Marcus Gardley’s “every tongue confess” at Arena Stage’s Kogod Cradle theater is a moving vision of relationships, religion and racial strife in the modern American South. It plays with memory, imagination and the supernatural to conjure up a place in which the living and the dead coexist, where dreams, fantasies and Biblical allegory are the stuff of every-day reality.

On its earthly plane, “every tongue confess” takes place in Kentucky and in Boligee, Ala., in August 1996. Black churches are burning to the ground at a great rate; there are far too many fires for them to be coincidental, and in what seem to be satanic acts of violence, the churches are torched with worshippers inside.