Don’t You Love It When Your Day Is in a Play?

I don’t know how many of you all out there have been spending your days like me, combing through proofs for and against the existence of God and trying to write clever things about them. But if you are, have I got a play for you: The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist, now playing at Under St. Mark’s in the East Village. Even if you’re not like me, I bet you’d like it. It is really funny. The story of a charming Viagra salesman and an existentially-troubled white couple wrapped around the story of an internet-celebrity atheist guy who steals a statue of the baby Jesus from a Nativity scene to prove that God doesn’t exist (things go wrong). As the trio begins to tell the story of the atheist, they talk about how obnoxious atheists always are. “But they’re right, obviously.” Yeah, obviously. And acting out a bit of internet urban legend, playwright Dan Trujillo manages to throw in a pretty good rendition of Augustine’s answer to the problem of evil. Everybody is funny, and everybody, bizarrely, is right.

The cast is fantastic, and the harmonies they sing warm one’s eternal soul. The only problem is, they way they’re dressed, you’d never believe it was around Christmas time, when a nativity scene might be out. At least while seeing it in New York.