Monologues run the risk of being tiresome examinations of the actor/creator’s navel. Spaulding Grey’s spectacular exercises in the English language, observation, and insight were at the same time torturously, neurotically, and narcissistically focused.  Contrast that with Julia Sweeney’s refreshing Letting Go of God.  Sweeney began her writing of Letting Go by presenting her story  to the Skeptics Society at Cal Tech. It is the intellectual journey of a complex, curious and open mind, told with humor, but not trivialized. While neither confession nor apology, nor total rejection of the potential of religion, it is the charting of her transubstantiation from rigorously observant Catholic child to still a grappling atheistic adult--a conversion she describes as being more shocking to her family and home town than had she come out of the closet and announced she was a lesbian.
    Letting Go of God, begins with the precocious Julia, daughter of devout Catholic parents, being informed by her father on her seventh birthday that, now she was seven, she had reached “the age of reason.” She now would be able to recognize the difference between right and  wrong thus rendering her capable of sin. Julia is indignant that she was not informed ahead of time so that she might have taken advantage of that knowledge to commit those acts before the age of seven. Now they would deny her a place in heaven.
    While raising  objections to religious dogma throughout her childhood, she adored her Catholic school and the rituals of the Church. She fantasized a life of silent contemplation as a nun. Riding home in the rain she experienced God “in the seat next to her."  There were no doubts, just questions, much the way the classic Torah scholar questions, grapples, and actively engages in an ongoing battle with God and his peers in order to perfect his beliefs. As Sweeney grew older her “relationship with God was like we were an old married couple getting in trouble with each other.”  Her caring and consternation are palpable.
    Ultimately rejecting what she saw as the typical Catholic nonquestioning attitude about the bible, “leave it to professionals,” she sought a place for her beliefs in Eastern religions. She traveled to the Himalayas for answers.  She tried on the definition of God as love, only to have it raise new questions in her mind.
    Keep in mind: this is Julia Sweeney, Pat of Saturday Night Live. Mocking herself as well as the Church, few passages pass without wit and humor; fewer still lack content. Her enthusiasm for science, which she discovers as an adult, is as fresh, and enthusiastic as the seven year old’s matter of fact logic. She started with classes like neuroscience that she had eschewed as a liberal arts major; she was awed by coming to an understanding of gravity. Also at work were her brother’s death of cancer, and her own bout with cancer.
    Trying to maintain her beliefs, she wonders, “perhaps mass should go back to Latin.”  That would leave intact for her the comfort of belonging, the sense of peace and empowerment she had found in her faith. She is solid in her disbelief, but drawn to the comforts of religion. Her observations of her family are both charming and pointed; there is no doubt about her love for them, but it is not idealized love of an idealized family. Foibles are revealed, yet the sense is that a parent or sibling could recognize himself in her descriptions without being devastated.
    Letting Go of God is 2 1/2 hours long. It is set in her den, an inviting and cluttered place designed by Steven Young and Drew Dalzel. It is filled with books and the eclectic bric-a-brac of an active mind--a busy, warm, but comforting, place to think  and remember. Initially, at least for the performance being reviewed, the impression was that it might read at least as well, if not better, than it plays, but as her quest takes shape, much more than a monologue enfolds. Characters take form. Her journey takes on life.
    Not a diatribe against religion – for she is not an angry atheist crusader –- nor a rejection of Church, Letting Go is a window into a life examined that all but the most doctrinaire can appreciate. “I had to go change the wallpaper of my mind,” Sweeney says. The redecoration suits her. Ultimately her theme song is the one her mother would hum to herself when Julia was a child, Leiber and Stoller’s “Is that All There is?”  Harbor no doubt, she will keep on dancing