The Montgomery County Cultural Center and Iron Age Theatre Present The Diviners by Jim Leonard Jr. October-November 2003

Buddy Layman is a curiosity in his hometown in Indiana. He is both terrified of water and blessed with the gift of finding it. This contradiction is at the heart of Jim Leonard Jr.'s play The Diviners, on stage now through Nov. 23 at the Centre Theatre at the Montgomery County Cultural Center in Norristown.

Set during the Depression in a rain-parched rural village, The Diviners examines the search for meaning in a world where the answers often are hidden under the surface, said Randy Wise, codirector of the production.

Buddy, 17, with his mysterious power of divining, is the intuitive seeker, guided by something unseen, but distrusted by those in town who see his power to find water as something akin to witchcraft. He is the foil for the characters in the play who look to external authorities for guidance, Wise said.

Between Buddy and his suspicious neighbors is C.C. Showers, a disaffected young preacher who arrives in town looking for work.

Drawn to Buddy's natural gift, Showers begins a friendship with the troubled boy that helps him through a crisis of faith.

"The story is really about their relationship," Wise said.

Buddy, traumatized by a childhood accident that left his mother dead and nearly drowned him, finds understanding in Showers. Through his friendship with Buddy, Showers, who is "disconnected from everything," Wise said, finds a kind of redemption.

"He starts to find himself. He is divining for something, too, but in a much different way," Wise said.

Leonard uses divining, or searching, as his central theme. All the characters in the hard-pressed village are looking for something.

Divining, sometimes called dowsing or water-witching, has its roots in antiquity. It became a more common practice in 15th-century Europe and was brought to this country by European settlers, said Daniel Rolph, a historian and folklorist who lives in Flourtown.

An instance of divining was recorded in the personal journals of a Philadelphia man, Samuel Breck, who served in the Pennsylvania Senate, Rolph said.

In September 1820, Breck wrote that he had witnessed a Quaker preacher named Alexander Wilson divining for water on the land of Caspar Morris in Philadelphia.

The preacher, according to Breck, was successful, and water was found under the surface where he indicated it would be, Rolph said.

While divining was regarded by some as witchery, it was a method that many put faith in. Ben Franklin was a proponent. Franklin once stated that roughly one in 10,000 people had "an extraordinary supply of electric fluid in his system" that made divining possible, Rolph said.

Even Albert Einstein believed in the practice, proclaiming that a divining rod "is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time."

Divining rods, still used today, were made of a variety of materials, but often they were forked branches of willow or some other type of tree, Rolph said. The wood twitched or pulled when it detected water, he said.

In The Diviners, water is symbolic of the connection and meaning that people seek. Drought has left the town with a scant supply of it, making Buddy's gift all the more important, Wise said. But people are suspicious of the boy and come to see Showers as the one who can provide spiritual leadership to solve the town's problems.

Divided into sections called "Earth," "Air," "Sky" and "Water," Leonard's play also comments on the lost connection between people and the natural environment, Wise said.

In the play, "the people who are the most grounded are the ones in tune with the Earth," he said.