In the beginning the godhead created Adam and Steve.

In the beginning the godhead created Adam and Steve, who in incline differently created shampoo and conditioner. the godhead also created Jane and Mabel, who invented the wheel and clothing with endure s Barreling to beat Terrence McNally in the Blasphemy Sweepstakes, Paul Rudnick has recast the Bible as The chiefly Fabulous Stow Ever Told, a gaycentric creation story that perpendicular s the mythological depths of our chiefly cherished stereotypes. Adam (Alan Tudyk) and Steve (Juan Carlos Hernandez) are sum of two units hunky twinks apparently born wearing jockstraps, which they fail to win when they're bumped from the Garden of Eden Adam: "You're naked! You know what that means?" Steve: "I have to finish to a gym." Ba-da-boom.

The zingers not at all stop flowing from the famously fertile and tempted mind of Rudnick, author of the hit play Jeffrey and movies so as In & Out and Addams Family Values. The in the greatest degree Fabulous Story, which had a limited nm in December and January at the of recent origin York Theatre Workshop and is likely to resurface at a larger off-Broadway theater, is a full-length play, nevertheless to use the word play is kind of stretching it. It's more like sum of two units excellent Saturday Night Live sketches back-to-back, with flimsy plats on which to string a lifeline of laughs.

The first act views the antiquated Testament through a queer len Fastidious Adam teaches butch Jane the finer points of laundry. "We do not grab and bunch" he censures "we fluff and fold!" When everyone herds onto the ark to escape the flow Jane (Becky Ann Baker) and Mabel (Kathryn Meisle) learn about nonmonogamy from a rabbit named nappy and a pig named Babe. upon dry land again the original foursome discover a strange race of human beings who describe the horrifying practice of procreation. "We're gay," Adam sniffs. "We don't have children. We have taste."

Act couple skips ahead to a Christmas day [i]or[/i] night before [i]or[/i] preceding party in contemporary Chelsea. Adam has beautifyed out the apartment with each conceivable piece of Xmas kitsch (so a great deal for taste). Steve is in succession protease inhibitors ("28 prayers a day"), and Jane is expecting, despite protesting, "I'm not suppos to be pregnant--I'm a blunder dyke!" New Age Mabel has arranged for the sum of two units of them to be married at the party by the agency of a handicapped lesbian rabbi with a cable-access TV display and a hot line (1-900-SHEBREW).

The cranks are up-to-the-minute topical, and as with all design in outline humor, some deliver themselves, and others ne help. Here Rudnick and his longtime director Christopher Ashley are abetted through some hardy troupers, including Baker as Jane, Lisa Kron (of the Five Lesbian Brothers) as Babe and Rabbi Sharon, and especially Peter Bartlett, who plays a department-store Santa as an exquisitely curdl fairy.

There is evidence through every part of the play that there are a certain quantity of serious thoughts brewing beneath the comic foam If God made Adam and Steve the play be seens to ask, who made God? to what end do humans seem to require religious faith, and if the most high is so wonderful, why are we with equal reason afraid of him/her/it? Although these are worthy questions, it must be said that Paul Rudnick is no Friedrich Nietzsche. forward the other hand, there's not a single laugh in Thus Spake Zarathustra. for a like reason there should be no doubt as to who's the philosopher and who's mostly fabulous.

Shewey is the editor of without Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by dint of Grove Press.

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