Three men and a religion

The title of So a Lawyer, a Priest and an Atheist Walk Into a Bar... promises a punchline, and the production more than delivers.

The actors who perform the three monologues developed them, with the help of director Wendy Leigh and workshop audiences, from their life stories. Doug Cooney is a lawyer turned performer and writer; John McGivern was a Franciscan brother before he became an actor (audiences roared through his recent 11-week run in Shear Madness at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center); and Rob Nash is a standup comic and playwright who found atheism helped clarify the world for him.

The show is built around several things the three have in common: They're gay, they were raised Catholic and they're very funny.

Though issues of sexual identity play a role, religion is really the theme of the monologues. All the men have been lapsed Catholics (or as one of them calls it, "collapsed Catholics"), and we meet one who has returned happily to his faith, one who has found freedom without it and one who grapples with its place in his life.

First on the bare stage is Cooney, dressed for court in suit and tie, weaving together three stories. One is his first case as a trial lawyer, a petty suit filed against a school librarian who organized a trip for a Catholic school's safety patrol. The cost of train tickets had gone up, so she booked the trip on Greyhound so all the kids, rich and poor, could go.

But one country club mother thought the bus wasn't good enough for her darling and sued to get her money back. As Cooney, who attended the same school, defends the librarian, he tells the tale of his safety patrol trip to Washington, D.C., a trip that changed his life. The third story is barely touched upon because it's a wound too raw: the trial of his sister-in-law for the murder of his brother.

McGivern is next, delivering a version of an Irish Catholic childhood in Milwaukee in the 1950s that's rich in detail and hilarity. His portrayal of a second-grader hearing from a nun that skipping Sunday mass is a mortal sin and that, yes, that means his dad might go to hell is priceless. (On Friday, McGivern cracked up when he spotted a woman in the audience mouthing the catechism definition of sins along with him.)

He's told early on he has a vocation, although he gets bad reviews for "twirling" as an altar boy. Along with the vocation comes a wicked sense of humor, as is evident in the highly unusual Christmas pageant he puts on while in the seminary.

Like the others, Nash left the church in part over its stance on homosexuality. He first finds solace in what he calls the "new age recovery industrial complex," entering treatment for one addiction and coming out with a whole array of them, not least an addiction to recovery: "I looooved my meetings."

Eventually, though, a tragic story causes him to question how a loving God can allow evil to happen, and he comes to his epiphany: If there is no God, then "God is off the hook" for evil.

Whether you were raised Catholic or not, all three performances -- Cooney's poignant, McGivern's warmly hilarious, Nash's edgy -- offer insight and belly laughs.

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