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review Here’s a pop quiz for you. Suppose for a moment you’re the average
boy-next-door, living an average life in today’s San Francisco. You're lonely. You
want a girlfriend. Oh, and God speaks to you. Directly. Especially when He's hungry. Do
you: If you answered “yes” to any or all of the above, then Richard Freedman’s charmingly twisted new comedy “Gift Of God” may be just the play for you. Sal (Jason Esquerra) is a nice young man with a problem. Yes, he’s lonely. Yes, he wants a girlfriend. But Sal's real problem is that God talks to him on a regular basis. Although prone to petulant rumblings of thunder, Sal’s God is more Harvey the rabbit than the ass-kicking Old Testament taskmaster, demanding little more than chicken Florentine or Salisbury steak. At least, at first. One night, Sal puts in a request for a girlfriend. Enter Ted -- short for Theodora -- on the 38 Limited, engrossed in her copy of “Myth and Reality”. Sal sees Ted as his gift of God, and is immediately smitten. A clumsy yet sincere flirt, Sal succeeds in getting Ted to first miss her stop and then to go out with him. Their budding relationship progresses well until God tells Sal to tie Ted to the shrine in his livingroom and sacrifice her with a barbecue fork. This is where their relationship is really put to the test, and where lesser playwrights would have surely self-destructed in any number of ways. But Freedman and director Shannon C.M. Flynn wisely choose to keep the focus of the play upon the blossoming, oddly innocent romance between Sal and Ted. Freedman’s true gift as a playwright is his ability to take the epic and the mythological and make it all so engagingly ordinary. So, when his couple hear God speaking to them and subsequently try to kill one another with various sharp kitchen utensils, it seems like just another bump along the rocky road of modern relationships. Fortunately, Freedman avoids the overtly philosophical while still examining questions inherent to our existence as human beings, such as the need for God, for faith, for love, for each other. Penultimately, the play says God resides in the individual, that we do God’s work through who we are and what we do. Ultimately, "Gift Of God" is a love story of two lost and searching souls coming together as one. Morgana Rae as Ted is perfectly cast in a role she absolutely nails. Rae gives a luminous, finely-tuned performance which moves from tentative attraction to desire to horror to rage to, finally, tender acceptance in one fluid, seamless arc. Esquerra, while always engaging, is less effective through the choice – be it his or director Flynn’s – to play his character from behind a constant façade of comic conceit and mannerism, as though his Sal had dropped in from a nearby Coward play. With Esquerra’s Sal I saw the acting; with Rae’s Ted I saw simply the character in all of her complexity. One area I wish more attention had been paid to is Sal’s livingroom shrine. Aware that this is a modest production of limited means, I nevertheless think that as the physical metaphor/centerpiece of the play, the shrine needs to be something truly imposing in some way, not merely the disheveled suggestion of a guy who hasn’t picked up for a few days. That notwithstanding, the gently perverse charm of “Gift Of God” lies in its sly and insidious ability to make this deeply disturbed pair seem just like the nice young couple next door. And that is truly a scary thought. |