In April, I saw the most impressive play I have seen in many years: Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Head of Passes. The production at The Berkeley Rep did a distinguished job of staging—such a lot of water that, even sitting high up in the theater, I could not help feeling a little at risk. But it was the acting and the play itself that made the evening truly memorable. I am still mulling it over.

The action on stage occurs over a single day and night before and during the passage of a hurricane. The Louisiana town for which the play is named lies in a particularly vulnerable place, but the protagonist, Shelah (played with splendid conviction by Cheryl Lynn Bruce), despite urging from her oldest son and her physician, refuses to be evacuated, and we wind up experiencing the violence of the storm along with her.

That alone contains the makings of a good drama, but this is more. In some ways, it is the thoroughly modern offspring of a fifth-century Greek tragedy with its compressed time and location, the dread news arriving by messenger, the terrible fall of a person who has deep claims on our respect.

One could also see the play as a reworking of the Book of Job—or rather of its first few chapters, which narrate Job’s loss of family and wealth. From this point onward, however, it moves in a different direction. Rather than defending her innocence like Job, Shelah digs deep into her conscience to accuse herself of a very human array of failings. She doesn’t need her equivalent of Job’s comforters to make the point of her guilt (though some of them do prod her along). She takes up the task herself.

And, yet, there is a sense in which her guilt makes no difference. She is a human being struggling against long odds to make and sustain a life—and failing, sometimes at critical points. But she is no more the chief of sinners than she is a saint. It is impossible to see the storm’s mortal assault as anything like just punishment.

Unlike Job, Shelah gets no face to face confrontation with God at the end. Although the violence of the storm and its eerie passing come close to Job’s whirlwind, no audible voice speaks out of it. The play doesn’t merely turn its back, however, on the transcendent or resign itself to complete meaninglessness in human life. The strange and powerful figure of The Angel, mimed (one might almost say “danced”) by Sullivan Jones, somehow combines the challenging role of Satan, the protective role of a guardian angel, and the threatening role of the angel of death. The character is impossible to decipher exactly, though strongly engaged with the action.

In other words, the divine remains as inscrutable in the play as in the Book of Job itself. Inscrutable, above all, to Shelah, who is unaware of The Angel’s presence. Only the audience sees him. We are allowed to spin out our thoughts and theories about who he is and how he is involved. Shelah can only present her case to God in what mostly seems like a one-sided conversation.

Perhaps I appeal to Job too much here, for the play is by no means simply a retelling or recasting of the ancient work—or, for that matter, a revival of Attic tragedy. It is a new creation shaped out of the same age-old realities of suffering as its earlier counterparts—realities no less familiar now than two or three thousand years ago.

The Berkeley Rep production was excellent throughout. There were no weak performances. The pacing was perfect. It was already near the end of its run when I saw it. But this is a play that deserves to be repeated many times. When you get a chance, go see it.