Hold onto your scriptures.
God would like a word with you, America. And she’s landed in St. Paul in the body of a great Minnesota actor to give it to you straight, no chaser.
Taking over the commanding voice and razor wit of Sally Wingert, the Divine One is showing jazz and standup comedy proclivities at Six Points Theater. In “An Act of God,” she shows that she’s prone to riffing and calling attention to her own thigh-slapping jokes. She also seems to go off script from time to time.
Part corporate-style liturgy with a direct, sermon-like address and part festive game show with buzzers and bells, “Act” is a 90-minute one-act staged lightheartedly by Craig Johnson on a set by Michael Hoover that suggests St. Paul is the new Mount Sinai.
Having grown frustrated by the fact that her testaments and divine inspiration have been mostly reduced to the Ten Commandments, God explains that she wishes she didn’t have to be like Don McLean, who is weary of singing his hit “American Pie.” And so, as she paces or sits beneath two large commandment tablets where the text is digitally inscribed instead of chiseled in or hammered out, God has come to deliver 10 new commandments.
Dressed in milk white by A. Emily Heaney, God is attended by similarly white-clad and winged archangels Michael (Kevin Brown Jr.) and Gabriel (Andrew Newman). Michael has a mic and seems to field questions from the audience. Gabriel taps buzzers to ring bells and read passages on cue.
The new commandments include ones around sex (“do not tell whom to fornicate”) and thinking of God as a personal assistant or servant (“Do not tell me what to do”).
As for some of the contradictions and questions around evolution and science, God explains that there’s a good amount of fakery that she had to engineer to backdate dinosaur bones and the like. But rest assured, she created the world in a short week and was misheard when she sent the flood.
