THE STORY: As Edith Oliver, writing in The New Yorker, describes: “The lines are filled with puns—outrageous and lightly blasphemous—and the theme is destruction. The play is set in the private library of the Pope at the Vatican—or, to quote the dramatist, 'of Papp at the Vatican.' The room is overgrown with vegetation and is thick with grime; the books are inches deep in dust, and so is a statue of Buddha on one of the bookshelves. There are jungle noises outside, and organ music within. The time is some future Dark Ages…Something serious and human and touching does come through all the verbal rigmarole—even a story. An extraterritorial Demolition Man named Mak, a plastic helmet on his head and a pack of explosives on his back, comes to blow up the place. Papp detains him by quoting garbled proverbs and telling him garbled stories from Scripture, trading a story for a 'boom,' and then Mak, who can read, picks up a Bible and starts to correct Papp who cannot. All ends with a public book burning and an explosion, and with Papp, back in his old form, pronouncing that 'God hurts those who hurt themselves.' The play is neither comedy nor tragedy, funny nor sad; it is facetious and pessimistic, both on purpose."
This remarkably imaginative allegory of God and Church employs an apt and often antic style of language to give special points and penetration to its satiric, and comedic, thrusts.
“A worthwhile evening…Just the kind of play the American Place Theatre should be producing.” —The New York Times.
“…a clever exercise at illustrating the contention that if there were no God, the world would invent Him.” —Cue Magazine.
