Permission

"Sometimes you have to know how to ask for it," reads the tagline for Permission, the new comedy now making its world premiere with MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Like the kinky Baptists onstage, it seems that we in the audience didn't really know what we wanted until we felt it — "it" being a play about the cozy relationship between evangelical Christianity and sadomasochistic desire. Straddling the line separating ridiculous and real, Permission is the kind of bizarre-yet-oh-so-truthful tale that could only spring from the deliciously demented mind of Robert Askins.

Askins is the author of Hand to God, the hilarious play about a demonic puppet that recently opened on Broadway to a tidal wave of glowing reviews. That play ran off-Broadway with MCC last year. While the two plays share certain themes (especially concerning the dubious use of religion to justify our most animalistic behavior), Permission is a much funnier play than Hand to God, and ten times smarter.

Texans Zach (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) and Michelle (Nicole Lowrance) are the model of yuppie evangelical propriety. Zach owns an athletic supply store and he's preparing to open a second location. Michelle is a busy attorney. They're the kind of people who quote the bible (chapter and verse), beginning every prayer with the phrase "Father God." They reside in a comfortable home in suburban Waco where they regularly host their friends Eric (Justin Bartha) and Cynthia (Elizabeth Reaser) for dinner. The play opens at one such dinner, when Eric and Cynthia stumble upon Zach in the kitchen spanking his wife with a hairbrush.

No, this isn't a Lifetime movie onstage. Zach and Michelle are just practitioners of Christian Domestic Discipline (or CDD). As the "head of household," Zach occasionally takes Michelle "over the knee" when she's transgressed, so she'll learn to be a better wife. (This was all Michelle's idea.) While Eric and Cynthia are initially horrified, they compare their economic stagnation (college professor Eric hasn't been promoted in years and Cynthia is a layabout "novelist" with no novel to speak of) with the flourishing careers of Zach and Michelle and decide to give CDD a try. Cynthia, in particular, seems to really take to it.

Director Alex Timbers stages this riotous Christian sex romp with a shrewd eye for detail and realness (frighteningly so in the case of J. David Brimmer's fight choreography). No matter how outlandish a situation becomes, it is always grounded in believable performances.

Near-Verbrugghe armors Zach's softness with a frat-bro exterior. Bartha undergoes a subtle transformation from mild-mannered nebbish to alpha male. Reaser's Cynthia looks like she just stepped out of a matinee of Fifty Shades of Grey. Lowrance gives a shocking performance as acid-tongued Michelle. Her role as "sub" seems more like escapism (something very common for people, like lawyers, who spend their waking hours dominating others). The wide-eyed and very funny Talene Monahon adds another layer to the insanity as Jeanie, Eric's polyamory-curious work-study assistant. Everyone in this cast takes roles that could easily become naughty caricatures and turns them into real people.

Augmenting these fleshy performances, David Korins has artfully decorated the set with visual clues to enrich the story. A Baylor University jersey hangs in a specially lit display case beneath a massive cross in Zach and Michelle's home. Their dining room is overpopulated by booze and accoutrements of drinking. A side bar prominently features top-shelf liquor, including a fifth of Johnnie Walker Blue Label (a sign of people with expensive taste in scotch who have not yet developed the good sense to start drinking single malt). In this world, there seems to be some special connection between alcohol and power: Once Eric and Cynthia begin succeeding professionally, a small bar takes the shelf space previously occupied by action figures in clear plastic bins.

One might assume that people who take their religion as seriously as these would be teetotalers ("And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit," Ephesians 5:18), but one doubts that anyone in this play is really being honest about where they place their faith. Cynthia claims to follow a gluten-free diet, but is later seen chowing down on spray cheese. Similarly, Michelle pays lip service to her scripturally mandated submission to Zach, but her willingness to aggressively challenge him on financial matters proves her obedience to capital, the one true God of 21st-century America. "Baptist," "polyamorous," "gluten-free"…these labels are more about belonging to a tribe than actually altering one's behavior.

Askins connects a tremendous amount of dots in two hours, keeping the audience in hysterics the whole time. If that's not a great night in the theater, I don't know what is.