What a difference fine acting makes. When I saw God's Man in Texas at Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre two years ago, I was sorely disappointed in the work of the two lead actors. As pastors Philip Gottschall and Jerry Mears, William Metzo and Mark Capri never stopped thundering, never demonstrated private personalities apart from the ones they exhibited when sermonizing. I even wondered whether director Richard Hopkins was trying to make a point with all this clamor, trying to say that after a life in the public eye, both ministers had lost the capacity not to perform.

Another problem in the acting was that Metzo and Capri too much resembled each other in personal style, so that their contest seemed more the race of a man with himself, and less a competition between opposing worldviews.

Flaws in the acting led me to flaws in the script: its failure to distinguish between the two characters' fundamentalism, the paucity of real conflict for most of the first act, author David Rambo's tendency — or so it seemed — to hedge his dramatic bets by both satirizing religion and taking it seriously. I closed my review by suggesting that Rambo was "a powerful writer with a strongly religious imagination," but that "we're not being allowed to see into it, not entirely. If one can trust the evidence, that's a real loss."

My tune has changed.

The current production of God's Man in Texas, at American Stage in St. Petersburg, is so splendidly acted that the script itself seems different from the one I thought I knew. The artists in this case are Warren Hammack as Pastor Gottschall, Matthew Carlton as Pastor Mears, and Henry Haggard as repentant sinner and audio-visual specialist Hugo Taney. With formidable skill, each of them takes us right into author Rambo's religious mindscape. True, there is little in the way of real conflict in Act One, but thanks to Carlton (and, not least, director Van Huff), we can track Pastor Mears' journey in this act, his efforts to make himself a candidate for Pastor Gottschall's job, so that the two ministers can finally slug it out after intermission.

Most of all, the American Stage version employs humor where appropriate, but not as an apology for Rambo's essential seriousness. This is a play about believers, and though Rambo is cognizant of the comic aspects of organized religion, he's never skeptical about faith itself. That makes God's Man in Texas a rarity in the contemporary theater, a show whose main characters are all sure they've heard God's voice. In an era inaugurated by plays like Chekhov's Cherry Orchard — where all that comes from the heavens is the sound of a breaking string — that's more than a little refreshing.

The setting for God's Man in Texas is the campus of Rock Baptist Church, a Houston behemoth that includes a college, a football stadium, gymnasium, dinner theater, bowling alley, two swimming pools, a restaurant and shopping center. Presiding over Rock is 81-year-old Pastor Dr. Philip Gottschall, a nationally famous television personality who's taken to asking guest ministers to his church to audition for his job. One of these invitees is Dr. Jeremiah "Jerry" Mears, a San Antonio minister whose father, a vitamin salesman and street preacher, taught him that saving souls for Jesus was just a form of closing a sale.

At first Mears is suitably intimidated by Rock and Gottschall, but as he learns — mostly from techie Hugo — what Rock requires of a pastor, he begins to play out his desire to replace the aging Gottschall. Gottschall isn't nearly ready to retire, however, and though he names Mears his co-pastor, he resists the younger man's efforts to supersede him. Finally, Mears has to decide: Where does he belong — and at what cost?

The acting is impeccable. As Mears, Carlton is persuasively complicated, sympathetic but hardly untouched by ambition. This minister is modest but stubbornly insistent when necessary, sure of God's reality and nervously willing to believe that the deity, and not just Dr. Gottschall, is calling him to Rock.

Hammack as Gottschall isn't nearly as vulnerable. Long success at the largest Baptist church in America has made him a formidable presence, demanding statistics on church attendance only moments after a service, liable to physically shove Mears aside even as they both stand before the congregation, and reacting to adversity more in anger than in sorrow.

Most of the comedy in the play is provided by Haggard as A-V man Hugo, who garrulously admits to a youth of vice and intoxication, and who holds anxiously onto Jesus as his only defense against self-destruction. But Hugo isn't just in the play for laughs; when his past comes looking for him in the shape of a discarded lover, Mears finds himself urging the frightened ex-druggie toward moral action, while Gottschall draws all sorts of wrong conclusions from the two men's struggles. These late scenes, in which Gottschall, Mears and Hugo are at cross-purposes, are easily among the most dramatic in the play, and they represent a convergence of several of the script's thematic strands. At moments like these, God's Man in Texas is riveting.

Satisfying, too, are the look and sound of the American Stage production. Christopher James has designed a two-level playing area comprising the Pastor Gottschall's private room on the ground floor and a pulpit above, backed by a screen on which stained glass windows are projected. Amy J. Cianci's costumes feature several sharp suits for the ministers and witty Western-wear for Hugo, the man of the people. John M. Schickedanz's sound design includes organ music and a church choir, and Dawn Krumvieda's lighting is essential in moving us from pulpit to preacher's chamber to the singles and weight-loss ministry.

I don't mean to suggest that God's Man in Texas is quite perfect. Pastor Mears' doubts about Rock come too late to be closely investigated, and I wish Rambo had given Mears and Gottschall some doctrinal differences. What I am saying, though, is that this is a first-rate production, and worthy of any serious theatergoer's attention. You're not interested in religious plays? To enjoy this show you don't have to be. When a play's cast is this good, that's reason enough to buy a ticket.

Sure, the themes that Rambo considers are important. And now I can see that he has something to say about them.

But what makes this show obligatory is acting, acting, acting.

Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com.

This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2004.