The Post-Standard News
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May 9, 1997
Section: CNY
Edition: City
Page: F8

Out of all Neil Simon's plays, "God's Favorite" isn't my favorite.

Appleseed Productions is giving it a delightful staging - funny, clever, with a good cast doing some fine comic acting and the three leads handing in hilarious performances. There's one minor problem: the script.

Starting with what works really well and working back to what works not so well: First, Tom Minion as Joe Benjamin and Doug Walls as Sidney Lipton.

"God's Favorite" is Simon's retelling of the story of Job as a vaudeville sketch. Minion plays the updated Job, a rich manufacturer of cardboard boxes living well on Long Island with his beloved but lunatic family.

Joe is God's favorite, his perfect servant. Walls plays a messenger from God. Not an angel, understand, although he has met God. ("Twice on business, once on a boat ride.")

Lipton is just some poor guy from Queens that God has on his payroll at $137 a week.

"If he (God) can have servants, why can't he have messengers?" Lipton asks the initially dubious Joe. "He's got cleaning people. I've seen them."

A lot of the play's jokes are built around the contrast between God's terrible message to Joe and his hapless messenger.

Walls, in a rumpled Columbo-like raincoat and soggy shoes, plays Lipton with a very funny mix of New Yorker irritability and self-absorbed goofiness.

Lipton's mind is only half on his mission, at best. And he's easily distracted. Trying to tell Joe about the awful testing of his faith God and Satan have arranged, Lipton wanders off into rhapsodies about his favorite movies, complaints about his wife and whining about his own health. ("I got a headache so big it's coming through my hat.")

The first of Joe's many trials is dealing with Lipton's maddening conversational tangents.

Minion, as Joe, displays a little less of the patience of, well, Job. Minion's Joe manages to deal with with all his tribulations through a combination of simple faith and blank-faced bafflement.

Job had it easy. What are boils next to the unbelievable idiocy of Joe's family? God's burning down Joe's house and factory and taking all his money are nothing in comparison.

Joe's dimwitted daughter Sarah (Tracy Randall), his even more dimwitted son Ben (Eric Feldstein), and his drunken son David (Edward Mastin) are enough to make the real Job curse the day he was born.

His wife, Rose, dividing her devotion equally among her children and her jewelry, drives him crazy with her self-absorbed indifference to her husband's plight.

She doesn't see that he has a problem. Her thinking is: Joe renounces God, God turns the lights back on - what's so hard?

Linda Ann Hill as Rose is a marvel. In her first two minutes onstage, clutching her oversized jewelry box and with earplugs in so that she's deaf to everyone else onstage, she earns more laughs than most actors can hope for in a hundred comedies.

Randall, Feldstein and Mastin are very funny in the first scene, less funny as the play goes on, because they are simply repeating themselves. Which is not their fault. Which brings me to what works not so well.

The script.

The first 40 minutes are hysterical, as Simon introduces his characters and sets up the situation. But then it's as if Simon didn't know what to do with the situation once he got it set up.

The second scene is mostly Joe recapping what went on in the first scene between him and Lipton and then Joe and Lipton doing a reprise of their first encounter. It's a momentum-killer.

And although the pace picks up again in the last act, the play never recaptures the lunacy of the opening.

Note: Wolf Warrens and Greg Holtham alternate with Walls and Feldstein in the roles of Sidney Lipton and Ben Benjamin, respectively. 

Copyright (c), 1997, The Herald Company.