The Chistians Bulletin by Playwrights Horizons

MAINSTAGE BULLETIN

IN THIS ISSUE

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE

THE KNOWN WORLD

NOTES ON TRAGEDY

“When I was younger, I was supposed to be a preacher, but I decided it would be too much responsibility.”

Lucas Hnath’s work probes the limits of human understanding.

“One of the many striking accomplishments of The Christians is that Lucas Hnath has managed to write a true, old-school tragedy: a dramatic height that contemporary writers rarely aspire to.”

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FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

DEAR FRIENDS, Lucas Hnath has described The Christians as his “big little play about faith in America.” When I first encountered it in its premiere production at the Humana Festival in Louisville, it seemed unequivocally big to me. I saw mainly the broad, timely thematic conflict that ensues when the pastor of an evangelical, Bible-literalist church preaches a game-changing sermon. In the downstairs bar after the performance, the cast shared what an incendiary, controversial, and galvanizing experience it was to be part of a show that so strongly challenged Christian orthodoxy in the heart of the Bible Belt. They told me how the devout churchgoers among their audience girded themselves from anticipated attacks on their cherished beliefs only to find a thoughtful, balanced, exactingly researched portrait of the human consequences of ideology. I worried in talking with the cast whether a play so steeped in Christian theology would translate to the decidedly secular humanist worldview of typical New York theatergoers. Deeper reflection eventually brought me to the realization that the broader implications of the play go so much further than the specifics of the play’s arguments over the finer points of Christian hermeneutics. We live in a world wracked by violence stirred by intractable conflicts between warring belief systems. These belief systems can be organized around religious precepts, political agendas, or, as was the case in Bruce Norris’s The Qualms, interpretations of morality. But the one common denominator sure to be found at the heart of any of these conflicts is the unslakable self-righteousness of each warring party. The real achievement of Lucas’s play, and the quality that makes it so unflaggingly absorbing, is his ability to show the human face of ideology. Lucas does not dwell on the ideological arguments of his characters for very long. He quickly turns his attention to the complexly-rendered characters in his drama. And I think it’s in this human scale of his play that Lucas locates the “littleness” of his play. Ideologies cannot act. Only humans can act. And people cannot enact ideologies in isolation. People always have hidden, deep-seated motives for their behavior. And the drama that unfolds in The Christians follows these fascinating and ultimately heartbreaking stories. In the abstract, the notion that any of us might sacrifice another human being for a belief system might seem abhorrent. But if we’re honest with ourselves, almost all of us make life choices based on the primacy of our belief systems and the expendability of people who would destroy them. Are we destined always for war? Can opposing theologies not coexist? The Christians walks us right up to the edge of this chasm. Its characters long for a bridge across it, but the vocabulary of their lonely rectitude cannot equip them. Still, the chasm yawns but they do not fall in. They pitch their longing across it towards each other and their words hover there, not connecting, but not falling either, defying gravity. Somehow a kind of desperate grace begins to emerge tenuously from their futility. The more impossible reconciliation seems, the more necessary it becomes. I found myself listening closely to every word as I reached the end of The Christians, clinging to its fragile epiphanies. Might one find a truce there? Lucas is too good a writer to provide that answer for you. But boy, does he supply the questions.

TIM SANFORD

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

The Mainstage Theater Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the

LIMAN FOUNDATION

Generous support for The Christians was provided by the

Photo by Zack DeZon

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE When I was younger, I was supposed to be a preacher, but I decided it would be too much responsibility. I didn't want to worry about other peoples’ souls. I switched to pre-med. I didn't want to worry about other peoples’ bodies. And so, I switched to playwriting.

angles. (I tried to find this picture on the internet. I could not. I remember this being a thing, but maybe I made it up.)

The expectation that I become a preacher did not come out of nowhere. I grew up in churches. My mother went to seminary when I was in middle school. During the summer months I'd sit next to her during her classes. I learned some Greek, some Hebrew. I read books on stuff like hermeneutics. Some of it I understood. Some of it I pretended to understand.

