Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder | The Magic Flute / 2013

emblems of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (music), Emanuel Schikaneder (libretto) The Magic Flute / Los Angeles, LAOpera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, December 15, 2013.

 

   Let me begin by admitting to what some may see as sacrilegious: of Mozart’s major operas, I least like his The Magic Flute. To me both Don Giovanni and Cossi fan tutte, the latter almost a variation of his last opera in its testing of faithfulness and love. With its heavy Masonic iconography, its fantasy and fairy-tale silliness and inconsistencies, and in its abstracted and often undeveloped characterizations, The Magic Flute is more about the idea of love and its challenges than actually a tale of two lovers willing to suffer the trials and tribulations of physical and psychic attraction. The fact that in this opera Mozart has so abstracted love, along with its comic book-like and fantasy figures is obviously what makes this opera so attractive to children—or, at least, to parents who would wish their children might grow to love opera. The very fact that Tamino, chased by the dragon, falls in love with a picture of Pamina, as opposed to a real being is what makes this tale a voyage safe for the kids. Indeed, throughout the entire opera, the two lovers hardly have more than a few moments together, kissing only at the end—an end that represents, at least symbolically, a life after death—after all they have been silenced, tempted, burned to ashes, and tied to the ocean floor beforehand.

     Even Papageno, the bird-catcher, who has a far more course vision of love than his compatriots, doesn’t get to kiss his Papagena until after both have been nearly consumed in an explosion—another kind of after-life experience—that renders his and her vision of a heavy-populated household as sexually neutered. Papagena—at least in the LAOpera production I saw the other day—may be a highly sexual flirt (she appears in the production I saw as a mix of a cabaret stripper and a baton-twirling majorette), but by the time the couple gets down to their chorus of “Pa’s,” they have quite literally been burned.

    In short, Mozart and his librettist seem completely disinterested in their characters’ motivations, interactions, or even consistency. They are simply lovers who must undergo predetermined and quite inexplicable trials and tribulations to prove their worthiness for one another or evil monsters determined to get in the way. We easily comprehend why Don Giovanni takes to the streets: he is a womanizer in search of yet more lovers. We can well perceive why the braggarts Ferrando and Guglielmo want to test their lovers’ faithfulness. But we have little idea why—particularly given the spider-like manifestation of Pamina’s mother in the LAOpera production—Tanino has fallen in love or why, without really knowing him, Pamina responds in kind, going so far as to attempt suicide and, later, follow Tamino into the throes of death if not death itself. In short, all of the Mozart’s characters in this opera seem to exist in a kind of gap, are separate and isolate, never quite able to reach out to one another until the highly spiritualized ending. And I think this isolation of the opera’s figures also plays out in Mozart’s music as well. The dialogue passages which separate the opera’s arias help to further isolate the opera’s set pieces, some of which are obviously quite beautiful, but for me, at least, seldom coalesce.

      Given the isolation of character and gaps of logic and plot of The Magic Flute, directors and designers generally fill the spaces with extraordinarily elaborate costumes and fabulous fairy-tale like sets which enchant audiences young and old and keep them from too carefully questioning and the why and where the characters actions and travels in their attempt to enter the temples of knowledge and wisdom. And in that sense, I have to admit, the LAOpera production I saw, based on the remarkable Komische Oper Berlin production with direction by Suzanne Andrade and Barrie Kosky and animations and concept by the two-person group 1927, consisting of Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barrit, is definitely the most innovative version of the Mozart opera in years.

