A play in two acts
A rehearsal for the end of certainty.
Three performers, a director, and a stagehand gather to bury the divine. The ceremony has a script, a casket, and absolutely no agreement about what any of it means.
World premiere at the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, New York, July 30 to August 2
World premiere, New York, 2026
The world premiere of Funeral of god will take place at
Broadway Bound Theatre Festival
until the first performance
AMT Theater
Directed by Noa Brenner
In brief
A troupe rehearses and performs a funeral for a deity whose death may be literal, symbolic, theatrical, bureaucratic, or merely inconvenient.
As the ceremony falls apart, the performers argue over faith, grief, authorship, blame, and whether meaning can survive being staged.
At length
Somewhere in a black box theater, three performers, a director, and a stagehand assemble to lay god to rest. There is a casket. There is a printed order of service. There is a director who has decided, against considerable evidence, that the ceremony can be made to mean something if everyone simply hits their marks. What there is not, anywhere in the building, is agreement about who died, when, or whether the deceased was ever in attendance to begin with.
The rehearsal proceeds the way rehearsals do, which is to say it does not. A eulogy is drafted and immediately distrusted. A prop goes missing and returns altered. Helen insists the ritual still holds something true and keeps reaching for it. Marvin objects to the premise on principle, then objects to his own objection. Jax says the one accurate thing in the room and is asked, politely, to stop. Above and around them the stagehand keeps rearranging the space, as if quietly correcting a draft none of the living can see.
What begins as a service becomes an argument, and what begins as an argument becomes a confession none of them intended to make. By the second act the funeral has stopped being about god at all. The performers are mourning something closer, and they are doing it in front of you, which was never part of the plan, and which is the part you will think about on the drive home.
What is left of belief once you have blocked it, lit it, and run it three times for timing? The play asks whether conviction can outlive the rehearsal that was supposed to protect it.
Every funeral is already a piece of staging: an entrance, an order of service, an agreed set of feelings to perform on cue. Here the seams show, and the seams turn out to be the whole garment.
When the grief gets too accurate, somebody makes a joke. The laughter is real and the relief is real, and both of them are a door these people keep using to avoid the room they are standing in.
You did not come to mourn. You came to watch other people mourn, which is a stranger thing to admit. The performers know you are there, and at some point they will need you for the paperwork.
The largest possible answer has stopped answering, and these five are left holding the procedures. The play is less about the death than about the meeting that gets called immediately afterward.
We rehearsed grief so well we forgot to feel it.
Five roles. The order of service, with the cast listed in the sequence they will go wrong.
Premiere cast Alyssa Silver
A perfectionist, a failed prophet, and the procedural tyrant of the rehearsal room. The Director is trying to make the ceremony mean something, which is usually the first sign that it does not.
Premiere cast Regina Palian
Mystical, reverent, searching. Helen believes the ritual may still contain truth, even if everyone else keeps misplacing it under a folding chair.
Premiere cast Hunter Thore
Cynical, skeptical, wounded by his own intelligence. Marvin distrusts the funeral, the premise, the room, and possibly the printed program.
Premiere cast Cal Wright
Absurdist, impulsive, and often the only person telling the truth, largely by accident. Jax has the spiritual authority of someone who should not be left alone with props.
Premiere cast Emma Anne Johnson
A silent presence who alters the space, moves objects, interrupts certainty, and occasionally seems to understand the play better than the living do.
The performers and makers of the world premiere.
Cast
Understudies
Creative and production
Funeral of god is built to travel light. It wants a dark room, five committed performers, and a director willing to let a ceremony come apart on purpose. The casket, the chairs, and the handful of props are not realism. They are shifting symbols that mean one thing in the first act and something less comfortable in the second.
The play rewards companies that treat restraint as a resource. There is nothing here that cannot be staged with care, attention, and a stage manager who has seen too much. It is written for colleges, festivals, intimate theaters, experimental companies, and adventurous repertory spaces that would rather unsettle an audience than decorate one.
Absence is now part of the staging.
A note left in the margin of the prompt book
Technical rider, abbreviated
Well. That changes everything.
That changes nothing.
We rehearsed grief so well we forgot to feel it.
We bury god so we do not have to look at what stayed behind.
Unspecified complications.
We are categorizing failure.
He is not late. Late implies he was coming.
We will take it from the top of the grief.
Whose god was it, exactly? There is a form for that.
I rehearsed my crying. It tested well.
The casket is empty, which is either a tragedy or excellent news.
Please hold your applause until we have established what happened.
Absence is now part of the staging.
What people said on the way out, before they had decided how they felt.
“If Waiting for Godot is about waiting for meaning, Funeral of god is about what happens after meaning dies.”
“I walked out feeling entertained and unsettled in the best possible way.”
“Like Monty Python wandered into a theology seminar.”
“Part comedy. Part philosophy. Entirely original.”
“A surprisingly thoughtful exploration of faith, release, responsibility, and what happens when certainty disappears.”
“Exactly the sort of bold new work theatre needs right now.”
“Whether you’re a believer, skeptic, or somewhere in between, there’s something here for you.”
Funeral of god is an absurdist theatrical ceremony about what people do after the largest possible answer stops answering. It is a comedy about belief, a tragedy about rehearsal, and a ritual performed by people who are increasingly unsure whether they are mourning god, themselves, or the audience’s patience.
A comedy with a casket and a terrifying amount of paperwork.
For anyone who has ever confused faith with stage direction.
The end of certainty, now with seating.
Coming soon
Programs, posters, and a few other objects with which to remember an evening you may ultimately prefer to forget. We are still negotiating with the printer over what counts as a souvenir of an ending. Check back, or ask to be told when the table opens.
Tell me when it opensFor rights, production inquiries, festival consideration, literary management, or other civilized forms of interruption, contact:
Brian Brijbag, Esq.