Mac Wellman | Two September / 2006

what america abandons abandons america

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mac Wellman Two September, New York, The Flea Theater / November 29-December 16, 2006 (The performance I saw was on December 7, 2006)

 

Over the years I have probably seen more plays by the noted American playwright Mac Wellman than any other writer. Beginning as early as 1986, I saw Mac’s play Cleveland performed as a BACA downtown production at, of all places, Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. In 1992, I attended the first of his famed Crowtet series, The Murder of Crows, at Primary Stages in New York. At the first production of the reconstructed Victory Theater on 42nd Street, I witnessed the 1994 En Garde Arts production of his Crowbar, which won two Obie Awards. The same year I saw both Swoop and Dracula at the Soho Repertory Theatre. The Los Angeles theater company, Bottom's Dream—with whom I co-produced a series of readings that included Mac’s Second-Hand Smoke, the third play in his Crowtet series—premiered the final play of that series, The Lesser Magoo, in Los Angeles in 1997. A year later I sat in on a reading of his Cats-Paw while visiting New York. I saw Terminal Hip performed in Los Angeles by Bottom's Dream in 2000, and witnessed his dance-drama Antigone in New York at the Big Dance Company/Classic Stage Company in 2001.

    Beyond these numerous play productions, I published his plays The Professional Frenchman (1990) and Bad Penny (1990) on my Blue Corner Drama series (the precursor to my later publishing house, Green Integer), printed his influential anthology Theatre of Wonders: Six Contemporary Plays on my Sun & Moon Press in 1985, published the first two Crowtet plays as Two Plays in 1994 on Sun & Moon and reprinted those plays as Crowtet 1 on the Green Integer imprint in 2000, following up with Crowtet 2 in 2003. Wellman’s two Dracula plays, The Land Beyond the Forest: Dracula and Swoop (1994) appeared on my Sun & Moon Press, as did his novels The Fortuneteller (1991) and Annie Salem (1996) and his collection of poetry, A Shelf in Woop’s Clothing (1990). More recently, I published his novel Q’s Q: An Arboreal Narrative on my Green Integer press. Together we co-edited the significant anthology of American drama, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama 1960-1995, which included 38 American plays since 1960, including Wellman’s own The Hyacinth Macaw.

      Accordingly, I presume that it will be understood as no disparagement of Wellman’s great talent to suggest that the newest play I witnessed, Two September, at The Flea Theater on

December 7, 2006, was not my favorite of his works. Basically a political statement, the play seemed without much of the linguistic energy of his other works, despite the interweaving of texts by American writer Josephine Herbst, from whom he quotes a long passage that might be read as a thematic entry into this work:

 

             Today the point of gravity for responsibility has shifted from the small

             community to the relationship between things. Experiences have even

             made themselves independent of men… Over the air ways, in movies,

             experiences come to be dogmatized to certain kinds of experiences at

             the cost of all others… The world comes second hand—or fifth hand—

             to us and the illusion that it is fresh because it is shown as a picture of

             an actual place by some reporter divides man into incalculable parts of

             any true center. (from New Green World, 1954)

 

Although I have difficulty with what I perceive as a romanticized notion of “the center”—a harkening back to an order of small town America and the social priorities of another age—I think there may be no better direct statement of what I began to explore in the 2006 volume of My Year: the simulacrum we now seem to desire in place of the “real” because it remains, in its imitation of dangerous reality, at a safer distance than the actual events. But, of course, in that preference we often have no way of knowing whether what we are witnessing is something that has been manipulated to look like the real thing or an accurate image of it. Truth thus becomes so separated from reality, from what might have really happened, that we have no way of unweaving it from someone’s fabricated warp and weft. As Herbst has argued, coming as it has from one or perhaps six degrees of separation, the real becomes disconnected from us, and, accordingly, is indeterminable and often indecipherable.

     Herbst’s statements seem even more prescient in the context of later wars in Vietnam, the first Iraq invasion (when even news reporters were kept at a distance from significant events) and our current occupation of Iraq. Only yesterday—through the simulacrum of my choice, a CNN television report—the young soldier, Staff Sgt. Roy Starbeck, interviewed from Baghdad, expressed precisely these issues: "It's just...really just aggravating," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "People saying that they don't support the war because they don't like the president or saying they don't support the war because they are Democrats or saying they support the war because they are Republicans. None of them are taking the time or energy to find out what is actually going on over here."

     Obviously, with the rise of virtual realities in our computerized age, it becomes even more difficult to separate any notion of “real” from what is imagined or simulated.

