Church
by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company
January 9, 2008
The performance begins in darkness and there is silence for a few minutes, as if you’re given time to calm down, take a deep breath, and live with your own thoughts for a few moments. And then a voice, a man’s, begins with a forceful polemic about the craziness of modern life. As he continues, he becomes increasingly strident, his voice quavering with emotion. He lights on all of the flaws and extremes of living: overeating, alcoholism, smoking, fornicating, gambling. Pig, he calls us. We laugh, uncomfortably, understanding that this is the theater, and contemporary theater at that, and this moment, this rant, is meant to parody Christian rhetoric and belief.
The lights come on and the gentleman who has been speaking is joined by three other women, fresh-faced and clean, dressed simply in cotton dresses and pumps. Hairdos are non-descript, lanky brown hair or a close blonde bob on another. The foursome walks into the crowd, greeting the audience, smiling, thanking us for coming. It’s a fairly common theatrical technique that is meant, I think, to break down the proscenium, the fourth wall and interfere with our suspension of disbelief. The group interacts with the audience and thus creates the illusion that they are just like us, that we are not in a play, but in a scene from life.
They meet back on the stage and stand in a line, and the man introduces himself as Rev. Jose, and there are two Reverend Katies. We know that the parody is progressing in good order, and that we are in for a performance of laughs and pointed observations about American Religion. The final Reverend is hobbled at the foot, moving around with a crutch at her side—a perfect detail in a minimalist set, I thought at first.
Later, at the UTR Opening Night party, I ran into the actor and she was still wielding the crutch. “Obviously, this wasn’t part of the play,” I observed, helpfully. And she explained that she had hurt it somehow, in the process of dancing, and she had ignored the pain and the discomfort until it became too much to bear and the doctor told her that she had broken her foot. This happened Monday, and the performance was Wednesday. The company had one day, essentially, to prepare for the new development.
I would comment to Young Jean Lee to keep the crutch—even in future, full-bodied stagings of the performance. The crutched Reverend added something very human and bleak to the piece, and the detail, in my mind, was directly connected to tent revivals and faith healing, and I half expected one of her companions to touch her by the forehead and yell “Devil begone!” And the juxtaposition of this incredibly fit woman who is hobbled by an unexplained injury worked very well.
The rest of the play unfolds with a series of single monologues delivered by each member of the crew—and at this point it’s clear that this is a parody of the classic Christian Church Scene—where the reverends testify, give advice, cajole and judge their audiences into God’s Path.
The interesting thing about Church is that the group does a spot-on impression of the Church Scene. Their earnestness does not seem like a put-on or faked—in short, their performance does not seem staged. Only when one of the group enters into moments of total absurdism, when Reverend Jose, for example, begins his parable about the tuna and the snake, do we understand for certain that this is meant to poke fun at the methods and the logic by which Christians talk to each other.
And then at the end, when the group comes on stage to dance in a sort of managed ecstasy, we understand that while the performers and the playwright have been making fun of Christianity, there is something so honest and real about their portrayals that it’s hard to understand what the point of the parody might be. In the guide for UTR, the entry for Church explains that “Playwright and director Young Jean Lee transforms her lifelong struggle with Christianity into an exuberant church service designed to test the expectations of the religious and non-religious alike.” The part of this statement that I’m interested in is the part about how Young Jean Lee has struggled with Christianity, which clearly indicates that she’s got something to say about how Christian Logic can seem so attractive to so many people while, at the same time, riddled with fallacies, syllogisms and downright wrong information.
So what is it that she’s trying to say? That Christianity, while undeniably a system of mismatched myths, parables and values, is also a really, really compelling force in our society? That Christianity is here to stay and those atheists, agnostics, non-believers, no matter how much reason, money or power they hold, it’s no stronghold against the steamroller of Christian belief? Yes, certainly the play says all of these things and more.
However, still something is unresolved in the play—and while I don’t necessarily need my plays and entertainment to be resolved, even a little bit, I guess I was looking for some kind of “a-ha” moment, a muted epiphany that would give us some indication how (and if) problems of Christian Logic had come to a satisfying détente in her mind.
Scott McEachern
PICA
Portland, OR
scott@pica.org
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