A church is a place where people go to see something that is very difficult to see. A place where the invisible is—at least for a moment—made visible.

In seminary you learn a lot about translation. You learn about how there can be more than one way to translate a word. And you come to realize just how many words the Bible has that could be translated this way or that way. The act of interpreting the Bible carries with it a lot of responsibility. A friend from high school who ended up becoming a pastor recently said to me that pastors have to be very careful not to remake the gospel into their own image.

PLAYWRIGHT

But here’s what I’m getting at. Here’s something I believe:

The theater can be that too.

LUCAS HNATH

But my question was, “How do we even avoid it?” For a few years, I taught expository writing at NYU. I'd have students read challenging texts by folks like Barthes, Berger, or Sontag. I was asking them simply to read and understand what these writers were saying. I was struck by how often the students would project themselves into the meaning of the essays we were studying. The students were so eager to find ways to make the texts “relatable,” and in doing so, they would bend the words of the author to say something the author wasn't actually saying. That word “relatable.” It implies that something can be understood because it’s like “me.” But what about the things that are nothing like “me?” Our imaginations seem to be so limited by our experiences, you have to wonder if it’s even possible to understand something that sits outside of our personal experiences. That expository writing class became, in large part, about the task of encouraging students to be okay with not understanding. In the rush to understand, we get in the way of our ability to see something as it is. I can feel that rush to understand when people ask me, with respect to The Christians, what I personally believe. I refuse to answer the question. I'm not necessarily cagey about my beliefs (although I do sort of think that the attempt to put those beliefs into words will always result in a misrepresentation of said beliefs; I am very mistrustful of words), but I suspect that answering the question will somehow diminish the effect of the play. I can also feel it when I’m asked if the play is based on this preacher or that preacher. (Invariably, the answer is no. It’s based on many preachers and many people who are not preachers, all thrown into a blender.) In these kinds of questions, I detect the desire to explain away something. I detect the desire to locate a single, visible point. And while the plot of The Christians is far from ambiguous, the play is a series of contradictory arguments. No single argument “wins.” There’s no resolution. That lack of obvious resolution can be uncomfortable, agitating. But with a lot of practice, we can also learn to take pleasure in the agitation. And maybe something more complex and true becomes visible within the agitation. I think back to my very brief pre-med days. I think back to a physics class I took. I think back to a picture from the course textbook. I think of this picture often. The picture is of a very tiny particle. The only way you can see the particle is by colliding it with many other particles, from many different Photo by Zack DeZon

