Shotgun Players serves morality in a soup kitchen

Shotgun Players serves morality in a soup kitchen

There are the small forgivenesses of her daily grind as a nun working in a soup kitchen — the petty theft (mostly just carrots that haven’t made it into the soup pot yet) and ingratitude bordering on entitlement of the people she serves, like Frog (Kevin Clarke, one of the Bay Area’s finest conjurers of eccentricity).

Pathologically, Emma thrives on Shelley’s forgiveness, just as she thrives on attracting Oscar (Caleb Cabrera), another worker at the soup kitchen.

[...] in Trout’s rendering, Emma’s pain is acute and contagious, making the case that all humans, no matter their background, need some form of soup kitchen to sup from.

“Grand Concourse” could very well conclude the first major time Emma asks Shelley to forgive her, and the play would still be excellent, making the quietly powerful assertion that forgiveness is only real — that is to say, a true act of maturity and virtue — when the forgiven doesn’t deserve forgiveness.

Thankfully for us, Schreck goes even further, proffering a vision of forgiveness for the 21st century even as she writes with the moral heft, the clarion call for change, of 20th century titan Arthur Miller.

If Catholics lionize the journey some make from regular person to saint, Riddley shows that it can be just momentous, righteous and otherworldy to go from saint to regular person.