The Butterfingers Angel...

Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival at Walnut Studio 3, 9th & Walnut Sts., through Dec. 22, 893-1145.

Both religious and hilarious, The Butterfingers Angel is the real stuff: a Christmas show that brings entertainment as well as tidings of comfort and joy. Playwright William Gibson (he also wrote The Miracle Worker and Two for the Seesaw) provides a witty, highly literate script, and director Domenick Scudera provides a lively, clever production — complete with an imaginative set (designed by Barbra Kravitz) making good use of the Walnut Studio's tiny stage.

The plot is the story of the Nativity, with the Annunciating Angel (Tony Braithwaite) — the guy with the butterfingers — as one of the central characters. He arrives on earth with curly eyelashes, a trumpet, a big book and an injunction: do this right or don't come back. He tends to mess up, misunderstand, get things wrong; glancing upward, he mumbles, "That they sent me is enough to make me disbelieve." But he carries out his mission and finds Mary (Deborah Seif) — a strong-minded, practical young woman with a bunch of barbarian brothers who doesn't want to marry and have children, but plans to go to Jerusalem and make something of herself. And so he announces (what else would an Annunciating Angel do?) that Mary is going to be visited by the Holy Ghost and will conceive a child who will be the son of God. Mary says, as any girl would, "What???" So he has to announce again.

A local carpenter named Joseph (Neill Hartley) is smitten with her. She's not interested — he's too old, and besides, she wants out of there. But once she accepts the new fact of her life, Joseph is the ideal husband — smart, steady, adoring. (Joseph: "When are you expecting this baby?" Mary: "Around Christmas.") Biblical facts overtake the happy couple — Herod (Eric Van Wie) forces everybody back to their home towns, and so Mary, Joseph and a very reluctant donkey (John Zak) hit the road to Bethlehem. The central twist of the plot pivots on the miracle told in "The Cherry Tree Carol" — the wondrous moment when Joseph's jealousy (who is the father?) is assuaged: as the song goes, Mary asks Joseph to pick her some cherries and he angrily replies, "Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee." And miraculously the cherry tree bends down to touch Mary's hand. But in this version, Satan has intervened, and another miracle is required: the angel's sacrifice of his future, relinquishing heaven, is only one of many acts of love in this remarkably human version of the story.

That love is the subject. Everybody in this show — angels, people, trees, animals — is human, and therein lies both the entertainment and the philosophic point: that if we are (as various characters suspect) merely fruit flies in the universe, living brief, meaningless lives, it is love that redeems us from our sense of futility.

But what's a play without conflict or a philosophy without a blind spot? The enemy has to be somebody more subtle, more dangerous, more seductive than the lunatic Herod, who suspects that the Three Wise Men are "spies in the employ of a Platonic power," mystics groping their way to us "through a miasma of metaphysics." Van Wie, who plays Herod, also plays a man in a gray suit, a slimy city slicker, the wild card in the universe, the principle of evil. When the Angel protests, "I've hunted through every line [of his big book] and you're not in it," he replies, "I'm between the lines."

The show is filled with laugh-out-loud lines, a lovely flute rendition of "Silent Night" (played by Dori Eisenhauer), singing cows and sheep (Bridget Jones and J.J. Van Name) and the singing guys (Jose M. Aviles, Aaron Cromie and Gerald T. Glackin) who play the barbaric brothers and the Three Kings. And not to forget the tree, played with great twigginess by Michele Guidry. The acting is, generally, first rate, with Deborah Seif, Neill Hartley and Eric Van Wie turning in fine performances that walk a fine line between psychological realism and Christmas cartoon.

— Toby Zinman