BACKSTORY

NOTES ON TRAGEDY

Over time, words change meaning, and language evolves just like everything else. Back in the day, for instance, if your son was a “determined bachelor,” you’d be proud of his knighthood, and if he brought home his broke, underage girlfriend to meet you, you could call her a “naughty wench” without ruining Christmas. “Sick” was ill, and so was “ill”; “thongs” were flip-flops, “bad” was bad, and a “gay marriage” wasn’t anything to argue about. And whether you consider the evolution of language a science, a history lesson, or a damn shame, it's an insight to the evolution of how we think. One of the many striking accomplishments of The Christians is that Lucas Hnath has managed to write a true, old-school tragedy: a dramatic height that contemporary writers rarely aspire to, and one that seems so hard to pull off in the context of a 21st-century worldview. Because the word “tragedy”—and by extension, of course, the whole notion of “tragedy” as a human experience—has evolved since the Good Old Days when, for example, Oedipus blinded himself and Antigone fashioned a noose. And I wouldn’t presume to imply that this semantic change is for better or worse— it has already happened—but when I suggest that Pastor Paul is a tragic hero, it seems important to be specific about what “tragedy” means to me, compared with the way the word is more commonly used today, and to take stock of the difference. In any discussion of tragedy, a guy pretty much has to start with Aristotle, who was hanging out by the stage door waaaaay before any of us posergroupies were. In Poetics (ca. 335 BCE), Aristotle proposed that tragedy is characterized by an unforeseen reversal of fortune (peripeteia) for our hero, brought about by a character flaw or frailty (hamartia); and through this downfall, s/he achieves some revelation (anagnorisis) about our place in the world: an experience that arouses fear and pity in the attempt to cleanse these emotions (catharsis) and purify us, using horror to elevate and enlighten. Which was more or less the dominant theory until the 19th century, when German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel offered another possibility in his Aesthetics (ca. 1820), and one that seems more generally applicable to the modern world and Hnath’s play: that tragedy is not achieved through character flaw or moral fault, but through two conflicting ethical forces which can’t coexist. So, for instance, while Aristotle would argue that tragedy in Antigone is caused by, say, her stubbornness, Hegel would suggest it’s caused by a collision of two equally viable principles: religious values in conflict with the needs of the state. From either vantage point, tragedy arises when we become aware of a fissure in the world, a crack or conflict that can never be reconciled; and it plays out as we witness a character who employs his/her complete self to engage in that conflict, only to recognize that it’s the human condition in a universe which will always be beyond our comprehension. Tragedy is an inquiry, at its best a doorway into a more exalted kind of consciousness, an enlightenment. In contemporary parlance, though, the word “tragedy” is used to describe anything that’s acutely sad; its meaning has been conflated with “pathos.” And distinguishing between the tragic and the pathetic, it seems to me, is not just crucial in considering the theater we make today, but also a possible window into the way we see our place in the world. “Let me put it this way,” Arthur Miller wrote in The Nature of Tragedy (1949), “When Mr.

CASTING UPDATE

So as we ascribe “tragedy” to stories liberally—not just in the media but on stage as well—such that the concept of a tragic hero has become synonymous with anyone who, like Mr. B, is simply a victim of suffering or injustice, we’re replacing the pursuit of enlightenment with something more defeatist: a call for sympathy. And what this implies—to me, anyway—is a startling reflection of how we think of ourselves: that, despite our suffering, nothing important can really be learned that might elevate our condition. Tragedy, rather than probing the soul and the cosmos, becomes a recounting of accidents and disasters befalling a species that’s more-or-less blindly making our way through some unknowable maze, finding comfort only in our ability to form a huddle. All of this is to say that, when I invite you to consider Lucas Hnath’s beautiful play through the lens of tragedy, I’m using the archaic, lofty, fussy, purist, borderline-pretentious definition of the word—not the epithet tossed around lazily on daytime TV. As Pastor Paul embarks on an ethical inquiry before God, his family, and his congregation (there’s even a chorus!), he opens a rift in the world as he knows it, only to get lost there. The simple belief he introduces can’t exist within his church’s accepted dogma, and this irreconcilability unravels everything he has built. But through his pursuit—whichever side of the argument we find ourselves on—we’re exalted by his human ability to strive for an understanding just outside of our grasp.

ADAM GREENFIELD

ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

AS OF 6/8/15

EMILY DONAHOE

LARRY POWELL

ANDREW GARMAN

LINDA POWELL PH debut. BROADWAY: On Golden Pond; Wilder, Wilder, Wilder. OFF BROADWAY: Jitney, The Overwhelming, Pericles, Jar the Floor. FILM & TV: Blue Caprice, Morning Glory, American Gangster, “Chicago Fire,” “Political Animals,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Damages.”

PH debut. BROADWAY: 33 Variatons. OFF BROADWAY: Deathbed, Queens Boulevard, The Attic. REGIONAL: Actors Theatre of Louisville, Arena Stage, Berkely Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, and more. FILM & TV: Dirty Movie, Handsome Harry, “Homeland,” “Law & Order: SVU.” PH debut. OFF BROADWAY: Burning (The New Group), Hamlet (Public), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (La Mama). FILM & TV: Simple Revenge, Wilderness, “Mercy,” “Law & Order,” “Conviction.”

