Keegan’s ‘Hand to God’ is a Fistful of Devilish Fun

metroweekly.com:

Hand to God who spends most of Robert Askins’ raucous comedy with his fist inserted firmly up another performer in the cast.It’s not weird, in practice.

It’s puppetry, pulled off exquisitely in Josh Sticklin’s staging of the saucy Broadway hit, led here by Drew Sharpe portraying rural Texas teen Jason, and also Jason’s emotional support puppet Tyrone.Jason and Tyrone might be of the same person, but are not of the same mind.

One is a shy, soft-spoken kid, and his felt friend is a lewd, crude, blunt-force truthteller, a sock-puppet Sam Kinison. Some schism in Jason’s psyche, or of a supernatural slant, has liberated a side of him no one has ever seen, and that he didn’t know existed.Through able ventriloquism, Sharpe distinctly brings life to both characters — who banter and argue with each other — while retaining the mystery of whether we’re witnessing madness.

His dual performances, one of which is sometimes shockingly funny, embroil us in the serious story of what might really be going on with Jason.The boy’s dad died earlier in the year, and he’s coping, barely, in a church youth group designed to give kids an outlet through puppetry.