It may not seem fair to compare Woody Allen’s play, God with Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” Whereas Tolstoy has written a highly literary examination of a wasted life from a Christian perspective, God is a farce in which the characters are named after diseases, the play moves haphazardly from Athens to Bensonhurst and back, from the mythic world to the Judeo-Christian, and from the stage into the audience. Yet both these productions are concerned with the same problem: how to deal with the knowledge of our imminent death; but while Allen’s play ends in nihilism, Tolstoy’s story ends in hope. God opens with two clowns trying to decide how to end the play one of the clowns is writing, and that is how the play closes. The obsessive search for a suitable ending to the play, one that is “in character” and fitting for a “rational animal” (3) leads to a dead-end; however if the universe is not rational the Writer can do anything he wants, but that would mean that life was meaningless and absurd. When they cannot come up with a good idea, they turn to the audience, but there they encounter a new problem: do we see what we see, or do we only imagine it? As the writer says, “they’re watching us in someone else’s play. What if they’re characters in another play? And someone’s watching them? Or what if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?” (4) Using Descartes’ paradox the play undermines all certainties, creating only anarchy. Similarly, when Socrates proves to two muggers that evil is just ignorance of the truth, they break his nose, an example of a physical argument overcoming a metaphysical one. The action speeds up as the play moves forward. Various philosophical problems are presented to the audience but they are interrupted by various temptations, Doris Levine in particular. A machine called deus ex machina is wheeled on stage, but the Writer worries that the presence of God would make a man not responsible for his actions while Doris argues that without God there is no meaning. The Writer finally decides that “I’m a free man and I don’t need God flying in to save my play. I’m a good writer”; then again, he would like to become a literary immortal (14). A demonstration changes everyone’s mind. However, when the king is about to kill the messenger brought him the news that God exists, the deus ex machina malfunctions, and Zeus appears strangled by the lowering wire. A telegram arrives to say God is dead, at which point one character says everything is possible and attacks the nearest woman. At the end of the play, the writer and actor are back to discussing the ending. As Hafliði Sævarsson says, “whether it is the absurdity of the God-machine or Zeus, whether it is the boredom or the sex deprivation among the actors sitting in the hall or whether it is the final desperate cries from the protagonist as he realises he cannot control his fate, they all present the audience with a concept itself has to deal with.” In other words, Allen’s play forces the audience to confront their own lives stripped of all illusion and metaphysics, one in which God is an unknowable factor, at least until after we die. Tolstoy is also conce