Sacrament!

CAMPO SANTO AND director Kent Nicholson, in collaboration with writer Dave Eggers, bring to the stage Sacrament!, their adaptation of Eggers's novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, about two friends, Will (Sean San José) and Hand (Danny Wolohan), who circumnavigate the globe on a private whirlwind mission to dole out $32,000 among the needy. Feeling burdened by the money that came to him as a fluke when his image was chosen to grace a new brand of lightbulb, Will devises a plan involving two round-the-world airfares, an itinerary of malnourished countries, and a seven-day time limit. The idea, too simple in several senses, starts crumbling before the complexities of visa requirements and airline routes. He and Hand instead make their way willy-nilly through Senegal, Morocco, and Estonia, all the while showering their random acts of kindness and/or their comically well-intentioned but boorish American personalities on locals and fellow oddball tourists (a series of characters sharply and colorfully drawn by Tina Marie Murray and Michael Torres).

Will, the driving force behind the trip, is distraught over the recent demise of a friend, Jack, in a freeway accident. Hit unusually hard by Jack's death (for reasons only partially and gradually revealed), grief and guilt storm inside him. Played sympathetically, with a haunted earnestness, by San José, Will puts the money into circulation as a desperate spur to life (maybe his own most of all) and a compensation for the death that trails him. At the same time, it may also be atonement on behalf of a selfish and privileged society. "This is about retribution," Will says. "This is about balance; we need to restore balance."

In addition to witty, artfully rendered dialogue, the story unfolds through Will and Hand's disjointed and competing narratives, as each takes turns addressing the audience. Hand, a garrulous autodidact with a fact for any occasion, addresses us from several years in the future, while stuck in a maddening spell of New Zealand rainfall. From this point in time Hand speaks about Will in the past tense, gradually revising most of what Will has told us so far about himself and the meaning of their trip together. (Wolohan as Hand charms throughout with his buoyant humor, effortless comic delivery, and the strange intensity with which he draws the audience into his confidence.)

As becomes clear early on, Will feels everything too intensely but is paradoxically closed off from other people. His fiercest loyalty is to the dead Jack. Meanwhile, he swings between fantasies of vengeful rage and saintlike altruism, both impotent gestures masking his fear of death and inability to embrace life.

Adapting a novel to the stage is notoriously difficult and often unsatisfying. But the world premiere of Sacrament! in some ways improves on the work it starts with. In scenes winnowed from Eggers's fitfully inspired, often plodding book – and set on a stage bare but for an overhead screen depicting a few choice details from their journey – the assumptions and decisions Will and Hand make while seeking out worthy beneficiaries of their largesse comment on the mixed motives of charity generally. Their attempt to bestow kindness often looks and feels like something closer to exploitation, the transfer of money acting only to highlight and heighten the dehumanizing power dynamic between the wandering representatives of the first world and their third-world fellows. But the story is ultimately about more than this contradiction. In its jumbled way, Sacrament! ends up being less about the pitfalls of altruism, or Will and Hand's excellent adventure, than a rumination on the disabling fear of death and, more specifically, the confusion that underscores the sanctity of life.

Eggers employs more than one metaphor to get at this. In a discussion between Will and Hand on the "multiverse," for example, physics gives way to metaphysics in the idea of atoms as simultaneously unique and indeterminate objects, capable of being in more than one location at a given time. The idea, redolent of potential and a larger reality to Will and Hand, also plays into their need for constant motion, as if moving fast enough will make their "velocity" knowable but never their position. Like the mythical lost Indian tribe described in the book (whose cry gives the book its original title), speed and motion seem to promise an escape from death. (It's hardly a coincidence that Jack died because he habitually obeyed the speed limit.) Interestingly, however, it's only when they're brought to a complete stop – first Will, whose heart stops briefly after jumping in a cold pool, and later Hand, stranded beneath his leafy New Zealand canopy – that they each experience the epiphanies that fill in the play's idea of the sacrament, the outward expression of an inward state of grace.

A genuinely funny and thoughtful work, Sacrament! can also be slight in its humor and can border on sentimental. As an exploration of mourning and the sense of mortality, it lacks the absorbing force of John Cassavetes' film Husbands, for instance, about three middle-aged men, old friends, who chuck all responsibilities and go on an international bender after the funeral of the fourth member of their circle.

Ultimately, the play succeeds most where the deeper concerns of the book find a specifically theatrical expression, and nowhere more so than in Hand's direct addresses to the audience. Here we begin to feel as if we're going somewhere with the character, rather than merely watching him go. Much like the opening words of the novel, which spread irreverently and longingly out onto the cover of the book itself, Hand gradually invades the audience's domain in a simple but wholly apt climax to the story's underlining search for contact and communion.

'Sacrament!' runs through July 11. Extended run: Thurs.-Sun. and Mon/28, 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15 sliding scale. (415) 626-3311, www.theintersection.org.