Religious, right? Firehouse stages the season’s Greetings! BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

As holiday-themed plays go, Tom Dudzik’s Greetings! has something for everyone: Catholics, Jews, atheists, New Agers, and those who hate predictable dysfunctional family stories. It’s at Newport’s Firehouse Theater (through December 18) in a well-done production.

We meet Andy Gorski (Andrew Stigler) and Randi Stein (Sara Walker) as they are flying from New York to Pittsburgh for a Christmas visit with his parents, who haven’t yet met her. He is a successful advertising copywriter and she is a sometime actress who works as a waitress. Andy’s back clenches from stress as he approaches his family, but Randi is convinced that they’ll like her, that she can get along with anyone. She’s certainly going to be put to the test. Andy’s father Phil (Rick Bagley) has a bad hip and hobbles around on a cane. The former minor-league baseball pitcher is the house grouch more in the tradition of The Odd Couple than All In the Family, by temperament more than blue-collar bigotry. The latter opportunity comes up because Randi is Jewish and Phil is Catholic to the point of having pictures of the late Pope and St. Teresa on the walls. Occasionally, his sense of humor comes out, such as when he says that in his impoverished childhood they would take out the garbage, "then bring it back in and eat it again."

Ironically, what throws Phil into a tizzy is that Randi is not Jewish enough, that she doesn’t celebrate such holidays as "Yum Kipper" — she is, shudder, a devout atheist. When she was a little girl, she tells the family, she witnessed her baby sister struck and killed by a car, so she never wanted anything to do with some cosmic overlord who would let such terrible things happen.

Emily (Maija Groden) is the mother, a kindly homebody who wears an apron as proudly as an officer wears epaulets. To make Randi feel comfortable, she tells about appreciating her Jewish friends, especially one. "Whenever anyone would die, he’d sit and shiver — I don’t know why," she obliviously reports. The last member of the family is Mickey (J.P. Cottam), mentally handicapped from birth to the point that his only words are on the level of "Oh boy!"

The central conflict in the play is represented by the father believing that his son’s leaving the church and his prospective daughter-in-law’s lack of religion is equivalent to calling his life meaningless. At one point he hurls an apple against the door and defies them to continue arguing that what people believe exists shouldn’t matter to others — is there a mess across the room or not?

Into all of this uncertainty steps a nonsectarian deus ex machina. The playwright isn’t so much throwing up his hands and cheating as he is rubbing his hands together in glee over the tentative omniscience all storytellers possess but few treat themselves to. The less said about Lucius (George Spelvin) the better, to not spoil the delightful, unfolding surprise of the play. But it’s not too much to disclose that while Lucius possesses some of the answers to Life, the Universe, and Everything, he doesn’t spoil the possibility of discovering most of them on our own.

Apt subject matter, this time of year. Tolerance for others’ religious and spiritual beliefs seems common sense to those who are tolerant, but threatening and contentious to many others. It’s not just the ayatollahs and the Bible-thumpers who feel a zero-sum threat from non-believers. One suspects that underlying a lot of dogmatic certainties in this bewildering world is a lot of fear — behind the shaky smiles of the sure — that the asserters are dead wrong.

Greetings!, directed by Deb McGowan, is hardly a philosophical or theological treatise on the issues it brings up. But it’s an honest as well as entertaining excursion into those dark, deep waters, as interested in questions as in the possibility of answers. The sense of mystery that Andy thrilled to as a boy, when he believed that animals magically conversed together on Christmas Eve, is one of the presents Lucius brings, along with awe and wonder.

At this time of year, as Tiny Tim might have said if Charles Dickens had the social permission that playwright Tom Dudzik has, "Bafflement bless us, everyone."