Patrick Healy at The New York Times quipped “Jim Parsons is God – and not just to fans of his character, Sheldon Cooper” on the CBS comedy hit The Big Bang Theory.
“No, Mr. Parsons is actually going to play the Almighty on Broadway beginning May 5 in the new comedy An Act of God by David Javerbaum, a former head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, the play’s producer announced on Thursday.
The 90-minute production is based on Mr. Javerbaum’s 2011 book The Last Testament: A Memoir By God, a swirl of satirical riffs on Biblical passages, jokey anecdotes and comic pronouncements.
Ron Charles at The Washington Post described it this way: “The alpha and the omega of Javerbaum’s comedy are deadpan silliness and startlingly graphic sexual gags, which no fig leaf could dress up for a family newspaper.”
MRC president Brent Bozell gave a little stronger summation of the contents:
Javerbaum's God is a doofus full of imperfections. In the beginning, God created the world so he could dominate someone. "In my humble opinion, thou canst hardly call thyself the LORD, if thou hast created no other beings to LORD it over," Javerbaum imagines. "I had a burning ambition to rule the world, but I knew such a world was not going to create itself; no fully formed planet was going to suddenly appear and say, `Here, LORD, take these 20 burnt offerings,' or `Here, LORD, take these 50 infidel heads,' or `Here, LORD, take these 200 years of religious warfare.'"
One of God's better qualities, apparently, is his strange loathing for the Word of God. The Bible condemns homosexuality, for example, but Javerbaum's God actually created "Adam and Steve" first. He created Adam to tend the Garden of Eden, but then when he grew lonely, "God" made for him "a hunk, unburdened by excess wisdom; ripped, and cut, and hung like unto a fig tree before the harvest; Yea, and a power bottom."
This apparently places the book in the "Humor" section.
This God-mocking play will be directed by Tony Award winner Joe Mantello (Wicked), who starred with Jim Parsons in the 2011 Broadway revival of leftist playwright Larry Kramer’s Reagan-killed-the-gays play The Normal Heart and the subsequent film adaptation shown on HBO last year starring Mark Ruffalo.
