AISLE SAY New York

Reviewed by David Spencer

December 2019

As Jewish atheist reviewing a Jesus show, I do pretty much what I would with any genre story: allow myself the willing suspension of disbelief, as long as the telling is compelling. But there’s a caveat that comes with the accommodation: for some audience members, a certain degree of presentation skill, plus their own faith, are enough to seal the deal on such an enterprise; and while I’m not immune to that feeling of community (in the moment, that is), if the show itself pulls me out of it…I have to assume I wouldn’t be alone.

To put this in perspective, I’m an enormous fan of two one-actor shows in this league. The first is the internationally famous St. Mark’s Gospel, that was performed, originally in the late 1970s, by Alec McCowen. It was, and remains, a stunning tour de force (you can see it here, on YouTube), and for all that it tells the story of Jesus, there’s something decidedly secular and inclusive about the experience; and I’ll get back to that. The second show I admire was written by Dan Berrigan specifically for the Christian circuit, called St John in Exile. It has been video’d at least twice, both versions currently on YouTube; the second version decent enough, features a solid, no-frills journeyman actor named James Moffett; but the first, taped in 1986, features Dean Jones (yes, Disney and Company Dean Jones), who had by then embraced Christianity. The play presents John as an old man in his prison cave, philosophizing, musing on the state of the world, often quite humorously, which is the seduction; and in time telling his version of the Christ story, culminating in a re-enactment of the crucifixion. Jones’ approach to it is as fearlessly uncompromising and bold as anything I’ve ever seen, and there’s nothing secular about it at all. This is come to Jesus stuff, pure and simple. Or maybe not so simple. But bracingly theatrical.

Anyway, the notion of performing a book of the Bible, combined with the character of John, brings us to Ken Jennings‘ rendering of The Gospel of John. (YouTube playlist of 11 info and excerpt clips here.) A short, Irish fireplug of a fellow with the energy of a veteran leprechaun, he starts out well enough, assuring us that the occasion is informal, anecdotally recounting the process by which, via personal study of John’s gospel, he backed into realizing that he had a show and something of a mission on his hands. But then he slips into the gospel, and it takes a moment to clock that he's actually started (despite the words, "In the beginning there was the word…"), because, unlike McCowen, he’s not delivering the King James text, but rather a version drawn from the modern, more colloquial translations, which extends the informality; the recitation lands less like the actual book of John personified, than the enthusiasm of a friendly guy down the pub, nursing a non-alcohol O'Doul's, telling you the cool stories in it. This, perhaps, is intentional.

But like the enthusiastic pub guy, the cadences of his delivery start to become a loop of sound after a while; the same rises and falls in inflection. This repetitiveness influences physicality too. Whenever Jennings gives us a conversation between two people, he takes the position of the first; then changes his stance to take the position of the opposite other. If the second character happens to be on the ground or recumbent for some reason, Jennings gets on the floor for those lines. Then he’s up again for the response. It’s not that he takes so much time to do this, Jennings is a bouncy enough chap—but you nonetheless feel that second between go by; more so when it hits you, early on, that this will be a schematic, unvarying device. There’s only a single stool onstage, which allows Jennings to pop up and down, affect some of the mood changes that relaxing allows…but even here, the novelty wears off early.

Contrast this with McCowen. His intro is anecdotal too, but it’s precise and focused. He performs the undiluted, uncut King James text. He allows a beat of preparation before he starts, and the start is something of a transformation—McCowen the actor subtly becoming Mark the chronicler. And physically? There’s a plain wood table of medium size onstage, around which are placed three chairs. You never know which he will go to or how he will use them, when he does, and it’s not that he does anything fancy (like climbing on them or stacking them or otherwise being illustrative in any literal sense), but they’re among his tools for marking section shifts, redefining spatial relationships in a new scene, enhancing intimacy—even magnifying emotion and painting a mental picture, because the different ways he can position and sit on a given chair give him different ways to use and angle his body, the breadth of his arms, his hands…recounting a conversation, he's able to clearly indicate opposing directionality with the merest shift of his gaze… and, of course, he employs a vocal versatility to match.

The contrast is not a matter of talent, per se; Jennings is his own unique being with his own native tool kit, style and technique. It’s a matter of conception. Jennings is an amiable, casual delivery-system for John, though you can paradoxically see, in that, the effort of wrangling the material; whereas McCowen has utterly mastered Mark, with a use of technique that makes the mastery seem effortless.

