The central character is Martha. Through absurd demos of how to make “worlds” with every day household items in Scene One, we learn she is part Judeo-Christian god, and part Martha Stewart. She has been scarred by the fact that 5000 years ago, when she rained fire and brimstone down on Sodom and Gomorrah, she inadvertently turned her best friend, Edith, into a pillar of salt. She has never dealt with her pain in a healthy way, and is now married to an accountant and living a bourgeois life on Long Island.
But when a child destroys her strawberry garden there, she loses it. She goes to the North pole to melt the polar ice caps, because she’s decided there’s no good left in the world.
In the subsequent scenes we meet Warren, her ridiculously Capitalistic husband; his all-too-human secretary, Tiffany; Liz, the yoga instructor who succeeds in talking Martha out of destroying the world; Jim Morrison, with whom Martha had a torrid affair; and Edith, the pillar of salt herself. Each character tells their side of the story through demos of their own particular art form; for example, Warren teaches us about the “principles” of accounting, and Liz a yoga class.
Over the course of the story, Martha reconnects with what made her care about humanity in the first place, and learns to forgive herself for the loss of her best friend.
Who is Lot’s Wife?
The Old Testament Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah is part of Christian and Jewish education across the country. Lot is the nephew of Abraham, the forefather of the Jewish people. In the traditional version, he and his family are living in Sodom, which is terribly evil. God sends an angel to warn Lot to get out of town, because he plans to destroy the cities, but warns them not to look back while on their way out of town, or he’ll turn them into “a pillar of salt.” Lot obeys, taking his family with him, and everyone manages to leave without looking back, except his wife. In the traditional telling, Lot’s wife is cast as too curious for her own good, hopelessly evil because she misses all the fun they had in Sodom, or, most serious of all, disobedient, and therefore deserving of what she gets.