Faith, theater both take on deeper questions
Is God anti-gay? Waite, pondering that question, seemed to dangle the moment in front of the audience, cognizant of how much favor he’d lose if he answered negatively. No one wanted to spend an evening indulging in a bigot. It was as if, after millennia of existence, the single most divisive figure is still the same one — that play could only have invoked more tribalism if it were called “An Act of Trump.”
But the question of the night wasn’t really about religion. It was about religion’s brief, tentative courtship with theater happening right now in Houston. The Alley’s “An Act of God” comes after last fall’s “Hand to God,” Rob Askins’ drama about a Christian puppet ministry in Cypress, which follows the previous season’s “The Christians,” the play by Lucas Hnath whose subject matter is selfexplanatory.
“It’s completely coincidental,” Alley Theatre artistic director Gregory Boyd said.
Meanwhile, Main Street Theater premiered Heidi Schreck’s “Grand Concourse” on Saturday (it runs through April 30), about a nun experiencing a crisis of faith, and A.D. Players, the only professional Christian theater company in Houston, is slated to bring back Jeannette Clift George’s “John, His Story,” about Jesus’ seven signs.
There’s a lot of God in local theater right now. Except, is there? “Hand to God,” “The Christians” and “Grand Concourse” are just dramas about people who happen to be religious. The plays themselves are not necessarily inquisitions about, say, the existence of a divine creator. Religion in these plays can serve as a larger commentary about society or simply as a warning against the religious hive-mind, but the lens is narrative and not theological.
Which is another way of saying that in theater, your characters can be religious, but not your play. And if your play is moral at all, a type of production that fell terribly out of fashion years ago with the arrival of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, its lessons must be shrouded in humanist universality, as in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which the A.D. Players finished a production of earlier this year.
Welcome to the world in which Godot doesn’t arrive or perhaps never existed. Welcome to the world in which Atticus Finch, living in the Deep South — where God is a noun, adjective, adverb, conjunction and proposition — never stops to monologue about how he was following in the path of Jesus Christ the entire time.
“It’s always a challenge,” A.D. Players managing director Ric Hodgin says of finding works in the modern theater canon that embody a Christian spirit. Yet things are getting better for the theaterloving faithful.
“Fifty years ago, you could hardly find anything you could produce. It’s changed,” he says.
Hodgin mentioned some newer works, such as Tim Slover’s “Joyful Noise” and Connie Ray’s “Smoke on the Mountain,” that have entered the theater world. But A.D. Players’ challenge in producing theatrical work that’s non-Christian by name but pro-Christian by spirit speaks to the unique place faith has in the creative ecosystem. Director Kevin Dean boils it down to the basics: “We just want to tell good stories well.”
This conversation about religion began with a focus on Christianity, by the way, with the knowledge that it’s the most popular but only one of many faiths in the U.S. Because Christianity looms so large in much of our society, its absence on stage is all the more peculiar.
But it seems as though it’s not so much an absence as an exiling, or at least the same cold shoulder you might cast at a family member with outdated views. The same sideways glance, an intolerant churchgoer might toss at a theaterloving teenage congregant who just came out.
So, back to that airsucking question about God’s thoughts on gay people.
“I knew I couldn’t make God anti-gay. That’s one thing I couldn’t bring myself to do,” Javerbaum said over the phone recently. “The kind of people who see theater starring a gay man, these are not typically the same people who come from the religious world.”
Javerbaum’s central character in “Act of God” was, in other words, made with full awareness of the modern theatergoer’s awkward relationship with Him. It’s why Montrose but not, say, Lutherans, got a shout-out in the Alley’s production of “An Act of God.”
Yet this God is not a villain. He’s an angry dad, vengeful and self-centered but charismatically so. God says it’s man’s fault, not His, for homophobia — according to the play, it was, in fact, Adam and Steve in the Garden of Eden, and the serpent’s relationship-ending apple wasn’t one of knowledge but of “shame of homosexuality.”
This isn’t an unusual reading of Genesis for the modern comedy writer. Javerbaum got his chops at “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” a TV program that embodies the liberal, atheistic (or at least culturally Jewish) tendencies in American show business. “An Act of God” embodies a common notion in comedy writing: If the issue’s too big to skirt around, then go right through the middle. Skewer it through the heart.
What a strange phenomenon. In the end, theater and religion are a perfect match for each other. Both strive to answer questions beyond the mundane.
The stories of Jesus, his miracles and disciples, Isaac or Job have the human conflict and tragedy that rival the best of Shakespeare or the Greeks. Tell a director you had a religious experience at the theater, and it couldn’t be a higher compliment. Talk to the most avid theatergoers, and they say it’s their “church.” Ask the best pastors about the craft of the sermon, and many of them will speak of their reverence for theater.
And yet, the cultural divide between the church and the stage looms wide. Attempts to reach across are often cloaked in humanism, symbolism, setting or satire. Will Christianity ever be fashionable in theater? Perhaps not. But for “An Act of God,” laughter — and its occasional absence — was the best way to take that first leap.
of The Jesus, stories his miracles and disciples, Isaac or Job have the human conflict and tragedy that rival the best of Shakespeare or the Greeks.