      Their brilliant blend of animation and live-singers, discards the long dialogical interludes with something similar to silent-film intertitles, often presented in the flourished letterings of the first two decades of film-making, with the similarly outdated links of words such as “meanwhile…” or “on the other hand,” etc. But, fortunately, that is only the beginning of 1927’s involvement with animation. In this work, film is not projected upon a backscreen or front scrim as in, say, the recent MET production of The Nose but becomes part of the on-stage action itself, using the singers to create links between cartoon-like images borrowed from the entire history of cinema, from Westerns, horror films, and science-fiction pictures and their images to figures that might remind one of the paintings of Andy Warhol and Henry Darger. The monstrous Monostatos (Rodell Rosel) becomes a kind of Nosferatu, to Papageno’s (Rodion Pogossov) Buster Keaton. Pamina (Janai Brugger) is turned into a Louis Brooks and Perils of Pauline figure, while Tanino (Lawrence Brownlee) is turned into a sort of Harold Lloyd-like nerd. Birds fly across the stage, along with pink elephants (clearly a reference to Disney’s Dumbo), monstrous legions of slightly leashed dogs and the trotting and faithful bird-loving cat. The three boys who accompany Tanino and Papageno into the underworld are transformed into sweet-faced butterflies. When Tanino plays his magic flute, notes flutter across the entire stage, and with Papageno opens his box of magic bells, a whole chorus of young nymphets flutter about the proscenium as they were the performers in a Busby Berkeley number.

       

     If at moments this can move a little too far in the director of Disney’s Fantasia, the work’s evil figures call up images that seem to salute the convoluted mechanical constructions of Monty Python and Gabe Ruberg. The terrifying aria wherein The Queen of the Night orders her daughter to kill Sarastro (Evan Boyer) becomes a horrifying series of images in which her spider claws turn suddenly into daggers pinning Pamina into the prison of her will.

      All of this energized image-making, in short, creates an often exhilarating and nearly always entertaining subtext to the opera’s music. The only problem is that in its stage-craft requirements that the singers take their places on the entire screen both vertically and horizontally of the stage, they are forced to stand upon small pedestals almost as friezes or, in the case of the three boys and three ladies in framed tableaus. Since they seldom can move through space, the actors seem even more separated and isolate from one another, only reiterating the problem of Mozart’s work. The brilliant interchanges between the “real” and the “imaginary,” moreover, merely remind us that Mozart’s figures are emblems of beings—lovers and evil forces—as opposed to psychological figures determined to explain and enact those emotions.

     As a lover of artifice, of course, this does not truly trouble me. Mozart’s work, in this case, was never intended to be a psychological exploration of why people fall in love or try to defeat its forces. Leave that to somewhat like Bergman, whose The Magic Flute-influenced film I have previously described. Here love, the lovers’ willingness to suffer its torments, and the knowledge that suffering rewards is as inexplicable as why Adam and Eve became determined to eat the forbidden “apple” which expelled them from their own magical lives.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2013).

 

John Arden | Serjeant Musgrave's Dance / 1959 [reading of play]

pulling down the roof

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Arden Serjeant Musgrave's Dance in John Arden Plays: 1  (London: Methuen Publishing, 1994)

 

With the death of British playwright John Arden on March 28, 2012, I decided to read his most well-received play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. Productions of this work have been rare in the US, so I'd never had the opportunity to see the play, and this was my first reading—although I read several reviews of the play when it first appeared at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1959.

      The Brechtian-like work, complete with songs (music by Dudley Moore), is a cry for passivism in a time when British and American society were moving full-blown into more and more international conflicts. The incidents which sparked Arden's play occurred in 1958 when British soldiers killed five innocent people in Cypress. By placing his play in a period of pre-Kipling redcoat soldiery, however, Arden shifted the theme of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance into a timeless statement of anti-war sentiment.

      The four soldiers—murderers, robbers, and deserters—descend upon a small Northern English town with vague motives. The locals, none too happy for their appearance, are in the midst of a mine strike, and are fearful that the soldiers have been placed in their town to keep order should their negotiations break down into riot. The local authorities (The Parson, The Constable, and The Mayor) see their arrival as a chance to get rid of the mining agitators, if only Musgrave and his men are able to get them to volunteer into the army.

      For his part, Musgrave keeps his motives much to himself. Although the three other men with him know that he is vaguely planning to spring his anti-war sentiments upon the populace, they cannot foretell his method. Sparky, Hurst, and Attercliffe are simpler men who enjoy drinking, sex with the local whore, and, although they share Musgrave's sentiments about their military past, a couple are not at all as ashamed by their murderous duties.

