Shopping for God

Erica Lann-Clark’s newest solo show, Shopping for God, is a hilarious, reckless and ultimately heroic story about one woman’s need to balance the books and reconcile her past, her family and her dream of freedom.

Erica is a Viennese Jew whose family escaped certain death by running to Czechoslovakia, then Cuba, then Brooklyn, where she grew up listening to tales of a vanished world. Her cousin and surrogate sister, Marsha, was 7 when she left Europe. Marsha was old enough to know family was the only safe place. She shut the door on the world. But Erica was too young to know so she got the knot in her gut.

When she was a kid, she used to ask her parents: “How can you be atheists?” Her mom would say, “Everyone’s relationship to this idea of a God is entirely personal. All you need to know is never touch yourself — you’ll go blind.” Her dad would say, “On this planet God is the almighty dollar. Why don’t you write a play about that?” An infuriated Marsha would say: “If I weren’t an atheist, I’d pray for you.” Erica rebelled against them all! She went Methodist; she became a Radical Presbyterian; she converted to Orthodox Judaism; she did Carlos Castanedas. None of it fit.

In Shopping for God, Erica stops at nothing – including wild drama therapy sessions between Germans and Jews and a tumultuous exploration of the she/god – to find out if it’s possible to reconcile with people you’ve hated for years.

Directed by David Ford.