     Iowa writer Herbst, former friend to Ernest Hemingway and Robert MacAlmon, experienced these problems first hand when she was summarily dismissed from her position at the Office of Strategic Services—precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization that helped to arm, train, and supply anti-German and anti-Japanese groups, including Mao Tse Tung’s Communist Forces in China and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, the Vietnamese National Liberation Movement. Herbst was released from her position, evidently, on the basis of classified reports, thus allowing her no opportunity to even know the charges or defend herself from them.

     Sound familiar? It is precisely what President Bush is advocating for individuals who today are arrested on terrorist charges, that such people—defined by the government as terrorists—should have no access to normal legal procedures, that because of the need for governmental secrecy they have no right to know all the charges against them, and, accordingly, no possibility of a knowledgeable defense. Herbst was later to discover that the source of information that named her as a political radical (in fact, her second marriage was to John Herrmann, the writer who introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss, and Herbst did embrace various Marxist ideas of the time)—information that was filled with lies and  exaggeration—had come from her supposed friend, Texas fiction writer Katherine Anne Porter. Although Herbst was later cleared of all charges, her reputation and career basically ended with her dismissal in the early 1940s.

     Against this backdrop Wellman portrays larger world-wide political events, particularly those relating to the young Ho Chi Minh, who had lived in and traveled throughout the United States in the first decade of the 20th century, and was highly influenced in his own attempts to free Indochina from the French colonialist regimes by the American Declaration of Independence and other such documents. His September 2, 1945 declaration of Vietnamese Independence in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi began:

 

                   All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with

                   certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit

                   of Happiness….”

 

Wellman presents the man as having sympathetic allies on the American front in China and Vietnam in 1945, individuals who attempted to explain to American higher-ups that it was in our better interest to support the Vietnamese National Liberation. OSS chief, William J. Donovan—the same man who fired Herbst—finally notified the local American forces to have no more connections with Ho Chi Minh, and in 1946 the first Indochina War (the Franco-Vietnamese war) began, resulting in the division of South and North Vietnam, and, ultimately, in the American military involvement in that country.

      The only actual link between Herbst and Ho Chi Minh is the figure of Donovan, and that fact, perhaps, is what weakens this play’s claim to our moral outrage. Donovan, moreover, later became assistant to the chief prosecutor, Telford Taylor, at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal and received the Distinguished Service Medal.*

       What continues to haunt me, long after Wellman’s play, however, has less specifically to do with Donovan or his role in these two seemingly unconnected events, but relates to what might be perceived as the American inability to separate our fears from listening to the voices of people who, caring about our values and ideals, represent opposing viewpoints. And it is in this matrix of events—even more than our misunderstandings of Indochinese politics, it seems to me—that we reveal our ready acceptance of the simulacrum over truth. The same blindness that Wellman speaks of in the post-World War II politics were continued in the Nixon-era slogans such as “Love it or leave it,” declarations of hatred to anybody who even questioned American military decisions in the Vietnam War, perpetuating the absurd confusion that disagreeing with governmental policies and decisions necessarily means opposition to or hatred of our country or—to bring it into today’s context—represents terrorist attitudes. It is strange that in a country founded on individual freedoms—a country that was created by individuals speaking out against what was perceived as unfair governmental authority—is so fearful of embracing those who question and challenge political monotheism. In fact, by dismissing figures as radically different as Ho Chi Minh and Josephine Herbst we threaten our existence. Had we heard and followed the enthusiasms and admonitions of that Vietnamese leader, we might have saved ourselves from years of painful political turmoil and rescued the lives of thousands of American and Vietnamese men and women. Had we listened to a voice like Josephine Herbst, we might have recognized that the truths we believed we held were imitations of—indeed were false presentations of—the real thing. By abandoning figures such as Herbst and the hundreds of falsely accused liberals and even communist sympathizers within our own country, we forced them to abandon America; their insights and percipient warnings were no longer heard. That some of them remained to advocate alternative views speaks not to the greatness of our country but to their own unswerving beliefs in the truth.

