Churches are thinking about cutting their losses and closing down a couple of days each week. Synagogues are merchandising the High Holy Days, selling tickets at a discount. Welcome to the new Neil Simon apocalypse. In the King of Broadway's 1974 comedy, God's Favorite, the trials of Job are transported from the land of Uz in the era of the Old Testament patriarchs to the edge of Long Island in the age of Carvel franchises and 800 numbers.
That's a wide chasm to leap, as the briskly-paced romp at CP Summer Theater hilariously shows. The latter-day Job has no camels, sheep, or she-asses among his vast holdings. After a hardscrabble youth in the Bronx, Joe Benjamin has made his fortune in high-quality cardboard boxes. His living room is studded with priceless art, his wife is draped in furs, and his children are impressively spoiled.
God's trial is initiated with thoroughly modern due process. He sends His messenger to Joe B, offering him the pre-trial option to renounce God without any subsequent sufferings. Due to the down market in religious fervor, working conditions for God's messengers seem to have deteriorated. Sidney Lipton appears in a bedraggled Robert Hall raincoat, and his part-time salary isn't enough to move with his wife to Miami. You want supernatural? Lipton is able to enter Joe B's home despite a fully operational burglar alarm system. Even more incredibly, at the height of the torments heaped upon our hero, his swimming pool burns down!
The transformation inside Joe's swank home occasioned another miracle last Thursday. When the curtains parted after intermission and revealed the divine devastation, the CP audience actually applauded the Robert Croghan set design. The audience was by no means profligate, withholding their standing O until Dennis Delamar took his bows as Joe. Delamar earns his kudos by deftly balancing the comedy of Joe's physical maladies -- hemorrhoids are the clincher -- with an anger against the Almighty that only comes to a boil when his eldest son is afflicted. Loving this wayward son, David, is a trial in itself, since Chris Gleim broadly overplays his drunkenness and dissipation. (His repentance is more credible.) Otherwise, director Tom Hollis casts his comedy superbly, pacing the action -- and pitching the tone -- to perfection.
Particularly well-tuned were the comical fears and tremblings of Kevin Campbell as Sidney, hypochondria on loan from Felix Unger and voice-of-God shtick stolen shamelessly from the "Wizard of Oz" movie. I've never seen Campbell funnier, and Delamar looked dangerously close to laughter during his shenanigans.
Only at the very end does God's Favorite become overly formulaic and Simonized. Before Simon tidies up, there is much grim truth amid the ingratiating bonhomie. In our devoutly rational age, when God scorns a righteous man, there are no "comforters" to question Joe's true rectitude or reaffirm God's unerring justice. Instead, Joe is surrounded by skepticism and puzzlement. People are no longer concerned with the quality of Joe's relationship with God. They're more worried by the fact that he believes he has a relationship with God -- and that a good relationship is worth maintaining. If the furs and the pool are toast, why not curse the Lord and die? As Sidney points out -- with utmost irony -- renunciations are toll-free calls.
