Faith Healer

“I smell religion on you like puke,” Marsha says by way of welcoming her minister son, adding benevolently, “You pray for me, I’ll slit your throat.” Of course, this raises the question of why Matthew turned to religion in the first place — whether out of conviction or out of spite. Under Charles Volken’s Spartan staging (probably a necessity for a company that was running three shows in repertory at the time of this viewing), Nigro’s understated, clenched-up performance raises any number of possible scenarios about his past.

Marsha does refer to stolen books and BMWs speeding away in the night, but if you don’t already know the history of O’Hair’s ongoing harassment by religious thugs in America, you’re not going to get it from this play. You might guess it from Marsha’s paranoia, but there’s no scene to support her fears. And that’s strange in a play in which flashbacks are a part of the architecture. (One of them has Marsha as a young woman — played by Jeana Blackman — being jilted in a big way by a lover, thus offering a trite and weepy explanation of why Marsha lost her faith in God.)

The play settles into a family reunion/deathwatch in which Johnny Boy begins to melt at the sight of his powerhouse ma, and grows ever more pathetic as the action progresses. Meanwhile, Marsha slips in and out of comas, during which she visits a moonscape populated by a pregnant woman (Pamela Clay), presumably symbolizing rebirth; a romantic, gold-suited Voltaire (John Malone), who keeps repeating, in French, “All nature cries out that God exists”; a fanatical Martin Luther (Rich Embardo); a pragmatic Erasmus of Rotterdam (Steven Shaw); and Marsha’s great-grandfather (Joseph Lennon McCord). All of which is a device allowing Marsha to discover a theology only slightly more nuanced than Waiting for Godot’s “The bastard, he doesn’t exist.”

But even if God doesn’t exist as a deity, Marsha learns, He’s all around and within us.

This is all well and good, but the story of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and the America she actually confronted, is far more interesting. Marsha’s theological epiphany flirts with, then bypasses, an entire stratum of American culture: our faith and its permutations. The problem isn’t so much with what’s in the play as what isn’t. The Atheist in All of Us is as far removed from O’Hair’s battle with corporate religion as its New Zealand and lunar settings are removed from America. If, in some rewrite, the play ever returns to O’Hair’s native soil, it might begin to fulfill its promise.