‘The Christians’ is saved despite packing a whole lot into sermon
Is tolerance what defines Christianity, or is it what will destroy the faith?
This provocative question lies at the heart of Lucas Hnath’s searching if uneven “The Christians,” a play passionately staged by the Alley Theatre whose cast rarely wobbled even when the script did. It runs through May 15 in the Hubbard Theatre.
“The Christians” is as much a play as an extended sermon. Appropriately, audiences enter to find James Youmans’ elegant scenic designs — which sketch any megachurch or televangelist’s studio, with a choir in back, chairs and microphones for the pastors, a luminous cross overhead and the audience looking out from where the congregants (or the cameras) would be.
This place of worship is the burgeoning megachurch of pastor Paul, whose surprise sermon in favor of extreme toleration rips his congregation apart. Paul’s conversion experience comes when he hears a missionary tell of a (presumably) Arab boy in a war-torn country who dies having just run into a burning building to save someone. The shame? That he must be consigned to hell for not believing in Christ. And so Paul comes to deny the very idea of hell, insisting that all are welcome in heaven, hard as it is to stomach — even Hitler. Predictable conflicts arise. Young and charismatic associate Pastor Joshua objects, debates Paul publicly and leads an exodus from the church. The concerns of congregants and elders spark questions, from the theological to the financial.
Where “The Christians” succeeds, it does so because Hnath works beautifully with the rhetoric of evangelism. “I have a powerful urge to speak with you,” Pastor Paul says, “but I feel the distance between us is insurmountable.” Pastor Paul scrawls this on a note on an airplane because he is too nervous to speak directly to the beautiful stranger, Elizabeth, who is to become his wife. That line returns to describe how hard it is to speak across divisions created by incompatible beliefs. Once Paul and Elizabeth fall on opposite sides of the divide in the church, that line expresses what it is to be unable to love the person you’re in love with.
Sermons rely on stirring, emotive rhetoric, but they are not mechanisms for conveying the complexities of character or plot. Thus “The Christians” is replete with potent monologues and soliloquies, which makes it harder to put the pieces together and care sufficiently about Paul, Elizabeth, Joshua or any of the others. We know them only from atop their various soap boxes. So though the union of play and sermon distinguishes “The Christians,” it creates dilemmas never quite solved.
Yet the play largely succeeds, and it does so on account of its passionate performers.
The convincing Richard Thieriot, as Pastor Paul, begins his congregation-shattering sermon with the queasy charisma of a usedcar salesman possessing the uncanny knack of sensing what people yearn for and worry about. Slowly, this becomes the queasy fervor of a believer, whose message of tolerance costs him his church and his marriage. As the pastor’s world crumbles, we see him doubting, tormented, longing and caught up in unexamined hypocrisy.
As his former protégé and newfound nemesis, Shawn Hamilton excels as the firebrand Joshua. Although Joshua’s character can, at times, seem rigid and simplistic, Hamilton infuses the part with the hard-won conviction of a believer who has passed, not unscathed, a dark night of the soul. Joshua visits a downon-his-luck Paul and offers a poignant monologue about his mother’s dying refusal to believe in Christ and her terror of death. Hamilton’s passionate delivery proved a high watermark in this performance.
Emily Trask marshals enviable patience in tackling Elizabeth, who sits in supportive silence for much of the 90-minute performance. She is not, however, a typical “pastor’s wife,” and Trask must flip a switch from silent to searing. She does so admirably, launching into a veritable aria cataloguing her passionate beliefs, her husband’s failures and her fears for the future.
Far less successful was Melissa Pritchett’s portrayal of the congregant Jenny, a single mother on food stamps who struggles, and fails, to sympathize with Paul’s message of tolerance. Perhaps this is as much a problem of the script. Writers regularly struggle to script common-folk characters with simple needs and commonsense questions. Most, like Jenny, feel clumsy and unconvincing.
Such oversimplifications are the root of all evil in “The Christians.” Can a 90-minute play tackle religious toleration, ideas of hell and punishment, the economics of religion, biblical translation and interpretation, culture clashes, the decline of church-going and the nature of tolerance and intolerance? Not without real sacrifice.
At the very end, Paul begs someone close to him to stand by him in spite of some doubts. “Don’t try to figure it out now. It will make sense later,” he says just before the lights go down. Hopeful? Perhaps. Or maybe a little hollow.