 

*Of more interest, however, is the fact that Donovan was later the chairman of the American Committee on United Europe which, with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations—secretly supported by CIA monies channeled through the Fairchild Foundation—fought against what was perceived as the omnipresent Communist force by attempting to unify Europe, which, in turn, led not only to the establishment of America’s cold war policies, but helped to fuel the cauldron of Communist fears brewed by the Senate Committee for Un-American Activities investigations and those meetings by house member Joseph McCarthy (part of the larger series of events related to the experiences of Josephine Herbst)—and indirectly led to today’s European Union.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 9 (June-October 2007), on-line

 

 

 

Jeremy Sams, with music by George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and others / 2012 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

everybody's opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy Sams (writer and conceiver), with music by George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and numerous others, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (stage directors), Barbara Willis Sweete (film director) The Enchanted Island / 2012 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

 

Perhaps for the first time since the days of Baroque opera, an opera company, in this case the New York's Metropolitan, performed a pastiche, a mix of operatic works assembled and woven into a new story. As several critics noted, this might have been a disastrous mish-mash of music and story, but with the encouragement of the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, Jeremy Sams' selections intertwined with elements of the plots of Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, the opera community has a charming new work that threatens to become a standard in opera houses. Certainly I would go back for another visit to this quite satisfying piece.

     Prospero (David Daniels), having taken over the "enchanted" island of the title's name, has at first loved and then abandoned Sycorax (Joyce DiDonato), a sorceress banned to the dark side of the kingdom, now furious for the results. Prospero and his daughter Miranda, having stolen away Sycorax's spirit servant, Ariel (Danielle de Niese), spend most of their days reading books filled with the formulas of potents and magic spells, attended by Caliban, Sycorax's dunder-headed and brutish son. He, she argues, using him to gain entry back into Prospero's sight, should be the inheritor of the island! Yet it is clear, Caliban has little talent to rule anything.

     Passing by this isolated island is a ship bearing Prince Ferdinand, a likely suitor for Miranda's hand. Determined to marry her off to Ferdinand, Prospero plans to summon up a storm that will bring the Prince to his island and into the arms of his beloved daughter. Ariel, who is charged to carry out the spell, however, chooses—in part because of the influence of Sycorax—the wrong ship, and sets the storm upon a boat carrying four Athenian lovers, who wind up upon the island instead of Ferdinand. Confusing the two males of the foursome with Ferdinand, Ariel serves them a magic potion, which brings all those involved, Miranda, Helena (Layla Claire), Hermia (Elizabeth DeShong), Demetrius (Paul Appleby), and Lysander (Elliot Madore), into a confusing series of mismatches, each falling in love with the others, until it is difficult to know whom is madly in love with whom.

     Indeed, as in Cosí fan tutte, it doesn't seem to matter—one by one they feel betrayed, confused by the vagaries of the heart, while Caliban cooks up his own scheme to be loved by one and all, men, women, animals, and demons from the dark.

       As in Baroque opera, each figure gets his or her own say in a series of beautiful arias, some well-known, others long forgotten.

     It is only by calling up Neptune (Plácido Domingo), at first furious for the interruption, then magnanimous in his help, that order is restored, Miranda married to Ferdinand, Sycorax restored to her proper position and the Athenian foursome paired with whomever they might at the moment desire.

     The frothy results are a delight, but would not have been so amazing without the wonderful costumes and sets of Phelim McDermott and his team (who previously put together the set and costumes for Satyagrapha). Every moment of this splendid work is underlined with their splendiferous wit.

     In a post-post modern culture such as ours, it is only fitting that pastiche might come back into fashion, and if The Enchanted Island is any sign of its pleasures, bring it on. As the opera closes, even its performers seem enchanted by the experience as they joyously sing "Now a bright new day is dawning." Bringing together numerous composers, this is everybody's opera and an opera for everyone.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2012

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2012).

 

 

Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Badari | Maria Stuarda / 2013

battling divas

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gaetano Donizetti (composer), Giuseppe Badari (libretto, based on the play by Friedrich von Schiller), Maria Stuarda / New York, The Metropolitan Opera HD live presentation, January 19, 2013

Watching the live H.D. presentation of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda on Saturday, I was reminded of and agreed with The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini’s enthusiastic review of the opera:

 

                              …if you think of a gala as a meaningful celebration, then

                              it was hard to imagine a better New Year’s Eve gift to

                              opera lovers than this musically splendid and intensely

                              dramatic performance of Maria Stuarda.

                                   The production stars the great American mezzo-soprano

                               Joyce DiDonato in the title role, a part that has been sung by

                              sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. Ms. DiDonato's performance

                              will be pointed to as a model of singing in which all

                              components of the art form — technique, sound, color,

                              nuance, diction — come together in service to expression.                  

