Play:

God Is A Verb

Marc O'Donnell Theater 
The Actors Fund
October 2015 - November 2015

GOD IS A VERB is an urgent portrait of a world - and a man - on the brink. In 1969, an eccentric professor gathers a team of offbeat academics to play a game with one goal: make the world work for all humanity. What unfolds tears space-time as we are whisked from a beatnik cafe to a treetop congressional hearing and back by way of a university telephone. As the clock ticks, the lines blur between the game and the real world and we wonder if we've detached from reality altogether.

Photos by: Mitch Dean

Our interest was sparked with a document that one of our writers ran across—the World Game Report, an account of an ambitious, Utopian thought experiment undertaken in Manhattan in July of 1969. In the summer of '69, Buckminster Fuller gathered a group of New York's brightest minds from dozens of disciplines—mathematics, architecture, biology—with a single goal: disproving the widely accepted notion that the resources of our world, even if properly allocated through global cooperation, are too scarce to match the rate of population growth.

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Photos by:Mitch Dean

The Team: 

CREATIVES:
Writer: Gavin Broady
Director: Chad Lindsey
Stage Manager: Leah McVeigh
Composer: Diarmid Flatley
Lighting Design: Christopher Weston
Costume Design: Krista Intranuovo
Set Design: Chad Lindsey
Set Consult: Ryan Howell
Projection Design: Weston Wetzel

ENSEMBLE:
Cynthia Babak*, Roger Casey, Jamie Effros*, Hannah Hartmann, Carrie Heitman*, Elizabeth London*, Sade Namei*, Jacob Trussell, Renee Wilson

*Member of Actors Equity Association

Reviews

“[A] rich, intelligent, funny work, one of the strongest plays we’ve seen in recent memory.”
—culture catch
“The actors performing with dancer’s grace and precision speak with hand signals intermingled with brief light-footed dances.”
— front row center
“[T]ranscendent . . . ‘God is a Verb’ is a sublime example of cross-disciplinary collaboration.”
— new york theater review
“[A]n IV of optimism about how much fun it is to be alive and trying to solve the messy world in which we live . . . ‘God is a Verb’ has wisdom to spare.”
— edge new york
“Their joyful passion and understanding of the subject was so apparent in every aspect of this production that it is a testament to the collaborative process of theatremaking.”
— helen herbert - theater is easy
“‘God is a Verb’ is a multi-layered endeavor filled with humor and a deep understanding of R. Buckminster Fuller, the renowned 20th century inventor and theorist.”
— theater is easy
“Audience members are enraptured, hanging on to each cryptic phrase, effortlessly falling in step with the absurd magical realism.”
— front row center
“[A] very sharp, poignant, and pointedly critical play.”
— hyperallergic

Video

Video by: Kyle Beckley, Full Out Creative
Edited by: Colin Edleman