There is a popularly held belief that the promise of theater resided throughout the country. According to the theory, if Broadway was dying, then American theater was thriving west of the Hudson and south of the Delaware Water Gap, nurturing not only the talent but also the audience.

There has been a problem, of course, so overwhelming that no one has even dared address it: how to deal with the effect of theater sprawl. Fifteen years ago, Robert Brustein asked, “Where are the Repertory Critics?” Ever since regional theater became a force to be contended with, the question has been, “Where are the regional critics?” Brustein himself, as critic for The New Republic, has made it his business to visit Minneapolis, Washington, DC, Chicago, New Haven, and yes, even New York. To a lesser degree, John Simon of New York Magazine, Jack Kroll of Newsweek, and a bevy of Times critics have made their excursions to the provinces, catching the prominent offerings at the more fashionable regional theaters. But Broadway has not been replaced so much as diffused. Regional theaters have come to secure attention on the basis of reputation alone, thereby emulating Broadway.

Two summers ago, American Theater Exchange was set up exporting three regional productions to the Joyce Theater in New York. But beyond the concept of the American Theater Exchange itself (and ironically, there was never any “exchange” involved), there was nothing distinguished about Faulkner’s Bicycle (which originated at the Yale Repertory Theater), In the Belly of the Beast (from Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum), or Season’s Greetings (from Houston’s Alley Theater). If this was the best that regional theater had to offer, then regional theater seemed no healthier than New York theater. If the Goodman, the Guthrie, the Actors Theater of Louisville, the Mark Taper Forum, Steppenwolf, the Alley Theater, and certain other celebrated companies or theaters became acclaimed, haven’t they relied on marketing as much as Broadway ever did?

Now, two years later, the American Theater Exchange has sponsored its second program of plays, once again at the Joyce Theater, with results hardly any better than before. This time four productions were featured, and only the last—Holy Ghosts—proved worthwhile. The Long Wharf Theater production of Joe Cacaci’s Self Defense provided little more than a few strong performances (notably by Charles Cioffi as a DA); the Berkeley Repertory Theater version of Dickens’ Hard Times, as adapted by Stephen Jeffreys, had some highlighted theatrical moments under Richard E.T. White’s direction but could never really shed the shadow of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby; and the Wilma Theater’s (Philadelphia) rendering of Orwell’s 1984, as adapted by Pavel Kohout, was a letdown in every respect, particularly in its technologically busy production.

Whatever else the American Theater Exchange may advocate, it seems to lack a respect for the playwright, since the playbills for both Hard Times and 1984 failed to include them, no matter how inadvertent such omissions may have been. There also seemed to be a message in the poster designed to promote the festival. As rendered by Polish artist Rafal Olbinski, it featured three theater masks that allude to the American flag. But instead of the characteristic smile or frown, each of these masks has an enigmatic expression, suggesting better than anything else the confused state of our theater today.

Holy Ghosts, however, was a superb production of a valuable work. At its best, Romulus Linney’s play about a backwoods Pentecostal religious meeting captured the spirit of a class of people who might have stepped out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. To this end, the San Diego Rep production is truly an asset, evoking the mood of the rural South. But Linney’s blessing is also his curse, for in creating 15 distinctive personalities and telling their stories in roughly two hours, he could not avoid making them into types. The sense of verisimilitude he so masterfully achieved is necessarily undermined by the formula at work.

The leader of the clan is one Reverend Obedia Buckhorn Sr., a self-proclaimed minister who preaches the gospel (“Well, friends—what is real religion? One thing I know is it don’t have no beginnin’ and don’t have no end—it’s a happenin’ all the time”) and who, as effectively portrayed by Ollie Nash, looks and sounds like Burl Ives. We learn that Rev. Buckhorn has had six wives—and is working on his seventh, the woebegone Nancy Shedman (Diana Castle), who is miserably married to Coleman (Bradley Fisher).

“They shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” While such practices are decidedly illegal, their existence is well-known south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Coleman is as “dumb as a ditch,” a “clod,” and “the fool of creation,” as his wife Nancy calls him. About the only thing he had going for him was the “fish-farm” he inherited from his father, but even that has dried up through neglect. While it would be difficult to blame Nancy for fleeing Coleman and entering “into a tender, human relationship” with another, it’s equally hard to see Buckhorn as an improvement.

By the end of the play, Linney supplies an ironic reversal as hard to anticipate as retrospectively inevitable. Nancy leaves both men in the lurch; but Coleman, who was the only voice of reason inasmuch as he was the lone disbeliever in a throng of Buckhorn’s followers, joins the fold.

Holy Ghosts is predominantly an ensemble work, and most of the first act is used to introduce the motley crew. These include an ex-Sunday school teacher dismissed after 20 odd years of service because she could not conform to increasingly permissive tendencies; a retired, alcoholic lawyer; a cancer-ridden bachelor; a hapless youth who never overcame the loss of his “bird-dog”; an unhappily hitched interracial couple; a paii” of love-starved truck drivers; a guilt-ridden spinster; a simpleminded adolescent; a painfully shy woman who deserted her husband and family to wander into Buckhorn’s makeshift service; and Buckhorn’s son, who has just become manager of a bowling alley (“I don’t know how to explain it—they just seem to go together—Jesus and bowling”).

At a certain point, the thought occurs that with only some minor changes in the script, Linney could have told the same story within the context of an AA meeting. If there were a common denominator to these lost souls, it would have to be the palpable loneliness which has brought them together. Each of them has some unholy ghost to avoid. Under Douglas Jacobs’ inspired direction, public confessional and participatory religion clearly becomes a way for them to feel they belong in a world that has abandoned them; the passion of their involvement reaches almost sexual frenzy when they finally get around to snakehandling, rolling on the floor, and glossolalia.

A beauty of the conceit is that we hear the snakes and watch the believers handle them, though real snakes are never used in what otherwise resembles a documentary production. As a device, the invisibility of the snakes reinforces the faith these fanatics must have to risk their lives at the height of their religious passion. In a recent interview with Mervyn Rothstein, Linney explains why he has endorsed this method of the production: “When I did it at the Alley Theater, I just had the actors pantomime the snakes, and I only allow the play to be done that way now. What happens is that you see right through the hands of the people handling them, you see what’s on the actor’s faces, because they’re staring at something that if it were real would be within an inch of their faces, with that little black tongue going in and out, and if it bites them, well, wham, good-bye.”

While the American Theater Exchange has done little to confirm that regional theater is the salvation of theater in America, it’s encouraging to note that Holy Ghosts has been performed at over 100 theaters throughout the U.S., since it was written in the mid-70’s.