It’s kind of strange to be cursing in a blog I’m writing at work, but I guess if I’m quoting G-d as played by F. Murray Abraham in “Almost an Evening,” it’s alright.
… And what a highly quotable play it was. The show gets more awesome the longer I think about it.
It is composed of three one-act plays.
Waiting shows purgatory as a vast and unending government-style bureaucracy. Joey Slotnick’s woebegone expressions and exact counting of time spent waiting for entrance into heaven makes the entire piece.
In Four Benches, a James Bond-type gets in touch with his feelings after witnessing an accidental shooting of an innocent man – a “collosus” as his grieving dad calls him repeatedly.
Debate is an argument between two archetypes of deities: one angry and commanding, and one loving and soft. It’s the angry Jew that not-so-subtly explains to the audience that they must remember the difference between COMMANDMENTS and SUGGESTIONS.
I’m a secular Jew with Modern Orthodox parents and I was sitting next to my friend, a lapsed Seventh-Day Adventist, so the whole debate and the commandments/suggestions comment, in particular, garnered a big guffaw from both of us.
My favorite shows are those that elicit both belly-laughs and deep discussions, so I have to give Almost an Evening 5 stars.