Namir Smallwood, Zainab Jah, and Brian Marable Photo by Michael Brosilow

The events take place over the course of just a few days beginning with Buddy's return after a fifteen-year absence and leading up to a ceremony in which Vet, his father, is to be honored for singlehandedly bringing in a group of dangerous illegals with a truck full of guns. Although the two are wary of one another, Grace is optimistic about the possibility of her stepson and husband repairing the damage of the past. But each of the three characters is living a distinct fantasy world.

Vet imagines himself a hero and leader as he endlessly rehearses the speech he intends to give, yet the reality that he sees life as a zero-sum game, and the only community he has is one born of silence and complicity regularly, intrudes. Buddy's letters have built him up as a tech bro who has found James Bond-esque success after an honorable discharge from the service, but his reality is something carved out of his attempts to cope with PTSD, joblessness, and fury at the worldview that drives his father to chase young men and families back across the border. Grace's world is one of stories clipped from the newspaper and collected from the patrons at the diner where she waits tables, and one she guards carefully from Vet. The three realms the characters inhabit emerge as incompatible in dire, volatile ways, but the build to the inevitable is funny, heartrending, tense, and anything but simple.

The success of the multiple stories Parks has deftly woven together hinges on the setting, which never strays beyond the backyard of the remote house that Grace and Vet share in an unspecified border town. Arnel Sancianco's scenic design captures everything from the space that looms large in Buddy's childhood memories, which are fifteen years out of date, to the clean and comfortable, yet slightly shabby reality that confronts him when arrives.

In the dated furniture and faded braided rugs, there is nothing of the Disneyland castle that features in Grace's book, yet the pairs of her not-quite-sensible shoes that sit visible on a rack near the hidey-hole for her book, the always-full coffee pot, and half a dozen homey details lend the set the magic necessary to connect the actual to the metaphorical. And for Buddy, whose footlocker that contains all that remains of the house he shared with his own mother until her death and his subsequent loss of it, the way that Sancianco manages to infuse a fundamentally stark and practical space with Grace's warmth marks an important and painful contrast.

Jason Lynch's lighting and Curtis Craig's sound design provide outstanding complements to Sancianco's set. In the twilight as Grace or Buddy lingers in the yard, writing themselves into existence, the warped and weathered wooden deck glows an appropriately eerie and alien green. And the sun that Lynch moves ruthlessly over the yard party that never happens is every bit as critical as Parks' dialogue (and the cast's perfectly timed delivery of it) to the heartsore humor and ratcheting tension that move the story toward its conclusion. Sonically, Craig blends the natural and the technological so skillfully that the audience does not know from minute-to-minute whether the chirp they are hearing is desert insects, a smart phone, or some conversation between the two.

The demands for costuming are minimal, yet Raquel Adorno's choices, from Buddy's stiff Levis and tape-repaired, military-issue glasses, to the family Hawaiian prints, to the red dress Grace fantasizes about shade in important visual details that fill out the characters. Similarly, employing the three video screens that surround the in-the-round stage, Rasean Davonté Johnson's projection design keeps the border wall as present in the audience's mind as it is in the lives of the family before them. The projection of Buddy's "Book of Snake," broadcasts from his iPhone on to these screens then almost, but doesn't quite, blot out the images of the wall. The end result is stark and effective without being distractingly on the nose.

The real story here, though, is the cast, who do a phenomenal job, both individually and as an ensemble. As Grace, Zainab Jah is upbeat and forward-looking without her once coming across as in denial or anything less than a flawed, fully realized human. As skillful as Parks' text is, it is not difficult to imagine the character veering into the territory of the thinking man's manic pixie dream girl. But in Jah's delivery and what definitely comes across as Broadnax III's steady direction, this is never a possibility.

A Vet, Brian Marable also creates a fully realized, lived-in human who is neither a two-dimensional caricature of a particular worldview nor simply misunderstood. Marable's delivery of lines we know to be projected into Vet by Grace is easy, natural, and believable every time. And just as engrossing is his reflection on what he views as his place in the order of things, as contrasted with the abuses he is fully aware go on around him all the time. If there is a weakness in the play it is, perhaps the fact that Vet's character loses complexity in the second act. But even here, Marable's work has the audience buying in, at least a little, to the terrible new relationship the character attempts to forget with Buddy.

As Buddy, Namir Smallwood is exceptional. He brings out the very best in both Jah and Marable, as they bring out the best in him. The subtlety of his performance renders it believable that he could put on a suit and a bronze star and charm "the guys" at the wall, and yet every second he conveys the tragedy of the fact that Grace, and to a certain extent Vet, buys into the desperate act that he is putting on. And in his performances for the iPhone camera, the tenuous logic of his manifesto is painfully obvious, yet we believe that he believes.

The Book of Grace runs through May 18, 2025, at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Ensemble Theater in Honor of Helen Zell, 1646 N. Halsted St., Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit steppenwolf.org or call the box office at 312-335-1650.