American Theatre Company: The Christians
July 13 – 17, 2023
Tulsa, OK
If you think the question of whether or not there’s a hell is a tricky one to navigate, try walking the razor’s edge of the script of The Christians. Lucas Hnath’s 2015 play, produced at theaters like Steppenwolf in Chicago and praised in the The New York Times, follows the fall (or is it the rise?) of an evangelical pastor who breaks with his conservative megachurch’s teaching on eternal damnation — with results both predictable and complex.
Tulsa’s seen a story like this before in the real-life saga of Carlton Pearson, whose journey Hnath used in his background research. But the play never lets us stay sure about anything for long, most of all about what we think we know. American Theatre Company presented this challenging work last weekend in four shows at the black box Studio 308 (I saw the July 16 performance), and a fifth at Hope Unitarian Church, directed with care and precision by Tulsa theatre veteran Vern Stefanic. This troupe has a reputation for bringing big edgy plays to the local scene — think Waiting for Godot, Mothers and Sons, God of Carnage, and In the Next Room or, The Vibrator Play—and The Christians is a bracing addition to its repertory.
It’s also an eerie, edge-of-your-seat experience in a city with more churches per capita than any other in the nation. The play starts with a Christian music video blasting on dual TV screens and a nearly 30-minute opening sermon by Pastor Paul. Not sermon: monologue. Wait, which is it? Is this church or theatre? Should we accept or question? (You could see some in the audience resist the reflex of bowing their heads when Will Carpenter, as Pastor Paul, said “let us pray.”) From the first moments of this script, we’re in cognitive dissonance, uncomfortably unsure just where we’re at. Hnath keeps that quiet tension up throughout the play, and Carpenter never let it loosen. His was not a bombastic but a warmly intimate and earnest pastor, reaching out into the megachurch crowd with searching eyes, longing for contact.
After Pastor Paul reveals from the pulpit that he no longer believes in the doctrine of hell, pressures mount from all sides — from young co-pastor Joshua (the relentless Micah Weese) who resists the new teaching, from a concerned church elder (Mark Ingham), from a single mother (Lydia Gray) whose confusion, grief, and Bible verse word salad ends up landing some of the clearest questions of the play. (Why did Pastor Paul wait until the congregation had paid off the church’s building debt before he announced this potentially alienating break with traditional teaching? And, by the way, she asks, what about the really bad guys? Do we really want to say they’ll be in Heaven?)
It was Leslie Long as Elizabeth, Pastor Paul’s wife, who held the deepest nexus of this play’s refusal to give us an easy place to stand. She revealed another face of his apparently noble, gamble-everything loyalty to the doctrine of universal mercy and love he believes God has shown him: selfishness, betrayal, deception, male supremacy, lack of love for his family. One fracture exposes the next, and the next, until we’re left with a so-close-yet-so-far-away dialogue that feels, in today’s America, all too familiar. Long and Carpenter have a long history together on Tulsa stages; they were ballast for each other in many agonizingly tricky scenes.
Hnath’s is an intensely wordy, theologically astute, emotionally piercing script that these actors made feel lived-in and relatable. In Stefanic’s hands the live-wire pacing never faltered, and a simple set let the commitment of these tremendously assured actors carry the day. The line that resonates throughout the play is one Pastor Paul says he scribbled in a note to his future wife, after glimpsing her for the first time at the other end of an airplane: “I have a powerful urge to communicate with you, but I find the distance between us insurmountable.”
What does it mean to be faithful? To be tolerant? To do right by someone you love? (Weese’s final monologue as Joshua, recounting his urgent attempt to convert his unbelieving mother on her deathbed, was devastating.) Hnath has refused to detail his own religious beliefs, and his work leaves us on the tightrope to the bitter end. There are few plays that wrestle — really wrestle — with religion in the way this one does, without melodrama, with clear eyes. Companies that produce work like this do deep service to the community. We may leave sweaty, exhausted, and more confused than when we went in, but that’s the kind of challenge to complacent belief of all kinds that is worth the effort.
Find me next: covering experimental music duo DABNAP and a mixed media gallery show by filmmaker Zach Litwack.