     The first half of the play is taken up with the local's suspicions and the military men's attempt to allay them. But Musgrave is not at all easy with his own intentions at creating anarchy. A highly religious man, he believes still in duty—even if that sense of duty has shifted to disobedience. Most importantly, he is man of conscience, horrified by the death of a young friend from the very town which they are visiting, a soldier whose skeleton is among their processions.

     In this atmosphere of suspicion and opportunism, things do not at all go right. The soldiers waver in their obedience to the man they have nicknamed "God." And their own desires, particularly their admiration for a local "soldiers whore," Annie, get in the way of Musgrave's mission. Although Hurst and Attercliffe spurn Annie's sexual attentions, the younger Private Sparky lusts after her, and is even willing, so it appears, to desert the deserters, asking Annie to hide him until they might run off together. The other two, overhearing his intentions, try to prevent him, accidently killing him on the point of his own bayonet.

      Trying to cover the "accident" up, Musgrave hurriedly calls for a town celebration, with bunting, flowers, speeches and all, hoping to waylay any further doubts by the townfolk. After the usual flowery banality of the Mayor and Parson, Musgrave begins his "dance," unveiling the weaponry available to murder innocent folk, setting it out, one by one, so that he might, indeed, kill his very audience. To everyone's surprise, he slowly unravels the tale of the soldier's duties, which involved, after the murder of the local boy, pulling innocent people from their houses into the streets and slaughtering them. The town gentry, Mayor, Parson, and Constable, are horrified by the shift of his speech, while the local miners are confused. While they want little to do with the soldiers and are perhaps ready to go to battle for their jobs, they cannot conceive of the anarchy against government Musgrave is proposing.

      Hanging the local boy Billy's skeleton from a plinth, Musgrave tries, with weapons at the ready, to find volunteers for his anti-army. Annie, however, reveals the murder of one of their own, as Musgrave's lofty intentions begin to crumble, Hurst shouting at him: "You've pulled your own roof down!" Suddenly loyal dragoons, called for in case of a riot, appear, arresting the deserters.

      The last scene reveals the imprisoned men, scolded by the innkeeper Mrs. Hitchcock for their lack of understanding. The men's only hope is that when they are hung, a seed from their actions may begin an orchard, that something might grow out of their ineffective but well-meaning words.

      In many respects, Arden's play is a brilliant statement locked away in its own level-minded cynicism. The values it declares are perhaps admirable—a complete shake-up of the militarist British world—but its hero, Serjeant Musgrave, still a product of that world, is not strong enough in intelligence and will to transform it. Arden may argue for a revolt against the class system, but such a revolt can never occur, he reveals, through the principles on which that system was based—God, duty, honor. Musgrave presents himself only as another kind of God, not a true alternative to the system which destroyed his own faith.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2012).

 

Shelagh Delaney | A Taste of Honey / 2016

permanent outsiders

by Douglas Messerli

Shelagh Delaney A Taste of Honey / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, the performance I saw, with Deborah Meadows, was on Sunday, October 2, 2016

 

It’s interesting that this season has seen two new revivals of Shelagh Delaney’s 1959 play, one at New York’s Pearl Theatre, and the other at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. I’ve not seen the New York production, but apparently, like the Los Angeles revival it includes an on-stage jazz ensemble, surely appropriate—as opposed to some of the other music used in Odyssey version (“Que Sera Sera,” sung by both the character Jo [Kestral Leah] and on record by Doris Day, one of my very least favorite songs of the 1950s).  Although I haven’t read the script for years (I reviewed the play, read from the script in 2013), I certainly don’t recall, moreover, Jo’s mother, Helen (Sarah Underwood Saviano) taking up a saxophone to accompany the trio.

       In any event, I am sure that, along with several statements, particularly by Helen, spoken directly at the audience, director Kim Rubenstein intended to “modernize” a play that does certainly creak some. I’m just not that all those updatings truly worked. Perhaps this late 1950s slice of kitchen sink drama— without, fortunately, the sink—is best presented as a kind of historical document. Perhaps, even in its original appearance—one of a handful of plays and films by the likes of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe, and John Arden who, in their “angry young men” grouping, completely changed British theater—it would quickly seem dated, with for more experimental plays by Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and the American Edward Albee being performed nearly simultaneously and in the years following.

