David Javerbaum, having written for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for many years, knows his way around a laugh line. In his An Act of God, now playing at Baltimore’s Iron Crow Theatre, the quips and one-liners come fast and furious. It’s divine comedy.
Iron Crow’s production, directed by Sean Elias, makes clear from the outset that we are seeing an act. The three performers, in casual rehearsal garb, on a backstage setting, warm up, chat, and — via an election as full of irregularities as some seen in too-familiar secular surroundings — determine which actor will play God in the performance.
On Sunday afternoon, Jack Taylor did the honors. Along with the honor came nearly 90 minutes of comic monologue, only sporadically interrupted by the local angels. Taylor handled the assignment in a way that merited a hearty “Praise God” from all who heard.
Taylor’s Old Testament-style God is distinctly gay and thoroughly cynical, possessed of an ego universal in scale. He is determined to set the audience straight on several matters about which a certain famous collection of religious literature has misled the reading public. Take Noah’s Ark, for example. No way was there room for all those animals. It carried just Noah, his family, and a couple of cocker spaniel puppies, which ultimately proved tasty.
Before that, contrary to a well-known anti-gay slogan, the first two humans God created really were Adam and Steve. Before that, God really did create everything in seven days. Manipulating the geological record and DNA history of the world to provide fake evidence for the theory of evolution took a lot more work.
A velvety smooth angel Gabriel (Nicholas Miles), reading from the pages of a noticeably altered Gutenberg Bible, tees up God’s riffs on the Ten Commandments, displayed on an electronic sign board. Not surprisingly, the play’s list of dos and don’ts differs from those on the tablets that Chuck Heston carried down from the mountain. “Honor your children,” for example, leads God into a discussion of his fraught family dynamics. Jesus, it turns out, had middle-child issues, given the presence of his brother Zach and his sister Kathy.
The jokes keep coming. God is comfortable with celebrities; they’re his chosen people. So are Jews; the categories overlap a good deal, right? What is God’s favorite Broadway show? Cabaret. He had to let the Holocaust happen or else there would have been no Cabaret.
Rachael Small, as the perky and ultimately impertinent angel Michael, conveys to God questions posed as if by audience members. Does God answer prayers? Answering 12 million entreaties a second from humanity is tiring, but God allows that he did answer a prayer once, or at least responded to a question: Why do bad things happen to good people? To balance the good things that happen to bad people, of course.
When God and the angels take the stage in character, James V. Raymond’s set shifts from the rehearsal hall to a more celestial look, with a diaphanous, iridescent, pastel-toned backdrop and flown-in puffy clouds of flowers. Gabriel’s darker lectern and God’s gold and rose-tinted sofa were nice variations from the white-dominated, talk show-style sets I’ve seen in video clips of other productions. The sound (Zach Sexton) and lighting (Thomas P. Gardner) designs were as tongue-in-cheek bombastic as one could ask for in a show featuring an overlord as temperamental and capricious as any denizen of Olympus.
In the latter portion of the show, Michael returns to the problem of evil, insistently demanding to know why God’s world includes so much pain and suffering, seemingly for no reason (children’s cancer, for instance). God’s tone becomes darker and more introspective. Perhaps, he muses, it’s because he’s an incompetent asshole, and humans were made in his image. Surely he can do better, imagining constructing, with the help of Steve Jobs, a Universe 2.0 in which everything turns out well. Otherwise, we’re on our own. Perhaps there’s some comfort in that.
Like a literal reading of the Bible itself, spoofing such a reading does not probe deeply into the power of the stories we tell about the meaning of life. But here, the spoofing is the point, and Iron Crow’s production does the job with skill, humor, and verve.
Running Time: 90 minutes, with no intermission.
An Act of God plays through January 26, 2025, presented by Iron Crow Theatre, performing at Baltimore Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston Street, Baltimore, MD. Tickets ($25-$50) may be purchased online.
The cast and creative team credits are here.
