Rodney Gardiner brings his one-man show, Smote This, back to the area for one night.

“Anybody can make a joke about an elevator,” says actor and now playwright Rodney Gardiner.

He may be right. But not everybody can make a joke about growing up in a Caribbean household with very strict Christian parents and very sexy music as part of culture. Gardiner can.

His play, Smote This: A Comedy About God and Other Serious $h*t, returns to Monterey County after being performed earlier this year during Black History Month festivities in Sand City.

In this one-man show, originally directed by Raz Golden for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he strives to make sense of his feelings about God in the context of his deeply Christian roots and the experience of growing up undocumented in 1980s Miami where racial unrest, an immigration crisis and the drug war were norms.

Miami was as dangerous as it was exciting, a very different world from the quiet, Baptist island of the Turks and Caicos archipelago southeast of the Bahamas, where he was born. Moving there was a shock and an identity test. “I struggled with religious resentment long into adulthood,” Gardiner explains. Perhaps that is why, after graduating from New World School of the Arts, he performed with a traveling group, entertaining and educating folks in drug rehab facilities, jails, group homes and shelters.

Gardiner started working on the play in 2023, after leaving Oregon where he had spent over 15 years acting for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (he calls himself a “recovering Shakespearean actor”) and arriving in Los Angeles to try acting on camera and stand-up comedy. Smote This originated as stand-up comedy material that soon took on a life of its own, becoming a more serious reflection on Gardiner’s past and growing up.

“Stand-up comedy is supposed to make you laugh,” he says. “It becomes a one-person play when it dives deep beyond humor and becomes more thought-provoking, something more than just a joke after joke after joke.”

Gardiner and his brave, entertaining show is brought to Monterey County by New Canon Theatre Co. and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at CSUMB. Just as in February, it is one performance only.

Smote This, A Comedy About God and Other Serious $h*t 7pm Saturday, Nov 8. CSU Monterey Bay World Theater, 5260 Sixth Ave., Seaside. Free. (831) 582-4580, tinyurl.com/smotethis.