That said, Jennings’ Bible turn was extended. (Closed now, but it has been video'd and he will no doubt be doing it again; he received more than enough good notices, and it's the kind of piece that becomes a performer's solo signature.) And I was among an appreciative audience. All I can tell you is that both I and my afternoon’s companion—he a Christian, by the way—found it very hard not to periodically check out. Your mileage—and spirituality—may vary.

*************

Fellowship for Performing Arts is an unusual and arguably unique theatre-producing body because their dedicated focus is Christian worldview, but their target audience is secular. Strictly speaking, this shouldn’t be so odd: in a city that has been home to The Jewish Repertory Theatre, The American Jewish Theatre, The Negro Ensemble Company, Pan-Asian Repertory, The Irish Repertory Company and etc., what's so anomalous about a Christian company as well? If there is an answer, I’d say it’s that the stories told by all those other companies tend to be socio-political or cultural in nature; you may be asked to understand relatable factors, or share in the experience of a humanist agenda—or even just to enjoy comedy from a cultural perspective and authorship—but the objective of reaching your conscience is never conflated or confused with that of reaching your immortal soul. Whereas Christian theatre, by its very nature potentially multi-cultural and unbound by ethnicity, has at is core the agenda of not only reaching your immortal soul, but assuming you have one and bringing it into the fold. Saying to an audience, Consider your fate in the next world, but hey, we’re okay if you’re just entertained is something of a tightrope walk. FPA tends to walk it skillfully.

Their latest, about to go on its second national tour, is The Great Divorce adapted from the allegorical novel by C.S. Lewis. (The first tour, in 2014, was in the wake of a NYC mounting presented as a “workshop,” albeit with full production values.) The novel’s plot is both relatively simple yet hard to describe, because it is densely philosophical. Putting as simply as I can, the narrator/author somehow loses consciousness and regains it, inexplicably finding himself in “the grey town.” (We will understand this later to be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon whether or not one chooses to stay there; Lewis's interesting angle that one can choose to leave Hell, though of course not without cost—or, perhaps more accurately, not without divestment.) Our narrator is in an odd bus terminal with many troubled and temperamental people, only some of whom see teir way clearly enough to board the bus, which ascends. As it does, they lose corporeality and become more translucent, revealing themselves to be ghosts. Some, unsettled by this, abandon the ride (presumably returning to the grey town); the rest disembark at a temporary destination, the Foothills of Heaven. There, they are each met by spirits, the essences of people they knew on Earth, who have since entered Heaven and are now appearing to their respective ghosts to guide them through the difficult process entering Heaven as newborn spirits themselves—which requires releasing the addictive, seductive and misleading pathologies and philosophies that anchor them to an eternity of increasingly miserable lack of fulfillment and resolution. The divorce of the title refers to that transitional line of demarcation, which, per Lewis, is what truly sets apart Heaven and Hell.

Most or all of the play’s text is drawn directly from Lewis, and it takes us through the phases of the journey, with numerous exchanges along the way, between spirits and ghosts who cannot embrace the truth; culminating in one ghost who does allow himself to ascend, but only when he can do naught else.

This particular stage adaptation, clean and streamlined—not the only one, but probably the most prominent and impactful—is by FPA founder and artistic director Max McClean and stylishly directed by Christa Scott-Reed: she manages the precarious balance between a heightened fantasy landscape and playing for real stakes. The play employs a cast of only four: Joel Rainwater as the author (the one returnee from the previous iteration), plus Jonathan Hadley, Carol Halstead and Tom Souhrada multiply cast as everyone else. The actors are splendid and live up to their assignment of versatility; the projections are elegantly designed and meticulously timed, and there’s sound design to match. But those are the elements. What of the cause they serve?

I saw The Great Divorce five years ago and again in its current “frozen” version, and though I don’t have the recall to know what changes were made, both times I had essentially the same experience: which is that I found Lewis’s arguments for Christianity brilliantly argued (as usual; I don’t buy in, but provide verisimilitude and I’m happy to take the ride), but that the density of some of the arguments is tougher on sustained concentration than others; and that once the game was established—that we were watching the various ways in which people hold to their human frailty in the belief that it’s their source of strength—it started to become repetitive, despite variations in archetype and problem. Boring?, no. But occasionally a bit lulling. The creative team has solved its tone, theme, purpose and style, which is no mean feat…but I think they’ve only somewhat conquered the challenge of making a barrage of often Shavian ßdialectic dramatically dynamic. Still, in an odd way, this adds to the ultimate fascination and worthwhileness of the piece.

Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page