STAGE REVIEW : A Rugged ‘Heathen Valley’ Gets Religion at Theatre 40

There’s a soft blue light that illuminates distant hills and mountains in Appalachia. It’s there in the panoramic vista that stretches across Theatre 40’s wide stage during Romulus Linney’s “Heathen Valley.” Nancy Dunn Eisenman’s stark, evocative set is lit by Debra Garcia Lockwood with the shifting tints of a Turner landscape, obscuring the rich earth colors that closeness reveals.

Like that light, the colorful popular image of the people who inhabit those hills and mountains obscures the rock-hard life they lead, and the powerful, animal wisdom that has been bred into them since their outcast forebears first filtered out of civilization into the wilderness.

Linney, born in that world, has unfailing insights into these people, their often-failed struggles toward simplistic faith, and the rules of the games they play with existence.

Heathen Valley, according to the play’s 19th-Century Episcopal Bishop, is the land that God forgot. It is mired in sin, and he must bring Christianity to it. With the help of Starns, a newly literate ex-con, and a young boy named Billy, he wends his way into this lost world, makes an ersatz deacon of Starns and leaves him and the boy to shepherd the wayward flock to Jesus.

An often told story it may seem, but not in Flora Plumb’s direction, which is as wide and as deep as the mountains behind her action. The literate and poetic words that Linney uses like notes in a Baroque concerto also sound fresh, as does his powerful denunciation of an organized religion that tries to replace the simple “spells and charms” of the hill people with imagery of its own confection. The Valley people know that virgins don’t have babies.

The play’s stumbling block, Billy’s lyrical narration, which ties the action together, is hurdled easily in the mountain spring clarity of its delivery by Paul J. Read, who remembers the events as an older man, and also plays the young Billy with gusto.

Michael Gough’s rough-hewn goodness, in a strong performance as Starns, effectively sets up the tragedy of his eventual downfall at the rabid hands of the Bishop. Jay Louden’s totally believable Bishop seamlessly makes the transition from kindly man of God to obsessed fanatic.

Dee Croxton, as wise Juba the midwife, is as full of humor and grit as her real mountain counterparts, and Ann Hearn and Steven Dawson Hart are often astonishingly honest and wrenching as a hill couple just a few steps above the animal, accepting incest, slaughter and spirits as part of the world created by the only God they can understand.

Maria Gutierrez’s excellent costumes and Stephen Tobolowsky’s soundtrack, which sometimes seems to echo through the hills, help place the imagery and the events where they belong.

* “Heathen Valley,” Theatre 40, Beverly Hills High School campus, 241 Moreno Drive. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 & 8 p.m. (Nov. 29, 2 p.m. only). Ends Nov. 29. $14-$17; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours.