TheaterWorks’ ‘Hand to God’ A Dark, Dirty, Sensational Social Satire

Editor’s note: TheaterWorks has added a performance to “Hand To God.” The final performance will now be Sunday, Aug. 26, at 7 p.m.

In other stage reviews this month, I felt obliged to explain how classics such as “A Flea and Her Ear” and “Oliver!” have had to carefully change many of their jokes and plot points to be less offensive to today’s audiences.

So it’s a hell of a nice change to see an uncompromising, angry, unsettling, uncensored contemporary comedy that embraces bad taste and bad language brilliantly for this exact moment in time.

“Hand to God” will rip your head off, and when it’s reattached, your head will be in a different place.

Robert Askins’ sinister social satire, an off-Broadway and Broadway hit a few years ago, charges into TheaterWorks as nasty and in-your-face as ever. Director Tracy Brigden, three of the five actors and several of the designers in this new Hartford rendition hail from a 2016 production at City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh.

“Hand to God” can’t be much more brazen. It takes cuddly hand puppets and makes them objects of lust and demonic power. They also swear. There’s a sex scene between a recently widowed middle-aged woman named Margery (Lisa Velten Smith) and an unhinged teenager named Timmy (Miles G. Jackson), involving domination and vandalism. They also swear. The show’s hero, a gentle, easily possessed soul named Jason (Nick LaMedica), is subjected to horrible humiliations, witnessed by Jessica (Maggie Carr), the girl he’s too shy to confess his affections for. Jason and Jessica also swear.

The only other human actor onstage, Lutheran pastor Greg (Peter Benson) may utter oaths like “What the heck?” and “Son of a biscuit!” earlier in the play, but in the second act he’s spewing the f-word as casually as everyone else.

The worst language and behavior comes from puppets, beautifully designed by Stephanie Shaw to be so soft and cuddly that you have no idea how coarse and vicious they can become. The main felt-faced terror is named Tyrone. He’s a muppety manifestation of the devil who grafts himself onto Jason’s arm and causes bloody mayhem. Sometimes you can’t blame him, as when someone disses him with what appears to be the ultimate puppet insult: “Miss Piggy.”

Much of the play is about how the appalled Texan churchgoers can rid themselves of Tyrone. “Do Lutherans even do exorcisms?” someone asks.

One of the glories of Robert Askins’ script is that the question is answered. There’s a lot of humorous back-and-forth here, not just blood-spraying special effects and repulsed reactions. There are real dialogues — between mother and son, between awkward teens, between minister and flock, between man and puppet. Even the curses have comebacks.

Smith, as the grief-stricken, unhealed Margery, hits excellent extremes of demure teacherly patience and propulsive sexual dynamism. But in fact all the actors have their mild moments and their completely mad ones. The one who ping-pongs the hardest is Nick LaMedica, who is convincingly withdrawn as Jason and just as convincingly unfiltered and unfettered as Tyrone. LaMedica expertly manipulates Tyrone so that he and the puppet can have sensational knock-down-drag-out arguments.

Amid all this frenetic physical comedy, Maggie Carr adds nuanced eye-rolls and deadpan smirks as Jessica. She’s the object of Jason’s affection, and her puppet Jolene is being lasciviously eyed by Tyrone. You don’t know where to look — or, when things get raunchy, where not to.

The script and cast are solid and superbly sick-minded, but TheaterWorks’ “Hand to God” is also helped immeasurably by Luke Cantarella’s scenic design. Cantarella gives us sedate backdrops upon which all the craziness can explode. A revolving stage brings us a church-school classroom (replete with child-painted pictures of rainbows and butterflies), then those brightly painted cinderblock walls change to the drabber walls of the church office. A driving scene uses that old theatrical prop, the front end of a car, but adds fast-moving street projections behind it. The lighting ranges from spotlights to flickering fluorescent tubes. On the small TheaterWorks stage, this intense attention to detail enhances every scene, especially the ones where rooms get wrecked before our eyes by angry outbursts or unrestrained sexual hi-jinks.

At a mere 90 minutes, including an intermission, “Hand to God” is a short sharp shock to the system. The between-scenes death-metal music (interspersed with sickly sweet pop versions of Christian standards like “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know”) helps maintain that furious pace.

Then it comes to a halt. And a point. “Hand to God” doesn’t have a moral message or a happy ending, and thank God for that. The whole play wants us to question how we can blindly accept guidance from others, and how difficult it is to cope with grief, guilt and loss.

Tyrone’s closing remarks, about “how we invented Jesus,” are highly reminiscent of various classic Lenny Bruce routines from 60 years ago, about “giving it up for the tribe” or “What is obscene?”

Lenny Bruce is the highest standard for meaningful scatalogical comedy, and “Hand to God” meets it.

HAND TO GOD runs through Aug. 26 at TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. (and at 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 26). Tickets are $45 to $70. 860-527-7838 and theaterworks.org.