       What is still amazing about this play is not its language—although Delaney always expressed her delight in the Salford dialect—but in its daring mix of subjects. Writing the play in response to the repressed gay sexuality of the plays of the elder statesman of the day, Terence Rattigan, Delaney, without a blink, calls up quite straightforwardly issues of prostitution, child abuse, and vastly different ages of marrying couple (in the behavior and relationships of Helen and her 20-year younger boyfriend, Peter [Eric Hunicutt]);  teenage sex (both Jo and the author herself were under 18 when they became pregnant); interracial marriage (the young sailor with who whom Jo finds her “taste of honey,” Jimmie [Gerard Joseph] is black); and homosexuality (this, in the person of Geoffrey [Leland Montgomery] who cares for Jo when her sailor disappears).

      If some of these themes seem introduced with almost accidental casualness, others are taken up quite seriously, presenting alternatives to the current—and sometimes still present—sentiments of the day. Yes, Geoffrey, as the gay nurse, is often a kind of stereotype, but he is very much more real and, at least, a different kind of stereotype from Rattigan’s whispering and tortured men and women.

      What also doesn’t get much said about the play today—and I’m afraid the Odyssey production didn’t completely succeed in its attempts to portray it—is that A Touch of Honey is also very funny, sometimes in the manner of Pinter and Albee. Although Jo seems permanently damaged by her mother, their relationship is often a dependent one, based on their mad “Irish” sense of argument.

      Saviano, perhaps the strongest member of this cast, did her best to make her lusty “good-time-girl” mother into less of a monster and more of a blustering fool. But it’s a complex role and needs a superlative thespian like Angela Lansbury, who played Helen on both the stage and in film, to get it right. Certainly, she has the lusty, loud-voiced monster down, but the kind of cow-like tenderness Albee discovers in his Martha, is here missing.

      All the actors did their credible best, with Leah having the benefit of a Manchester accent, while the others shifted in and out of Salford dialect. Joseph, shifting from the jazz ensemble drums to sailor was a likeable and quite tender “black prince” for Jo, and helped us to comprehend what Jo sees in him.

    Montgomery’s character is one of the most complex of the play. As a gay man, seemingly still closeted , since he will not reveal why he has been thrown out of his previous digs—clearly because he has been caught in bed by his landlady with another man. He also has to channel, without being too effeminate, the campy humor of the day; no mean task.

      He is also quite evidently “in love”—whatever that might mean in a work where no one feels loved enough—with Jo, offering to marry her in a far more serious way that even Jimmie has. He’d surely be the most loving and caring father for her mixed-raced baby.

     But he’s also a kind of coward, easily scared off by the returning Helen and, before that, by her drunken lover, Paul. And, ultimately, he leaves Jo, as she begins to go into birth contractions, in the lurch. Without him, more importantly, she has no one to help her escape the same patterns which have destroyed Helen, and one might imagine the two in the future locked in their hateful embrace a bit like the mother and daughter duo of Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens fame.

      Ultimately, however, everyone in this play is a permanent outsider, with no way to truly enter a society that would never be able to understand them even if they had been offered “entry.” Although Delaney hated to be described as one of “the angry young men,” she was certainly a very angry, and yes humorous, young woman. Although she wrote one other play, several film scripts, and a credible autobiographic work, Delaney had put all of her wrath into this one early play. For that reason, if for no other, A Taste of Honey a work worth watching again, even if it does now function better as a document than a living modern theatrical play.

 

Los Angeles, October 3, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2016).