     All the performers were excellent, particularly DiDonato’s Maria, but also South African Elza van den Heever’s powerful Queen Elizabeth and Matthew Polenzani’s well sung the Earl of Leicester. The marvelous encounter between the Scottish queen and the English ruler is, quite obviously, the unforgettable scene in the opera, wherein, after insulting attacks on Maria for licentiousness, murder, and treason, the patient Scott ruins her possibilities for freedom by lashing back, denouncing Elizabeth as “the illegitimate offspring of a whore.”

      But the glorious aria “Oh! Nube che lieve,” which Maria sings to the clouds over her head—just before that encounter, in one of her first times in which she has been released to the outside—is absolutely beautiful, as well as her last act confession to George Talbot (Matthew Rose) and her touching acceptance of her fate. All is equally stunningly staged.

     Despite all of this glorious operatic bravura, however, Donizetti’s opera still seems a bit clotted and somewhat strangled by the libretto, which focuses too much on the two queen’s battle, without filling in the audience about the issues that lie behind those horrific clashes. The religious differences—the fact that Maria was Catholic in a culture that had recently, through the hands of Elizabeth’s father, broken with the Pope—are certainly hinted at, but not explicitly developed. Scotland’s own turmoil between the Knox-led Presbyterianism and local Catholicism is not even hinted. And, although Maria’s checkered sexual past—the death of her husband Darnley and her relationships with David Rizzio and others—are vaguely suggested, unless you know the history, Elizabeth’s attacks are nearly meaningless. Elizabeth herself is portrayed as such a cruel cousin that one would have no comprehension of how difficult she found it to sentence Maria, a queen after all, to death, nor might we imagine that that death might have been a misunderstood request.

     Of course, the audience of Donizetti’s day—and even the audiences of contemporary Europe, well versed in European history—might immediately have understood the underlying facts of the story. But, even though I think of myself as fairly well-educated in terms of history, I missed a large number of Donizetti’s and his librettist’s allusions, which helped to create a notion of Elizabeth’s almost maniacal behavior and Maria’s confused innocence. Even if you grant both Schiller and Donizetti their fictional aspirations, what the opera finally focused on was a battle of divas—as engaging as that is—instead of a battle between two warring queens—both of whom, as the divas, in between acts admitted, believed they were right. More importantly, without any deep historical context, it is difficult to comprehend the marvelous scene of confession. Was Maria truly involved in Darnley’s death? Was she plotting for the assassination of Elisabeth? And what was Leister’s role in all of this? The fuzziness of the opera’s history takes away the consequence of the character’s actions, so that the incredible meeting of the two queens seems to occur more as a force of performance rather than the figures whom the performers represent.

     Finally, as beautiful as many of the arias were, Donizetti’s score is simply not as beauteous as it aspires to be. Throughout, his formulaic patterns of Bel Canto arias seem just that. In short, while I was absolutely delighted to see this seldom performed work, it did not take me to the level of “complete renewal” that Tommasini promised. It was only—what a strange qualification!—a wondrous treat.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2003

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

Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne (adaptation from the play, The Mahabharata, by Jean-Claude Carrière) | Battlefield / 2017

going on

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne (adaptation from the play, The Mahabharata, by Jean-Claude Carrière) and directors Battlefield / Beverly Hills, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the performance I attended was the matinee on Saturday, May 27, 2017

 

After productions in New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere, Peter Brook’s most recent work, Battlefield, has now moved in for a short, 4-day run at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

      In some respects, this seems less like a new work than a kind of extension, or epilogue, to Brook’s epic 1987 work The Mahabharata, a nine-hour spectacle that had such a large cast that, when it was performed in Los Angeles, was staged at the Raleigh film sound studio.

      Like that epic-event, in this new Brook worked with long-term collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, adapting the play by the noted writer Jean-Claude Carrière (who collaborated with Luis Buñuel on several films and wrote the scripts for dozens of others, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Tin Drum, and Valmont); but as the years have passed Brook and Estienne have shifted their focus from large to small, moving increasingly to a kind minimalist purity.

       Battlefield runs just over 1-hour, and it’s sets consist primarily of few slender wooden poles lined up in a row along the back of the stage; there are only four actors, dressed primarily in colorful robes which they don to differentiate the various roles they undertake. Instead of the large chorus of instruments employed in The Mahabharata, there is a single drummer, Toshi Tsuchitori, who performed as well in that earlier production.

