in proportions to match those of life.

Stephen D'Ambrose plays Samuel, the only character in the show. On Ron Albert's austere set, with a crypt, a bench, and a pair of windows through which Samuel spies on his loved ones, D'Ambrose fills two hours with explanation and recollection. Samuel has left a ministerial gig in New Mexico after an unspeakable tragedy and taken a job tending the grounds of a church back East. Several years back another tragedy of sorts occurred when he fathered a daughter born with her entire body covered in hair--pretty well guaranteeing that hers will be a rough journey.

D'Ambrose's Samuel is as thin and dry as a piece of parchment; you feel as though he might crack or tear as he describes the events that led him to lose faith, as well as the humdrum tedium of his days. The ex-preacher is sweet and sympathetic when he describes his daughter, befuddled and distant when he recounts his daily coffee and cigarettes with the bishop. D'Ambrose can call upon a certain sense of quiet melancholy, a facet of his craft that he uses to great effect here. The dialogue is wordy and (sometimes over-) poetic, at times straining the ear, yet D'Ambrose holds things together by convincing us that Samuel measures out his words like spadefuls of soil, composing sentences in his mind before allowing them out into the world.

It's not all gloom and doom--at one point Samuel recounts calling his wife's doctor a "fuckwad," then admits he learned the word from some little delinquent down at the churchyard. Still, the point of the work, which was drawn from a short story by Pamela Ward and often reveals its literary roots, is to show a man's flawed response to a world in which bad things happen for no reason, and a man of the cloth is compelled to lift his face to heaven and declare, "To hell with you!"

In this, D'Ambrose is a total success. He looks perfect for the part--during a scene that requires him to strip to the waist, one feels compelled to feed him a big meal and shove him out in the sun. What stands out most in his performance is his depiction of the steeliness and anger that sometimes arise from his everyday meek and bemused self. Without giving too much away, at one point Sam is confronted with visual evidence of his daughter's disfigurement and snaps in a wildly inappropriate manner. Recounting the story, D'Ambrose flashes from reliving that anger into a sort of appalled amazement over what he has done.

By the time Sam walks off into the darkness, we've seen a man who has dared, in his quiet way, to try to make sense of the full arbitrary hurtfulness of reality. Like all sleepwalkers, and people who talk to themselves, he can't make sense of his own narrative but simply knows he has to carry on. The show's happy ending, such as it is, leaves us with perhaps as much hope as it is realistic for anyone to feel.