“Warning: blasphemous sacrilege ahead,” a pleasant, disembodied announcer warns the audience from the dark before introducing our “next comic” to the stand-up stage. Joseph Richards takes the microphone off the stand. Joseph Richards acknowledges the audience before beginning their stand-up routine: “Fucking exes, right??”
Breaking Up with Jesus is an achingly familiar show for people who grew up in church. Solo performer Joseph Richards stages their memories of the three times Jesus betrayed them as a nonbinary child growing up in Georgia. A stool and microphone, a podium, a coatrack, a small round carpet, and a black box are the only staging equipment. These minimalist elements bring us into different interior spaces of Richards’s journey: the microphone is where an adult-Joseph processes childhood trauma with the audience through stand-up comedy; the coatrack is where a maturing-Joseph realizes how nice women’s clothes feel on their body; and the small carpet is...
