Bible thumping

Do local theaters ‘get’ religion?

When born-again Christian Frances (Jen Apgar) takes center stage in Five Women Wearing the Same Dress currently running at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square, she asserts pride in her faith and objects to the ridicule she receives from her non-religious friends. On opening night, her words twice got an “Amen!” from someone in the audience, evoking the call and response of a church sermon.
That moment hinted at how a playhouse and a house of worship can favor each other, and how the relationship between religious faith and artistic expression can be strained. Numerous plays in the Atlanta area are highlighting both the cooperation and the tension between the secular and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane.
Considering plays that address religion or faith, the first that come to mind are critical ones like Arthur Miller’s witch hunt The Crucible or Moliere’s attack on hypocrisy in Tartuffe. In 1998 Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, which suggests that Christ and his disciples were homosexual, received a death threat and thousands of protesters following its London and New York debuts. (If it opens in Atlanta, be very surprised.)
The Amen-sayer from Theatre in the Square probably would feel under siege at Horizon Theatre’s The Bible, The Complete Word of God (Abridged), an irreverent romp through the Old and New Testaments that employs kazoos, super-soakers, sock puppets and Viagra jokes. The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s script stresses that it means no offense to any particular faith, but also parenthetically points out the paucity of tolerant moments or favorable images of women in The Good Book.
Director Jeff Adler says that Bible, however light-hearted, has more going on than just parody. “The show’s three characters each come fortified with their own reference material: one has the King James Bible, one has Isaac Asimov’s scholarly guide to the Bible, and one has the Children’s Illustrated Bible. There’s a tension over which one provides the best presentation of the Bible story, instead of just having fun with it.”
Jewish Theatre of the South’s Cantorial begins with a comic premise worthy of Blithe Spirit, as a yuppie couple moves into a former synagogue, only to be haunted by its late cantor, who incessantly sings liturgical music. (The baritone belongs to Isaac Goodfriend, Cantor Emeritus of Atlanta’s Ahavath Achim Congregation.) Cantorial’s comedy proves less compelling than the obsession with restoring the synagogue that seizes non-Jewish Warren (Joe Knezevich). While not addressing God head-on, Cantorial offers a glimpse at the zeal of a convert, as well as a primer in the rituals and architecture of synagogues.
“By our name you’d think we’re more directly religious, but predominantly what we do is culturally Jewish,” says Mira Hirsch, artistic director of Jewish Theatre of the South, one of about 30 theaters belonging to North America’s Association for Jewish Theatre. “Only recently have we felt comfortable enough to do more plays that deal with religion, even though it’s not our mission to do so.” She points to the serious spiritual themes of last fall’s The Golem and the humorous look at orthodox roles in last spring’s Kuni-Leml.
Just as much of JTS’ work is culturally Jewish, cultural Christianity becomes more overt between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, when many theaters present holiday shows like A Christmas Carol, in which the spiritual content tends to stay at the margins.
Hirsch acknowledges that staging plays with overt spiritual messages can be more problematic than JTS shows like Groucho: A Life in Revue (which are the ones that attract more non-Jewish audiences). “I don’t do them as often, because a.) there aren’t that many that are that good, and b.) it’s riskier, particularly in regard to your own community, to deal with aspects of religion. It’s risky when you portray a religious character if the person isn’t of the highest esteem, or if you get it wrong.”
Hirsch suggests that if playwrights like Christopher Durang can seem antagonistic to religion, they’re just doing their job. “It’s the nature of theater to deal with conflict of any sort,” she says. “But I think that in general, we as a society deal with politics and sexuality much more easily than religion. On television or in movies, you seldom see a character who’s an observant Jew.”
In 1995, the lack of inspirational content prompted playwright Bryan Coley and some fellow Christian theater artists to form a theater troupe called Art Within. “It was a knee-jerk reaction to the hopelessness we saw in arts and the media,” says Coley. “As Christians we saw sex and violence, but didn’t see anything that represented us, so we decided to do something about it. We adopted as our motto a line by Michaelangelo: ‘Criticize by creating.’ We think there’s a way to communicate hope and that life has meaning, and not in a Disney film way where everyone has happy endings.”
