Will you even tell her if you decide to make the sky fall?

chriscrick is God. At least through tomorrow night.

I went last night to New Works New Haven's production of Children of Eden, a two-act retelling of the first eight books of Genesis that I had unaccountably missed when it was performed at Brandeis (even though Standing Room Only has regularly played "In the Beginning" and "Stranger to the Rain" ever since the first cast recording came out). There I observed chriscrick as the Father, Stephen Schwartz and John Caird's rather midrashic version of God: and he was good. And that was the first night. On my schedule, the evening and the morning are pretty much the same anyway.

I consider it his fault, of course, that I am even thinking about this musical afterward. The score is not the pinnacle of Stephen Schwartz, but the Father of Children of Eden is an odd character, simultaneously anthropomorphic and nonhuman. This is a God that blinks at the sudden brilliance of the light he has caused to exist (". . . That's bright!"), who can create man and woman in his own image only to marvel at their sleeping faces with the bemused pride of a new father ("I think she's got my nose / I think he's got my dimples"). His delight in their quickness is evident, as when he turns his children loose on the nameless natural world and watches them invent the alphabet and the bestiary in one—as is his possessiveness, his impatience with Eve's excited curiosity and the short temper that traditionally characterizes the God of the Old Testament. He knows how to love the children who praise his name, but not yet the ones who push beyond the boundaries of their childhood. He built the world from a dream in the dark, and has yet to learn that dreams always change when made real.

At times he is painfully, recognizably human. In his fury at Eve's defiance, he raises his hand to strike her—not with lightnings, as he will blast the Tree of Knowledge, or with curses and rejection, as he will brand Cain, but with the back of his hand, like any furious mortal—and barely catches himself in time. His encounter with the adolescent Cain and Abel shifts uneasily between theophany and belated acknowledgement: these are children still too close to divinity to be as impressed with their grand-Father's presence as he would like, and a deity who has learned enough of deceit and hurt to hide his visit from his disobedient first children. Even by Noah's time, he can kneel in pain as the world drowns, amazed at how differently from his expectations his creation has turned out ("I thought that you would keep me young / But you have made me old").

In some ways, the story of Children of Eden is really their Father's: how his children have grown and matured, learned and changed, and how he must catch up; and begin to trust these weird, perishable, wayward beings, as stubborn and contradictory as their creator ("In your hands I place the key / To this prison made of gratitude / That has held you close to me / Now I know I cannot hold you / Till at last I let you be"). But he cannot be all human petulance, or his credibility as a god fails; and if he is all distant majesty, his children's capability to wound him makes as little sense. So I was particularly impressed by the way chriscrick inhabited the character: even silent, motionless, his Father would not be mistaken for a mortal. He stands like a temple statue, walks unhurried as continental drift, a literal force of nature in birkenstocks and pragmatic white robes. If his demeanor and his actions were sometimes at odds with one another, so much the better for dramatic tension: we would like our gods to behave better than we do . . .

Well, at least it makes for good story when they don't.