Despite the sex and drugs it features, and despite a sudden and unexpected turn into violence, this play is less a sendup than an affectionate tribute, as essentially sweet-natured as the cartoon strip itself. The theological implications of Schultz's creation were explored -- in the nicest, least dogmatic way imaginable -- in a 1960s book called The Gospel According to Peanuts, which defined Charlie Brown as a kind of Everyman, always puzzled, always acutely aware of life's uncertainties and losses. So it makes sense that Bert V. Royal's script begins with CB on a search for meaning, asking one friend after another what to make of the loss of his dog. None of the responses -- from the ecstatic babblings of Van (Linus) about liberation into nothingness to the cheerleaders' casual mention of maggots to pyromaniac Lucy's comment about burning the corpse -- really helps. And things get even murkier after that, as CB finds himself filled with inexplicable longings for Beethoven -- aka Schroeder.
(Actually, I could have helped with the dog question. When I was six, I was besotted with dogs, though my mother wouldn't let me have one, and after a neighbor's dog died, was obsessed with the very same doubts tormenting CB. We had an eighty-year-old gardener who came every couple of weeks and whom I faithfully followed around our tiny back yard while he tied up drooping plants, cut unruly canes, troweled out weeds and devised ways of keeping me out of his hair: asking me to unknot a length of ancient, grubby string; giving me a package of seeds with a picture of bright-orange California poppies on the front and promising to help me plant them. He was bronze-skinned and sun-wrinkled, and I saw him as the font of all earthly and generative wisdom, so I asked him if dogs went to heaven. Yes, he said, unhesitating. Reassured but still a little anxious, I pressed on: "How do you know?" Mr. Brown straightened from his labors in the soil to look me full in the face. "How do I know?" he repeated. "Because they've got souls, that's how I know." I have never really doubted this since.)
Directed by Nick Sugar, Dog Sees God is funny and endearing, and keeps over-acting tendencies under control. Jack Wefso is a very good CB, still a little bit dopey and frequently nonplussed, but warm and grounded. Steve J. Burge is shy, sweet, sullen and perfect as Beethoven. CB's Sister (think Sally) has grown into a lost young woman, sometimes a goth, sometimes a wiccan, and the sole member of the school drama club, where she works on a monologue about being a platypus; Elgin Kelley makes her clear and touching. Jeremy Make has a nice vague presence as Van, and Karen Slack is as crazed and quixotic as required of a Lucy stand-in. Kent Randall is convincingly intense as Matt-Pigpen. Missy Moore and Amanda Earls make appropriately squirmy and over-the-top cheerleaders.
The play has flaws: an inconsistency in some of the characters, the occasional stereotypical comment or action. It's hard to believe, for instance, that Beethoven's schoolmates would be so crudely and uniformly homophobic, or that drunken Marcy would reference the Bible. There's also a bit of useless, sentimental pop-psych, like the observation that school shootings could be avoided if people made a point of reaching out to lonely kids. But on the whole, this is a very enjoyable and sometimes even moving event.
