The Diviners: A Play in Two Acts and Elegies is a 1980 play by Jim Leonard, Jr.
The action kicks off when C.C. Showers arrives in the small town of Zion, Indiana, having walked from Kentucky looking for work during the Great Depression. C.C. meets the Laymans; Ferris Layman's son, Buddy, is mentally retarded, but able to tell the weather and find water wells. Buddy says that he does this by thinking of his mother, who drowned years before trying to save him from the river. The incident left him terrified of water, never allowing it to touch his skin, even for baths. Ferris Layman, the town mechanic, gives C.C. a job and room and board, and he begins to bond with the family. C.C. also gets to know the other townspeople, who become obsessed with convincing him to return to his old job as a preacher.
The play is melancholy from the first monologue, an elegy for Buddy Layman, to its inevitable conclusion. The audience is given some comic relief from the sadness by the conversations between the ex-army Marvin and his hapless friend Dewey.