Gbenga Akinnagbe stands alone atop a raised wooden boardwalk, utterly vulnerable, his back to the audience. In the course of The Thin Place, now on at Intiman Theatre, he’s played 11 characters exploring their faith: everyone from a young Muslim woman to a 60-year-old Vietnamese man who found God inside an isolation cell. The stories he tells, he embodies, are real, based on interviews of Seattle area residents. But now, we start to hear the voices that have been rattling around Akinnagbe’s head for the last 90 minutes, piped in over loudspeakers:

God existed before Christianity.
I love Jesus…and I like to sin.
Terrorists hijacked my religion.
The teachings don’t make sense.
It’s hard. It’s personal.

It certainly is. To say Sonya Schneider and Andrew Russell’s The Thin Place is moving would be an understatement. If you don’t leave thinking to yourself, “Why do I believe what I believe?” then I dare say you were napping during the play. In a testament to its potential as a conversation starter in our so-called churchless state, nearly 75 people stayed after the show on Sunday for a Q & A with its star. But I had a chance to sit down with Gbenga (pronounced “Ben-ga”) before opening night—and let’s just say that honesty informs everything the New Yorker does.

You’ve starred in The Wire, and you’re flying between here and New York to film The Good Wife. But how does it feel to do your first solo show?

It’s crazy. They handed me the script, and I instinctively started looking for my parts to highlight, and Andrew [Russell, the director]’s like, no no no, they’re all your parts. It’s wild.

Do you think this play is more about religion or spirituality?

I think it’s about 70 percent spirituality, 30 percent religion. … Religion is something different. Religion is rules to instruct people how to get to the spiritual side. What I think a lot of people are recognizing is that they don’t need those rules to get to the spiritual side.

Have you been doing your own self-reflection?

You can’t help but do it. But I feel at peace with where I am, my belief in God, and a lot of that is also because I realized I’m not in this world alone. I’m not even just talking about God, but I believe strongly in this idea of a global citizenry, so I feel very connected to my brothers in China, my sisters in Argentina. I feel like anywhere I go is home. … I went to Israel a few years ago when I was considering Judaism, and I [loved it]. I was tempted to join the Israeli military at the time.

Really? What made you decide not to?

I did this whole search for religion. I was going to pick a religion—this was when I was 13, so there was Buddhism, the Mormon church, other sects of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, atheism, being agnostic. I boiled it down to two, which at the time were surprisingly similar: Islam and Judaism. And then I came back and I decided not to have a religion—to just believe in God.

The Thin Place, in its world premiere, runs through June 13 at Intiman Theatre. Check out Gbenga’s blog and behind-the-scenes photos and stories at thethinplace.com.