John Adams, Lucinda Childs, and Frank O. Gehry | Available Light / 2015

unaltered images of movement

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Adams (music), Lucinda Childs (choreography), and Frank O. Gehry (stage design) Available Light / Los Angeles, Walt Disney Concert Hall, June 6, 2015 

 

Although often referred to as a “performance art work,” and despite the collaborative contributions of composer John Adams, architect and, here designer, Frank Gehry, Available Light is very much a modern balletic piece in which choreographer Lucinda Childs plays the major role. That this work from 1983 was first performed in the museum space of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts “Temporary Contemporary” venue, and was curated by art curator Julie Lazar, may have made this dance seem to be something other than is, leading some art critics such as Los Angeles Times’ William Wilson to dismiss it and others to praise it as an avant-garde, cutting edge piece. But as its revival at the Walt Disney Concert Hall last evening confirmed, it is a beautifully conceived work of contemporary dance that is different from others, perhaps, only through its venues: besides MOCA and the Concert Hall, the work was also revived at Mass MoCA and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, all rather untraditional locations for works dedicated to movement.

       To say that this work primarily functions in the dance world, however, does not take anything away from the lush musical circlings of Adams’ score nor detract from the breathtaking two-tiered platforms that Gehry has created for the dancers to perform on, the top layer held up plinths of a kind of delicately laced chain-link fence-like construction that reminded us, of course, of the architect’s early constructions. While the original MOCA audience sat on two sides of the platforms, experiencing it, accordingly, from completely different vantage points, most of the Concert Hall audience members were able to observe the patterned movements of the two layers of dancers from a shared perspective. My only presumption is that, as Deborah Meadows and I were seated on the fourth-floor level, the action of the dancers came into sharper focus, revealing the fact that the ten dancers on the lower level, moving in pairs of twos and threes in repeated spins (generally one and a half turns), skips, and leaps were determined by similar movements along a lateral bias by the two dancers above—although those patterns alternated later in the performance. In short, like two waves of movement, it appeared that the dancers of the top platform determined, for the most part, the larger image of dancers in a group on the lower level.

      While these series of “patterns and permutations, repetitions and variations,” as dance critic Anna Kisselgoff suggested in her 1983 review of the Brooklyn performance, are all signatures of Child’s minimalist esthetic, we might almost read this two-layered patterning in a different manner, particularly if we explore the metaphoric associations of the work’s title, perceiving the “available light” as having to do with photographing or imaging a reality without artificial light sources, and imagining the two layers of movement to reflect actions of two hands (the two top-positioned dancers) moving through water and chemicals to the resultant image (the ballet corps below).

      Such a reading is surely encouraged by the fact that the dancers are all dressed by costumer Kasia Ealicka Maimone in the three colors of the photographic studio, white, black and red, and that, from time to time, light designer Beverly Emmons dims her normally bright white lights into near darkness and briefly introduces red tones. And while we feel some guilt, perhaps, for reading Child’s obviously abstract movements in this more literal manner, it appears to give significant structure and depth to the whole, particularly if we believe, as Kisselgoff argued, that “the piece is not simply [an] exercise in perception, [but]… an aid to perception.” For in this work of wide-eyed availability, the observer can readily see how each movement gives direct rise to others, and transforms simple elements into waves of wider motion and expression.

      However, one might “read” her dance with Adams’ joyous music and Gehry’s simple but elegant designs, Childs has created in Available Light something truly profound. And the Los Angeles Philharmonic should be commended for returning this excellent work to the city of its birth. I feel fortunate to have been part of the audience rediscovering this work of art.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (June 2015). 

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II | The King and I / 2017

making oneself at home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Rodgers (music), Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics, based on Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam), The King and I / Los Angeles, Hollywood Pantages Theatre / the performance Howard Fox and I attended was a matinee on January 18, 2017

 

 The King and I, obviously, has no witchcraft behind it. Yet, given the exoticism of the “barbarians’” world that the proper English school marm, Anna Leonowens (Laura Michelle Kelly) enters, it might as well be magical, which the sets (in this case by Michael Yeargan), costumes (by Catherine Zuber), and music all attempt to recreate. The Thailand of Rodgers and Hammerstein is a gold and marbled fantasy land that has been, quite literally, “dreamed up.” Is it any wonder that the straight-thinking Anna keeps demanding of the King (José Llana) a "normal" home outside the confines of the palace.

