My God Is Better Than Your God

I normally attack theater from the review flank.  I use my insight to take you, the possible audience member, into the "reality" of what a theatrical event may be like - without you having to actually be part of the reality.  I try to express the theatricity of a theatrical event through the written word.  It is my job - to bring the entire experience of sitting in a theater, marveling at what is taking place on stage, the smells of the greasepaint and the dinner that is stuck to the lapel of the patron next to you - without your ever having to enter a theater.  Although entering a theater to see a play is always best!

And here is why... I've just returned from a performance of My God Is Better Than Your God by theater great Gina Grass.  Once again, it is a one woman show.  Normally I would just review the show, but there was a moment when everything came together for me, as it will for you.  As it will for anyone who ever lived to see theater.  For anyone who has ever lived!  Here is a snippet from My God Is Better Than Your God, now playing at the Manka Open Mike in Tribeca.

Gina:  You can't possibly imagine my God.  Your mind is too small.  Imagine a goat trying to drive the Batmobile.  Trying to drive the Batmobile with cooking mitts.  That is you - stupidly in front of my God.  Only more stupid.  My God would laugh at you but h/she/it is above laughter.  My God is always in a state of laughter because my God is always in a state of ALL.  Eons ago, my God would have bathed in the lamentations of your women and children.  That was before my God evolved to a point that evolution now means nothing to he/she/it.  No, back then, my God would have taken a hoof (for my God only needed ONE HOOF!) and smashed that hoof on your pathetic being.  And the bodies of the weak - like the previously mentioned women and children.  And to make you feel even smaller than you already would be feeling - my God would rip the viscera from the chest cavities of those you loved in front of your pathetic face.  And my God would use their intestines like a gore-drenched and dread sippy straw... and my God would suck and suck and suck the life out of everything you held dear.  And then, for spite, my God would spit that life right back into your face.  You turn pale.  I haven't really started.  Then my God would smash YOU with the HOOF!  And you would be dispersed into fragments no bigger than an atom.  And even your smartest atom would kneel before my God in much the same way that a lichen kneels before you - if a lichen could kneel - BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I'M F-ING TALKING ABOUT!  I see you.  You are trying to comprehend my God.  But you are like the contents of a Petrie dish trying to comprehend the scientist.  The only difference is that the contents of the Petrie dish do not know to be afraid.  And you should be SO afraid.  Because my God no longer needs a hoof...

I have never heard the like on a stage before in my life.  I could only imagine saying these beautiful words to someone who has cut me off in traffic, or to my landlord when he implies that my sub-lease may be invalid.  In what situation would you use these words?  And what would you do with your HOOF?!?

Kyrle Lendhoffer has been writing "Behind The Proscenium" for Broadway Manka for over 20 years.  In that time, he has had the pleasure (and burden) of interviewing some of the most powerful visionaries of modern theater.  He studied Theatrical Criticism at Cal-State Northridge and Astro-physics at MIT.