Back to the Garden in Pleasantville: What was God thinking when he enticed Adam and Eve with forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden? And what happened to them after they were expelled into the wilderness and encounter the sometimes bumbling and often volatile inhabitants of civilization’s dawn? Award-winning playwright Albi Gorn offers some fanciful ideas in his humorous retelling of Genesis, Back To The Garden, receiving it’s World Premiere with the Axial Theatre at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Pleasantville.

Mr. Gorn cultivated the idea for his new play when he joined a women’s study group at Temple Beth Shalom in Hastings-on-Hudson, where his wife Robin Anne Joseph is cantor. The purpose of the group was to interpret anew how women are depicted in the Bible. “I was the only man,” recalls Mr. Gorn, “and I was taken by how these extremely well-read women brought their own brilliant ideas to the stories of Eve, Lot’s Wife, Sarah and Miriam. From that, I crafted two songs and two plays. One of those plays is Back to the Garden.”