      Symbolically, of course, she is asking for a “home” with him, an impossible thing. How is she to become the teacher to his family and him if she, too, is not a kind concubine, and her refusal to enter into that state is also what makes her even more interesting to him—not to say her outlandish dress and manners. In a song I had forgotten, since the movie had excised it, “Western People Funny,” we get the so-called barbarians’ reaction to Anna and her kind, and we get a new perspective on how the Victorian hoops and tight ribbons must have appeared to the Siamese.

     This King, however, is clearly not stupid, and quite openly perceives that he will be seen by the English and other western cultures as a barbarian, particularly if he desires to “build a wall around Siam to protect his country.” Hearing these lines on stage two days before the inauguration of a President who has expressed that very desire, made many in the audience, I am sure, flinch.

      Anna sagely advises him to do just the opposite, to invite the outsiders into his world so that they might see he is not a true barbarian. Of course, by doing so, the writers and composer hint that the true barbarians, in this case, may be the westerners, not the people of Thailand; and this insinuation helps to soften the quite obvious colonialist sympathies of the musical, something that has always made me winch in watching the film and stage work. It’s still hard—hearing such works as “A Puzzlement” and even “I Whistle a Happy Tune”—whose reprise during the King’s death seemed terribly inappropriate and, I’d argue, should have, as the movie did, been deleted—as does the endless repetition of “etc, etc., etc,” makes it somewhat difficult to stomach some of this musical’s disdain of cultural differences.

     Never mind, by the time the big bash is over, and we’ve experienced the cross-cultural lectures of the stunning Jerome Robbins-inspired ballet-within-a musical, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” the situation has radically shifted. The King, a bit like Trump, is now convinced of his own cleverness, and Anna, after a breathless series of polkas in “Shall We Dance,” has fallen in love with the seeming barbarian.

      Given her position still as an outsider, however, she cannot completely “redeem” him, and he is still committed to punishing his slave-concubine from Burma, Tuptin (Manna Nichols). He is, after all, a kind of barbarian in Anna’s eyes, and recognizing that he remains so in her eyes, quite literally destroys him.

     However, even the fact that the departing Anna determines to stay on and help the Prince Chulalongkorn (Anthony Chan, so much better than the movie Prince) during his new reign, it is hard to forgive her moral abandonment. And, in the end, we do feel that, despite all of her good intentions, it is she who has been not only the King’s adversary, but his personal barbarian—a kind of colonialist amazon who has imposed her views and values upon a vastly developed society, even if it be an autocratic one.

      The things that save this musical from its thematic inconsistencies are many: the wonderful singing of all involved (although the necessary amplification of voices, given the vast size of the Pantages theater, was a bit disconcerting), the simple yet elegant settings (including a gloriously beautiful curtain used to marvelous effect throughout), along with orchestral settings I’d not heard before which made me aware of just how muted was the symphonic version presented by the 1956 movie, as well as all the other stage-craft talents in lighting and costumes, and, of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s resplendent score. I admit that I loved this production.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and USTheater, Opera and Performance (January 2017). 

 

Tom Jacobson | Captain of the Bible Quiz Team / 2016

asking questions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Jacobson Captain of the Bible Quiz Team / presented by Rogue Machine Theatre, Sunday August 28, 2016 at Lutheran Church of the Master, Los Angeles

 

Los Angeles playwright, Tom Jacobson’s new play, Captain of the Bible Quiz Team, is about the collapse of the small Kandota Lutheran Church in Little Sauk, Minnesota—or perhaps we should say that it is about the end of numerous such churches, since in writing this lovely work, Jacobson interviewed eight ministers nationally, all of whose churches were radically effected when in 2009 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted to welcome the LGBTQ community into their ranks not only as members of the church but as pastors as well.

      Jacobson’s play, with the major role of Landry Sorenson alternating between four actors (two of them women, one black male, and white male; the performance I saw was with Mark Jacobson, no relation to the playwright) takes place in a number of Lutheran churches throughout the city (the performance I saw was at Jacobsen’s own church, the gay friendly Lutheran Church of the Masters in Los Angeles) with a real organist, a program that mimics Sunday Church bulletins, and with the audience itself serving as interactive congregants. Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, some audience members were asked ahead of time to take on small roles throughout the play, and at the end, each attendee was named and asked to stand in a final act of unexpected support for the young preacher—not yet ordained as a full pastor—who has just declared he has lost his faith.