       Yet for all of this stripping away of extraneous detail, Battlefield does not feel simplistic or constrained. In fact, it carries with it all the terrifying details the great battle before it which has killed millions, including nearly all of Yudhishthira’s (Jared McNeill), family, along with his greatest enemy, whom his mother Kunti (Carole Karemera) reveals early in the play was actually his brother, born with her in a liaison with the sun.

       Yudhishthira, overwhelmed with the grief of all those deaths, is determined to enter the woods in penance for his destruction of so many lives, but his father (Sean O’Callaghan) and his mother insist he must carry on as the new King, suggesting that he visit his grandfather, the elderly and soon-to-die Dritarashtra (Ery Nzaramba), who, in a series, of parables and gnomic statements, impresses upon his grandson the cyclic nature of war and peace, of love and violence. What has just happened will ultimately happen again and again, and is not entirely the fault of those involved but simply a product of their destinies. Much as in Beckett’s works, Yudhishthira is a man who cannot “go on,” but must go on nonetheless.

     Finally convinced to take up the crown, Yudhishthira gives away all his personal goods and wealth to the priests, but is advised, instead, by his royal counsel, to give everything to the poor. One of the most charming episodes of the play is when, after gathering up all the robes upon the stage, the counsel attempts to give them away to the poor, a difficult thing to do to the front-row patrons of the Beverly Hills theater. Giving up on asking whether any them are poor, the counsel asks only if they might know someone who is poor.

       Other crises follow, and there are further engaging parables, one between Destiny and Time, who argue about a snake that just killed a child; Time wants to kill the snake, but Destiny successfully argues that the snake was only doing what a snake does and therefore should be allowed to escape alive.

      In another such parable, a worm is terrified to cross a road, desiring to remain alive in the world, even though he, in his former life a cheating man, has been punished by becoming just who he is. Time argues that he has no choice but to cross the road, even if a speeding chariot might crush him, and the worm is convinced to move forward; he is, of course, crushed.

      In a third such scenario, a just prince, after promising to save a pigeon, gives away parts of his own body equal to the size of the pigeon to a falcon who demands to feast upon his prey. Having finally given up his entire body, both the falcon and the pigeon praise the now dead prince as being the most just man in the universe.

       There is, in short, no answers provided for the horrible events that The Mahabharata chronicle; there is only the consolation of moving forward. While his mother and father determine to do penance by moving off into the woods, to live on roots and fruits, Yudhishthira has no choice but to rule for the 36 years that have been pre-ordained, and to do the very best he can do in his position.

       After all the roar of the battlefield, his rule is a time of silence, of sorrow, of regret, and reunification—reasons we can all use now as we once again hear the refrains of  “us” and “them,” of the differences between people who are, after all, simply our brothers.

       What Brook’s new work reveals is that, after the smoke has cleared and the bodies carried off, there can never be losers and winners; only fate itself remains. Lamentations have no meaning; only the knowledge of what life is and isn’t matters to those given the task to go on living.

       If this play is simple in its storytelling, it is made profound by the brilliant acting the entire cast. With their quiet voices, their every word was clearly to be heard, and only the beat of life played out on Tsuchitori’s drum had the ability to drown out their musings. But that is, obviously, life’s prerogative, as it gradually kills off all of the fears, absurdities, and contemplations of the living.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (May 2017).

Lucas Hnath | The Christians / 2016

what does it mean to believe?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Hnath The Christians / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum, the performance I saw was a matinee on January 9, 2016

 

 Everything seems in good shape for the megachurch congregation and its minister in Lucas Hnath’s play The Christians. The large church, with thousands of seats, a baptismal font as big as a swimming pool, and a parking so large you can easily get lost, has finally been paid for, while pews are nearly filled with believers led by the lively chorus with which the play begins. As pastor Paul (Andrew Garman) begins his sermon, you can almost hear the churchgoers settle in to enjoy his benevolent words.

        But the sermon on this Sunday, presented in four parts, we soon perceive, is something different. With his wife, Elizabeth (Linda Powell), his associate pastor Joshua (Larry Powell), and church elder (Philip Kerr) sitting on the plush chairs beside him, Paul tells the story of missionary friend in Africa who tells of a building that has been attacked by terrorists going up in flames. Suddenly a young boy plunged into the burning building and brought out a child, evidently his sister, into safety. But the boy himself was burning and quickly died. The missionary explains how sad he was that this young hero, whom he had never been able to convert, will never go to Heaven and be condemned to Hell.

