Thanks Jonathan. I figured this out shortly after posting. Our need really was only to geocode a single address, then find intersecting project area. For this workflow I found that just calling the geocoding service and decoding the JSON response worked great. Turns out, it was also much faster than using arcpy.GeocodeAddresses_geocoding.
gcUrl = "https://mapviewer.lynchburgva.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Locators/Composite/GeocodeServer/findAddressC..."+ arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0) + "&outFields=&maxLocations=&outSR=&searchExtent=&f=pjson"
response = urllib.urlopen(gcUrl)
data = json.loads(response.read())
with open('gcAddress.json', 'w') as outfile:
json.dump(data, outfile)
gcPoint = arcpy.Point(data["candidates"][0]["location"]["x"], data["candidates"][0]["location"]["y"])
arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management(projectArea,projectArea_Layer)
arcpy.SelectLayerByLocation_management(projectArea_Layer, "INTERSECT",arcpy.Geometry ("point", gcPoint, arcpy.Describe(projectArea).spatialReference),"","NEW_SELECTION")