     Sorenson is the son of the full-time Church’s minister, who has suddenly been hospitalized and is near death for much of the play. The young preacher, accordingly, comes back to his home-town to bear several burdens: to nurture a basically conservative, mostly Scandinavian congregation, back to health, while simultaneously caring for a dying father whom he has strongly displeased with his collegiate and after activities. He has already told his son, in no uncertain terms, that he does not feel he is fit for the ministry, and throughout his dying he refuses for much of time to even acknowledge his presence.

     The young Sorenson, in his mix of high idealism and his often rambling seven sermons (Christmas Eve, December 2009; Epiphany, January 2010; Baptism of Our Lord, January 2010; Ash Wednesday, February 2010; Maundy Thursday, April 2010; and Good Friday, April 2010), is hardly a fit for a community that is certain to have heard highly structured homilies for most of their lives. But most of all is his dangerous tendency, as he claims was the pattern of the Lutheran founder, Martin Luther himself, to question everything, including the veracity of Bible stories and the fundamental values of his congregants. And, in that fact, this work reminds me some of Robert Bresson’s far greater The Diary of a Priest (see My Year 2000).

      Although he makes some important new changes, including establishing a needed food back in conjunction with other community churches, and even slightly increases attendance, he further grates on many churchgoers by revealing personal information about himself and his relationship with his father, and, finally, admitting that he himself has fallen in love with another man (in the production I saw, the supposed lover was represented as a black man). Members of the congregation retaliate by interrupting him mid-sermon with written messages, arguing for succession from the ELCA because of its decision on the LBGTQ inclusion and proposing Sorenson’s own termination—in particular for his tossing away an ancient couch in the church basement—a couch which as a child, he had often slept upon.

     Even worse, Sorenson discovers some secrets in his own father’s closet: most notably, the fact that, in an attempt to build a pastoral house next the church years earlier, he had taken out a loan in the name of the church, which was never paid back. The church must now attempt to free itself from the larger ELCA simply in order to not be closed down.

Tom Jacobson

     A true believer at heart, however, Sorenson seems to meet these dilemmas with an open mind and a calming heart. But when his father dies, still refusing to even speak to his son and his lover, the young preacher finally begins to break, his sermons becoming even more personal as he speaks of his own spiritual crisis. The only meliorating fact is that his father has left the family farm to the church, and its sale may pay off the church’s debt; the son has been left nothing. But even here, he proclaims, beneficently, that at least his father has given him his faith; what better gift than that, he proclaims.

      By the final Easter Sunday sermon, however, the minister admits his loss of faith, not of God, apparently, but of his fellow beings. The narrow-mindedness and hostility of the congregants themselves has seemingly defeated him. Yet another audience member walks forward with a written message, and the genial Sorenson, quipping on these now regular intrusions, braces for the worst.

      But this time either God or the men and women to whom he has been preaching—Jacobson has left the answer vague—has wrought a true miracle, as the audience members’ names are called out and we all gradually stand up to ask him to create a new church in the living room of one of our supposed members—an act much like ancient Christians who gathered to confess, in just such small, hidden-away locations, to one another. The questions Sorenson has pummeled them with have finally found their way into the minds of his congregation.

      I am what you might describe as a cynical non-believer (I too, however, was brought up as a Lutheran before my family turned to the Presbyterian Church—which I am sorry to say took even longer than the Lutherans to accept the LBGTQ community). I didn’t even bother to attend the Jello-mold party next to the church at play’s end—although I did sing along with the well-known hymns before each sermon.

     Yet there was something moving about being asked to turn to our fellow audience members (as church-goers are often encouraged to do) to shake their hands and, mid-play, express our love to one another. In an odd sense, this simple act was perhaps one of the most dramatic moments of this “play” simply because it questioned what theater actually is and was always, a bringing together of a temporarily sharing community to listen, question, challenge, and react. That acknowledgement of one another’s presence seems to be an important element missing in so much of today’s drama. And for many of millions, that dramatic interchange is what draws them still to church.

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2016).