By Lisa Bornstein

God dresses like Fred Astaire, has the cadence of Walter Winchell, and is at least as clever as Eric Mather. All of this comes as comforting information.

Mather has long been a staple of Denver improv circles (and now Good Times commercials), but at Miner’s Alley Playhouse in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s The Visitor, he takes on a dramatic role and sprinkles it with just enough amusements to make the Creator a thoroughly entertaining fellow.

God has made his appearance in the most unlikely of places: 1938 Vienna, where the Anchluss has already taken place and the Austrians are enthusiastically showing themselves to be the equals of German Nazis. Sigmund Freud, in the last months of his life, has been arguing with his daughter, Anna, over when and how to flee to London. Played by Laura Lounge, she is a smart and fierce young woman who openly defies the Nazis and pushes her father to leave quickly. Shortly after she is dragged off by a Nazi (Jeremy Satore, threatening in the way of the mundane) to a Gestapo interrogation, Freud is surprised is in his office (exactingly recreated by set designer Richard Pegg) by a dapper man in top hat and tails.

The man is distinctive, unusual and just possibly mad. He’s also rather seductive, drawing one of the great minds of the 20th century, and an atheist, to boot, into believing that he just might be God. It helps that the visitor predicts the title of the in-progress book Moses and Monotheism, adding, “I’d rather not tell you what I think of it.”

Miners Alley artistic director Richard Bernstein is physically transformed as Freud, although he gives little sign of the illness the character mentions. He plays a man who has balanced a life of the mind with one of human relationships, and who carries the arrogance of his achievement as easily as an innate inquisitiveness.

John Arp directs with great intelligence, clearly reveling in the script’s intellectual nature. Freud is hell-bent on truth at the expense of belief, but his adamant protestations against God reveal his need to have something not to believe in. Freud’s theories are used as the very reason for God’s visit: The threatening world has reduced him to a frightened child; what better time for a father figure to pop in?

The play doesn’t answer the lasting question: Where was God in Auschwitz? And really, how could it? It does, however, ask the question, and leads the audience to examine its own quandaries.

The Visitor
7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays, through April 5 (2 p.m. April 5)
Miners Alley Playhouse, 1224 Washington Ave., Golden
$20
303-935-3044 or at www.minersalley.com