Church du Soleil

On the longest day of the year, a man dressed in black rides shotgun in a cheap white Toyota, stuck in post-theater gridlock, trying to exit the Crystal Cathedral parking lot.

"All right," he says. "Which one of these good Christians is going to let a Jew and an atheist in?"

Not the first car. Not the second. What would Jesus do? The Jew and the atheist bully their way into traffic like a creationist onto a Kansas school board.

It is the eve of a full moon, near the end of the pagan's delight, the summer solstice. Heading north, toward the Los Angeles offices of the Center For Inquiry (CFI) West, Jim Underdown—passenger, atheist and executive director of the pseudoscience-debunking, secular humanist CFI—is ready to offer a review of the evening's entertainment: "A high school religious pageant on steroids," he says.

That would be Creation, the $12-or-so-million, two-act, multimedia, mixed-message theatrical extravaganza, conceived, written, produced and directed by Carol Schuller Milner, daughter of Cathedral founder Dr. Robert H. Schuller. Creationis scheduled to run through September 4. If all goes well, it'll run at least nine more summers. Attempting no less than to tell the story of the world's beginning, it is a self-conscious mix of the conceptual and the literal; cosmology and theology; New Age and biblical. It is, as one production person puts it, "Our Townmeets Omeets The Lion King."

Featuring extraordinary animal puppets and impressive aerialists (playing the parts not only of Lucifer, Adam and Eve, but of free-flowing matter as well), as well as computer-generated images displayed on a 200-foot-wide screen, it's enough to have another contractor dub it "Church du Soleil."

In the beginning, Creationfeatures "Gramps" and "Michael"; they provide narration throughout the production. Gramps is a man's man who likes to fish and smoke his pipe. Michael—his chubby, lispy descendant—is a science-loving preteen in plaid. The pair descend from the Crystal Cathedral on high, in a rowboat. A computer-generated metropolis—Chicago?—gives way to a reedy landscape, just the sort of slop where fins begat legs.

Michael speaks of electrons, protons, continental drift, chloroplasts and irradiation. Gramps cites angels, adversaries and "a story as old as life itself." When the grandkid mentions "ecosystems," the old man throws up air quotes, practically coughing out the word "systems."

"Gramps represents anti-intellectualism on a huge scale," Underdown says, his voice sounding vaguely like a Stripes-era Bill Murray. "It's that kind of thinking that keeps us from pursuing stem-cell research. It's that kind of thinking that delayed the exploration of the continents. It's that kind of thinking that kept us from knowing our bodies better, and on and on and on. He represents a tradition that is alive and well and very old. Unfortunately, it has been an anchor on human progress for probably thousands and thousands of years.

"And the kid, to extend the metaphor, should be modern thinking and science and technology and the potential that mankind has—the potential that our unique brains have. And it is numbed and quashed by this old-school thinking that has not graduated from myth and superstition."

Underdown once put on his own play at the CFI's Steve Allen Theater. Titled Party of 13, the Last Supper-style piece is set in a Jerusalem pizza joint. Some of the apostles are female. Judas and Jesus have a beef. Everybody splits and stiffs the waitress. Outdoors on the Crystal Cathedral campus during Creation's intermission, Underdown ogles the bright light of a faux burning bush, part of a statue diorama located by temporary concession tables brimming with stuffed animals, glow balls, pepperoni pizza and the like.

"I wish I had just the money they spend on gas to keep that silly bush on fire," he says. If the Party of 13auteur was given his own $12 million budget, how would his resulting production differ from Creation?

"It'd be a lot funnier," he says.