B, while walking down the street, is struck on the head by a falling piano, the newspapers call this a tragedy. Of course this is only the pathetic end of Mr. B. Not only because of the accidental nature of his death… It is pathetic because it merely arouses our feelings of sympathy, sadness, and possibly of identification. What the death of Mr. B does not arouse is the tragic feeling.” Not to devalue the life of Mr. B, or the grief of the entire B family, but the story of a falling piano illuminates nothing about the human condition more insightful than, basically, Shit Happens: an aphorism that fits neatly on the tire flap of a semi on I–95.

PH debut. NEW YORK: Ruby Place Nest on the Ground, Sakharam Binder. REGIONAL: Humana Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, O'Neill, and more. FILM: Outliers, Stellar Manager.

THE AMERICAN VOICE

THE KNOWN WORLD

Robert: And what are you trying to see with this little set-up here? Isaac: Everything. Robert: Everything. Isaac: How everything moves, all of it. Basically if it’s something I can’t see, I want to see it. —Isaac’s Eye “Can’t know, who knows.” —Death Tax Three summers ago, Lucas Hnath sent me an email at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where I used to be the literary manager, with a Word document attached. “Well gosh,” his message began, “this was kind of fun. I went through my list of notes and organized it and turned my shorthand into complete sentences. So here are 17 ideas for plays.” (“There were even more that I didn’t include,” he added.) Just a few months before, after witnessing the premiere of Lucas’s gripping deathbed drama Death Tax in the 2012 Humana Festival, newly minted Louisville artistic director Les Waters had commissioned him to write another play. Lucas told me then I should expect an email like this one. He had a lot of possibilities in mind, he said, and might want help narrowing them down. Titled “Play Idea Warehouse,” the document he’d attached contained a ridiculous embarrassment of riches: seeds for plots, intriguing structural conceits, characters around whom a story might revolve. Each entry had an evocative dummy title (“TWO ROOMS”; “HOT SHOWER/COLD SHOWER”; “MOTHER [AKA, GUESS WHO THIS PLAY IS ABOUT]”), followed by a short description. They were as attention-grabbing as they were thoughtful, each wildly different from the last. I kind of wanted him to write them all. So I shared the list with Les, and we geeked out about it for a while (“I’m in love with this man’s brain,” Les said), and then told Lucas he should write whatever he wanted, some big help we were. And Lucas mulled a bit longer, and eventually settled on the idea he’d nicknamed “MEGACHURCH.” It would focus on a political rupture within a church community, he said, and probably would operate something like a Shakespearean history play. By then it was no secret that the sheer scope of Hnath’s imagination was a bit obscene. After earning an MFA in dramatic writing at NYU in 2001, he spent his first decade out of grad school making scrappy experimental work downtown, buying his own props at dollar stores and generally reveling in the creative freedom that self-producing afforded him. In Sake Tasting with a Séance to Follow, he adapted one of Japanese bunraku master Chikamatsu’s love suicide plays into an audacious participatory experience for small audiences, climaxing with the apparent death of the performers. Odile’s Ordeal, a loose adaptation of Cocteau’s Orphée, called for the actors to strap cassette players to their bodies at the beginning of each performance; the play was then performed entirely in lip-sync. Those early projects of the aughts laid the foundation for the astonishingly productive period that has followed; during the last five years, Hnath has been busy creating a distinctive body of work at an almost dizzying speed, and has seen productions of his plays mounted at theaters around the country and abroad. Along the way, he’s refined a kind of dramatic signature, one that combines self-conscious formal inventiveness with intellectual heft, and an idiosyncratic approach to language and theatricality with a concern, above and before all else, for a good story. If an overarching project has emerged in this ever-growing body of work, it might be to document the human impulse to strain against limits. The conflicts in his plays frequently arise from the machinations of characters attempting to work out their destinies in the throes of two powerful, probably opposed, desires: to know peace of mind in life, and to beat back the specter of death. Sometimes this tension manifests as ambition; in his freely fictionalized bioplay Isaac’s Eye, Hnath offers an account of a young Isaac Newton’s grasping attempts to earn a spot for himself not only the Royal Society, but in immortal history. In the propulsive, muscular Red Speedo, a world-class swimmer on his way to the Olympics confronts the limits of his own physical