Coley acknowledges that the quality of explicitly faith-based theater isn’t always the highest. At the 2000 Christians in Theatre Arts conference, Art Within led a workshop titled “How Not to Write a Play” dealing with this issue. “We receive so many scripts that are so didactic,” he says. “Especially in Christian tradition, there’s a tendency to beat someone over the head rather than show a reality of a struggle — for instance, after the death of a child, to show how mad someone can really get at God. We tell people not to be didactic, to tell a good story and to fight the tendency to preach through your art.”
The Marietta-based Art Within held its first performance at Harvester Baptist Church in Douglasvill and currently is in the midst of its first full season at 14th Street Playhouse, having just staged Joyful Noise, a docudrama about Handel’s “Messiah.”
“One thing I would not want to be labeled is a ‘Christian theater,’” says Coley. “That sounds like we’re doing sub-par versions of ‘The Passion Play’ with no commitment to excellence. Or people might be concerned, ‘They might try to save me or beat me over the head with what I’ve done with my life.’ But I would close down shop if we were just reaching out to Christians. I don’t want to preach to the choir.”
Theaters need not have religion in their mission to produce work that consistently touches on faith. Under the artistic direction of Tom Key, Theatrical Outfit often stages plays with a religious context or subtext, from Cotton Patch Gospel to adaptations of C.S. Lewis and Walker Percy — most recently Key’s version of Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. And at least once a year, Theatre in the Square revives the Gospel musical Smoke on the Mountain or its sequel The Sanders Family Christmas.
Considering that Theatre in the Square was criticized by local politicians a decade ago for disregarding family values with its production of the gay-themed play Lips Together, Teeth Apart, it’s interesting to note that the theater’s Alley Stage is currently home to Brad Sherrill’s theatrical performance of The Gospel of John (unabridged).
“My mission in presenting John is to deepen my personal relationship with Christ,” Sherrill says. “By drawing on my own faith in the Word and by utilizing the gifts God has given me, I hope to bring John’s entire Gospel to vivid life in performance.”
For people accustomed to hearing the Gospels only in short excerpts at church services (if at all), seeing the entire book performed dramatically offers a fresh perspective. Sherrill’s eloquent energy brings out the paradoxical and revolutionary aspects of Jesus’ message, and offers a reminder of the extensive religious persecution Jesus faced. Surprisingly, some of most dramatically powerful moments take place with Jesus “off-stage,” as when the Pharisees interrogate a formerly blind man.
Just as Sherrill conveys the drama of the Passion story, The Bible (Abridged) at Horizon puts a gag on the jokes during Jesus’ death and resurrection. After Jesus ascends, actor Christopher Ekholm quietly says, “He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. And that’s pretty cool.”
Spiritual plays will continue to be well-represented on Atlanta stages in 2001. Art Within’s Sleepwalking opens in March, and other shows with churchy content range from God’s Man in Texas at the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz Stage, to such warhorse musicals as Godspell at ART Station and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Stage Door Players.
Hirsch says there’s a renewed interest in religion from both playwrights and the public. “More and more plays are dealing more openly with religion,” she says. “And I can’t speak for all communities, but in the last decade I’ve seen a resurgence of people getting in touch with their own religion here at the Atlanta Jewish Cultural Center.”
For some artistic directors, theater literally meets many of the same needs as attending church. “There are extremes in both,” says Coley. “You have the Broadway blockbusters and dedicated little theaters, and you have televangelists and the big mega-churches as well as the small community churches. But both strive to provide meaningful experience that’s relevant to people’s lives, and if not, they don’t come back.”
At Horizon, Adler has explored different perspectives on faith, from the serious religious inquiry of David Hare’s Racing Demon to the blasphemous imagery of Quills. But he senses a spiritual dimension in his work even when the theater’s plays have no religious content whatsoever. “I think it does with everyone who does theater, if they do it for the right reason,” he says. “Running a theater very often feels like having a congregation, and what our audience needs affects our choices for plays — not just for the box office, but for Atlantans entering the 21st century. Theater is a profane church, not in the way that we usually think of profanity, but in that it’s of man, not God. It’s about how we coexist and collaborate and create and sustain a community.”
Can we get an “Amen?”
The Gospel of John plays through Feb. 4 at Theatre in the Square, 770-422-8369. Cantorial plays through Feb. 11 at Jewish Theatre of the South, 770-368-7469. The Bible, The Complete Word of God (Abridged) plays through March 11 at Horizon Theatre, 404-584-7450.