Church is drama

What would Bertolt Brecht have said if he had ever visited a mega-church? He grew up in a devoutly Protestant household, so I’m sure he was familiar with religious pageantry. But I would have loved to see him react to the large-scale spectacle of American mega-churches, with their packed rooms full of thousands of believers and the elaborate choreography of the service, complete with lights, music, and the emotional arc of a sermon delivered convincingly by a well-costumed pastor.

I think Brecht would have seen the theater in that kind of organized worship.

And if that’s the case, then he would have loved Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, which transplants the performance of religion into the theater. The Christians is staged religion once-removed, and despite making no explicit reference to Brecht (that I know of), I have to believe that Hnath was thinking of Epic Theatre when he wrote the play.

Take me to church

As you take your seats at the Mixed Blood, you’ll feel just like you’re sitting in church. Eli Schlatter’s set is spot-on: there’s a glowing cross center-stage, two big TV screens so we (the congregants) can sing along with the choir, a row of tasteful potted plants. The praise choir files onstage and sings beautiful songs of worship, and they encourage us to clap along with the more up-tempo numbers.

And then Pastor Paul, his wife, his Associate Pastor and a church Elder come in, shaking hands with the audience and welcoming us to the service. At this point, it’s easy to forget you’re in a theater at all – or on the other hand, you might be wondering if every religious service you’ve ever attended was just another stage production.

Then Pastor Paul starts to speak, and when I say that he is a charismatic orator, I don’t know if I mean Pastor Paul or Andrew Erskine Wheeler, a who carries the play (or do I mean delivers his sermon?) with confidence and compassion. It’s a powerhouse performance by both the character and the actor.

But what makes the play Brechtian, rather than just a great big hall of mirrors, is the way The Christians keeps reminding us that we’re in a theater. Paul continues to use a microphone even after the sermon is over, and he often narrates the dialogue with “she said” and “I said” – so we can never forget that the action is being staged for us. And as the play progresses, the choir’s song choices seem to be more and more deliberate, incrementally getting closer to a Greek chorus than a church choir. (The transformation feels even more deliberate when Jenny, played by Brittany Parker, steps out of her choir pew to deliver testimony about her doubts on behalf of the other congregants.)

High stakes drama

This isn’t all a theatrical gimmick, though – the game of audience/congregation ties in neatly with the themes of the play, which in essence is all about who is performing what, and for whom. Sure, the Pastor and his choir are performing for their congregants and worried about filling seats in the church, but the congregation also has to put on their own show of piety, both for each other and God, the ultimate witness (or most brutal theater critic).

And what is at stake in The Christians is, in fact, what happens at the final curtain. When Pastor Paul reveals a change in his beliefs, he calls into question how tolerant or punitive of a critic God might be.

This might seem like an abstract metaphysical question, but it has real emotional ramifications for the church community. The cast does a beautiful job conveying the characters’ deep commitments to their faith and their eternal souls, and the ripples of those commitments extend to their relationships at home, their local community, and their perceptions of the rest of the world.

High wire acting

It was particularly moving to watch Bonni Allen, as Pastor Paul’s wife Elizabeth, come into her own throughout the course of the play. She is silent and demure during the first half, as one might expect of a pastor’s wife, but Paul’s revelation clearly shakes the bedrock of their relationship. The Christians focuses more time on Paul and his attempts to hold his church together, but Elizabeth’s dilemma between her personal integrity and her love for her husband (both in the here and now, and in the afterlife) was one of the most compelling components of the show, and Allen does a lovely job portraying the fear and wounded pride beneath Elizabeth’s generally put-together exterior.

Kory LaQuess Pullam – who, coincidentally, also delivered a strong performance as a devout Christian in Prep this past September at the Pillsbury House – plays Joshua, Paul’s mentee and Associate Pastor. Here, Pullam’s character is less interesting, serving as a foil for Paul rather than feeling fully fleshed-out in his own right. But Pullam is clearly an actor to watch, and his own charisma makes it easy to believe why Joshua attracts so many followers.

It seems theaters are doing well with theological arguments these days; I would recommend this if you enjoyed the ideas, but not the vulgarity, in Bad Jews. Thanks to the cast’s utter conviction in its portrayals, it is easy to sympathize with all sides of the problem, while the show’s Brechtian inclinations keep the audience at enough of a distance to be able to analyze the issue more objectively.

Beyond the metatheatrical metaphysics, though, The Christians works because it is all about compassion: both the compassion we feel for the characters and the compassion that you believe your higher power feels toward humanity. I thought the show was engaging and human, despite having nothing theologically in common with it. If there happens to be a higher power out there watching me, I can only hope that they offer me the same kindness.