ability and the sacrifices implied by his total attention to his sport. In other cases—as in the aforementioned Death Tax, or the linguistically gymnastic A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney— it manifests with literal, manic attempts to forestall death through expensive medical interventions (including, in Walt’s case, cryogenics). And beyond the more obvious, mortal limits, his characters also wrestle, again and again, with epistemological ones—what are the boundaries of what can be understood? Many of his plays (Isaac’s Eye and Disney, among them) invite audiences to engage with familiar figures in unexpected ways; he renders vaunted icons of history on a disarmingly human scale, or makes tabloid figures mythic. In The Courtship of Anna Nicole Smith, Hnath imagines octogenarian J. Howard Marshall’s parking-lot proposal to single mom and stripper Smith as a kind of Faustian bargain, to captivating effect. Hillary and Clinton, which launches in a New Hampshire hotel room on the eve of the 2008 democratic primary, is as much a portrait of a marriage as it is a chronicle of political maneuvering. In all cases, he strives to subvert the expectations generated by his familiar subjects, making gleeful fictional leaps in pursuit of a larger truth. Given these various preoccupations, his early notes for a megachurch play seemed to describe a familiar Hnathian premise: iconic setting, classical underpinnings, a collision of wills and conflicted desire. “I’m interested in the moment where a church grows to the point that it becomes a business and becomes a place of political power,” he wrote of the play back then. “In tensions within the church, people jockeying for power and influence.” Lucas has a definite talent for developing a juicy argument, pitting strongly held points of view against one another to follow where they lead, and who lands on top. Had he written it, I bet it would have been a very good play. Somewhere along the way, though, Lucas’s frame of reference changed; he wasn’t writing a Shakespearean history play, he realized, but something more akin to Greek tragedy. When I read them now, what’s most striking about those early notes is actually how little they have to do with the play he ended up writing. The Christians does unfold as a series of difficult arguments between a pastor and those closest to him. But these characters don’t jockey for power or influence, so much as they attempt to find language to articulate their strongest convictions, their most urgent beliefs. Again and again they attempt to reconcile their conflicting perspectives, only to discover that such reconciliation may be impossible. For all their disagreement, they are reaching toward one another—and their hunger to connect makes their impasse all the more brutal. In this way, beautifully, it seems to me that Lucas’s abiding interest in the elusive nature of truth finds fuller expression in this play than ever before. As he charts Pastor Paul’s increasingly fraught search for clarity and communion, Lucas evokes the ache of human longing in the face of those greatest limits of all, the distances which are too vast to traverse: between ourselves and other people, and between what we know, and cannot know.

SARAH LUNNIE

LITERARY MANAGER

Leadership support for the New Works Lab is generously provided by the Time Warner Foundation.

PERFORMANCE CALENDAR SUN

MON

THE CHRISTIANS

TUES

WED

THURS

FRI AUGUST 28

8:00 PM

30 6 13 20

27 4 11

2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM l 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM 2:30 PM 7:30 PM

SEPTEMBER 1

7:00 PM

16 23

7:00 PM <

7:00 PM

3 10

8:00 PM

17 24

8:00 PM

7:00 PM

12 19

8:00 PM

30&UNDER NIGHT

28 5

29 6

7:00 PM

30 7

7:00 PM

OCTOBER 1

8:00 PM

2 9

8:00 PM

3 10

SAT

POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSIONS

8:00 PM

PPDs with the creative team have been scheduled for the following dates:

2:30 PM < 8:00 PM

SEPTEMBER 2 SEPTEMBER 5

2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM

(Following the matinee)

SEPTEMBER 9 We hope you can take part in this important aspect of our play development process.

Post-performance discussion

Open Captioned for

l theatergoers who are deaf or hard of hearing

We recommend The Christians for audiences 12+

2:30 PM 7:30 PM

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