       The friends’ story troubles pastor Paul, and over the last many months or years he has apparently pondered over the problem of why God would not admit such a being simply because he had not converted to a Christian religion. Searching and rereading his Bible, Paul finds no actual words of description of Hell in the Biblical texts themselves. Gehenna—the only specific reference he can find to anything like the idea of Hell—he explains, was a word that the Jews used to describe a kind of refuge dump (actually my Biblical dictionary describes it as the valley near Jerusalem where apostate Israelites, such as those who worshiped Moloch, and burnt their children as sacrifice to the God, lived). Why then do his fellow believers persist in their conviction that those who are not saved will surely be punished by the devil. Christ, he argues, came to save all men, not just those who believed in him.

      The congregation remains silent, but the associate pastor, Joshua, after delivering the usual prayer, cannot remain still, expressing his shock for his associate’s expression of what he perceives as an obvious heretical position. He argues that although the congregation has remained quiet, a large number of its members will surely disagree with Paul’s hermeneutical expression. Paul suggests a collection plate vote, discovering that at least 50 individuals are immediately ready to side with Joshua, and soon after Joshua and those parishioners leave the church. 

     After the service, the elder takes him aside to further discuss the schism Paul has created, worrying deeply about the ability of the church to survive if it loses more of its congregation, which, indeed, soon happens.

        A young congregant, Jenny (Emily Donahoe), who is raising a son alone, publically challenges her pastor by asking if, given his views, Hitler is also in heaven. If someone were to murder her son, she asks, would he also be saved in Heaven?

       Paul has no choice, given his position, but to admit that they too would be heaven. All mankind has been saved, not just those we as humans might choose. When she argues that his is an irrational view, he posits that his God is beyond human rationality, is something larger, more incomprehensible than the human mind can accept. His God, he suggests, must encompass more than the human mind can comprehend.

       But why, Jenny challenges, did he wait until the church was paid for to express his views. Had he, in fact, determined to share his revelations only when it became convenient to do so?

       As the formerly megachurch continues to lose its members and their money, Paul’s wife Elizabeth finally challenges him herself. Why hadn’t he bothered to share his intellectual struggle with her? Why had the man she trusted and loved kept his ideas to himself? And how far, she wonders, will he go to in order to maintain his new viewpoints? Is he willing to possibly lose even her, since she also disagrees with his readings of the Biblical texts?

       In Hnath’s thoughtful play, Paul cannot answer some of these questions; he can only beg that Elizabeth stay, and hope that in his new preaching, he will not lose everyone.

       Even the playwright, like his central character, refuses to provide an answer or to reveal what he might believe. Although Hnath grew up in just such a congregation, with a mother who attended a seminary and expected that he, too, might go on to preach, he felt that he did not want to be responsible for telling others what and how to believe.

       His play, accordingly, asks questions instead of providing simple answers. And in that fact, The Christians is a work that does not use its own title to challenge of demean those who do believe.

       If one might have wished that Hnath took his argument just a bit further, questioning even the idea of Heaven, positing the possibility, as a reformer like Calvin did, that what he describe has heaven and hell exist only here on earth, one cannot diminish the profundity of the questions his play does pose.

       Personally, I was put off by the director’s (or author’s) decision to present these issues to the audience by means of microphone; yes, we know that the evangelical preacher’s use these devices to raise their voices to the rafters; but in the intimate Mark Taper Forum, where actor’s voices easily carry, it seems somewhat off-putting to direct all conversations through electronical means. I was somewhat amused that a large number of the elderly audience had purchased hearing devices, when, surely, even the deaf might have heard every word of this production.

       Moreover, the microphones delimit the movement of characters, who, tied to their chords, find it difficult, at times, to move more than a few feet, which helps to reiterate that Hnath’s play was, primarily, a didactic dialogue.

       But I have nothing against such dialogues, particularly when they ask for their audiences simply to listen and weigh the meaning of the character’s pronouncements on such important issues as belief and doubt.

       Unfortunately, it appears that some audience members saw the play as a testimony for belief itself. A friend asked me, after the play, “Did it make you believe?”

       “No,” I replied, “I remain a non-believer. Although I grew up in a church, I find such beliefs somewhat repugnant and dangerous in a world that continues to use religion and culture as something to segregate and cut themselves off from others.” But I also don’t feel that Hnath’s play demanded that you should believe in either Paul’s gentle epistle or Joshua’s roaring blare of disregard. Rather, the playwright asked those who might believe—and even those, like me, who find they cannot—to ask some serious questions. What does it mean to believe, and how does any belief exclude others: simple questions we should perhaps daily ask.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2016

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