Review: Arizona Theatre Company Presents AN ACT OF GOD

Thou shalt surrender all your closely held notions of the divine almighty as a merciful, loving, responsible, and empathetic deity. She is unequivocally none of those things, and, in Arizona Theatre Company's adaptation of David Javerbaum's AN ACT OF GOD, the Lord (Paige Davis) descends from her celestial perch to set the record straight.

God incarnate in the human form of Ms. Davis aims to dispel her congregation of all myths and assumptions about her reliability as a source of salvation. Stop saying "God bless you" after a sneeze ~ The wish ain't necessarily going to be fulfilled. Silly stuff this business of children praying to have their souls taken if they should die before they wake! And athletes expecting their feats are a function of divine intervention? Enough, already!

She's "weary of the Ten Commandments, in exactly the same way that Don McLean has grown weary of American Pie," and presents a new and updated Decalogue that's more in keeping with her snarky attitude.

She reveals the dope behind the Bible stories to which mankind has attributed decidedly fallacious interpretations. All is not what it seems once you've received her revisionist accounts of the Creation, the Flood, the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, and even the agony of Jesus. The good news is that, contrary to certain interpretations she never was anti-gay: Behold, she first created Adam and Steve!

She is ultimately an amoral and inconvenienced god for whom, as she pointedly observes, omnipotence does not presume competence. God is imposed upon by man's expectations, and she's fed up with the burden.

Aided and abetted in her revelations by the adjunct archangels, Michael (Max Lawrence) and Gabriel (James Gleason), God swings high and low at her subjects human and her subjects theological.

The satire, directed by the marvelous actress Marsha Mason, is precisely what you'd expect from the pen of the writer and producer of such hits as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It requires however a delivery that is more nuanced and variegated ~ with well-timed dashes of irony, vexation, and sarcasm ~ than that provided by Davis. Hers is more the voice of a chipper rapid-fire (90-minute) one-note stand-up comic. That's fine enough, I suppose, but it's an opportunity missed. All in all, it's a mildly entertaining performance, relatively short on solid laughs, and fairly painless.

AN ACT OF GOD continues its run at the Herberger Theater Center through December 4th.

Photo credit to Tim Fuller