By Cynthia Citron

If you can still believe in God after listening to Julia Sweeney talk her way out of the whole God thing, then you must have a lot of faith in Him (him?). So how do you feel about Santa Claus? ("Too judgmental," Sweeney says).

You remember Julia Sweeney.  She was the obnoxious, androgynous "Pat" on Saturday Night Live. The one with the whiny voice and the one-note routine about gender: was she a man or a woman?

Well, Julia Sweeney has evolved into a charming, funny, upbeat comedienne who has brought her personal struggles to the stage in three one-woman shows.  The latest, Letting Go of God, which opened in February, will be running at the Hudson Backstage Theatre in Los Angeles, by popular demand, through Memorial Day.  And, if last Saturday night was any indication, to packed houses every night of the run.

Sweeney, who was brought up Catholic (by nuns from grammar school through college), chronicles her personal odyssey in search of God.  And a poignant and hilarious odyssey it is. She begins by questioning the Bible and the mean-spirited god of the Old Testament.  She finds ambiguity, contradictions, and downright perversity in the tales that underpin Judeo-Christian faith and comes to the conclusion that "God is bipolar."

When she questions the veracity of those tales she is told by her priest that things in the Bible are not literally true and that Exodus is "myth-ish."  And to all these revelations, Sweeney says, "God says 'Duuuh'."

Then she takes on the New Testament and questions why anyone would send his son to die for our sins.  And though it was a cruel death, she acknowledges, it was no more harrowing than the deaths of many millions of people over time.  So Jesus didn't really have a hard life, she says, "he just had a really bad weekend for our sins."

Once she begins to question her faith, she takes on all the others.  (When a couple of Mormon missionaries tell her that when she dies she will be with her family for all eternity, she recoils in horror.  "What kind of heaven is that?" she wonders.)  She dabbles in Buddhism, goes to India to meditate, and is told by a friend that she is, for all intents and purposes, Jewish.  ("The Jews spend all their time arguing with God," her friend explains.)

In the end, Sweeney comes to the conclusion that "the invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."  But still she has a hard time abandoning God altogether and decides "I'll not believe in God for one hour a day and see how it goes!"  She has a hard time, she says, "accepting what is true rather than what I wish were true" and wonders if things "work because they're true, or are true because they work?"

All this ruminating is done on a living room set designed by Steven Young, Drew Dalzell and Sweeney herself.  The room is filled with books, sofas, an Oriental carpet, and all kinds of tchotchke souvenirs of her odyssey: a crucifix, a little statue of a Chasid wearing a yarmulke and tsitsis, three little nuns dangling off a shelf, a triptych of a Madonna and child, a large head of Buddha.

Like Ulysses' odyssey, however, Sweeney's goes on a little too long.  Toward the end she abandons humor for convoluted metaphysics, finding a Pollyanna-ish satisfaction in the simple glories and delights of the universe.  Even if they are merely the results of evolutionary accidents rather than of a Divine Plan.

You've got until the end of May to catch this bumpy ride.  But it's well worth the trip.