'Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine'

[To those of you who have come to Rick On Theater in the past few weeks looking for a report on Lynn Nottage’s play Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, which I saw at the Signature Theatre almost a month ago, I apologize.  I suffered a perfect storm of disruptions that caused an inordinate delay in getting this report on the blog.  First, I had to finish some work that took more attention and more time than I anticipated; then I lost several additional days when I caught some minor bug that laid me up (and, pardon my scatology, had me running to the bathroom half a day; and then, that most devastating of all circumstances for an electronic publication like ROT, my computer died and I was without the machine—and the Internet and my word processor—for about four days.  The Fabulation report was partly written, but I couldn’t finish it and I couldn’t post it till now.  The play has only this week to run at Signature—it closes in 13 January—and I prefer to post my performance reports with enough time for readers who become interested to get a chance to see the plays on which I write.  Well, Man proposes and God disposes . . . and He really disposed this time!  Sorry.]

There are a lot of rags-to-riches stories, including on screen and stage, looking at upward mobility from various perspectives.  The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 1886 novel by the English writer and poet Thomas Hardy, in literature and, in pop culture, The Jeffersons, the CBS sitcom of the 1970s and ’80s, both leap to mind.  Less often do you find a treatment of the riches-to-rags downward mobility.  That’s where Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, in revival at the Signature Theatre Company on Theatre Row where the dramatist is currently playwright-in-residence, comes in.

Prior to Fabulation, I’d only seen one of Nottage’s plays, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which I saw in 2011 at Second Stage (coming to STC in January).  (I haven’t seen either of the writer’s Pulitzer Prize-winners, Ruined, 2007, or Sweat, 2015.  My report on Vera Stark’s première production was posted on Rick On Theater on 27 May 2011; my report on Signature’s revival will appear early in 2019.) 

The première  of Fabulation was staged by Kate Whoriskey, Nottage’s longtime collaborator, at New York’s Playwrights Horizons from 13 June to 11 July 2004 with Charlayne Woodard as Undine; it won the  2005 Obie Award for Playwriting.  Revivals and various regional premières have been mounted around the country and abroad in the ensuing 14 years.  The STC revival, the first in New York City since the première, began previews on 19 November 2018 and opened on 10 December; the production is currently scheduled to close on 13 January 2019 (after having been extended twice from 30 December and 6 January).  I saw the 7:30 p.m. performance in the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Friday, 19 December (without my usual theater companion, who declined to accompany me to either of the Nottage productions).

Kenny Leon directed a one-night-only benefit presentation (for Opening Act, an organization that sponsors free theater programs) of Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine with Tonya Pinkins and Anika Noni Rose at the New World Stages in Manhattan on 21 April 2015.  There is a Dramatists Play Service acting edition of the text of Fabulation published in 2005 and a 2006 literary edition, published with Nottage’s Intimate Apparel by the Theatre Communications Group.  It’s also available in the collection Contemporary Plays by African American Women: Ten Complete Works (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and as an audiobook from L.A. Theatre Works (a recording of the Playwrights Horizons 2004 mounting). 

Lynn Nottage was born in 1964 in New York City, and grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives.  Having begun writing scripts in her journal as a youngster—she attended Saint Ann’s School, an arts-oriented private school in Brooklyn Heights—Nottage went to New York City’s High School of Music and Art (now part of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts near Lincoln Center) and then Providence, Rhode Island’s Brown University, from which she graduated in 1986, returning for a 2011 Doctor of Fine Arts degree.  She went on to the Yale School of Drama where she completed her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1989. The playwright has also received honorary degrees from New York City’s Juilliard School and Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania (the locale of two of her recent works, Sweat, her 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning play—and her first Broadway production that same year— and This Is Reading, a site-specific multimedia installation blending live performance and visual media, also from 2017.

The dramatist worked as a press officer for Amnesty International after graduating from Yale, but later returned to writing.  (While at Music & Art, Nottage had written her first full-length play, The Darker Side of Verona, about an African-American Shakespeare company traveling through the south.)  Poof!, premièred in 1993 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville during the Humana Festival of New American Plays, garnered the Heideman Award as the winner of the National Ten-Minute Play Contest.  (A one-hour adaptation was subsequently broadcast in 2002 on the Public Broadcasting System’s American Shorts.  Viola Davis and Rosie Perez starred.)  In addition to her playwriting, she has worked as a visiting lecturer while her plays have been produced around the world. 

Nottage has also received a number of other prestigious awards for her playwriting in addition to her two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.  (The writer won her first Pulitzer in 2009 for Ruined, which dramatizes the plight of Congolese women surviving civil war.)  These include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in  both 1994 and 2000, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a 2007 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship.  In 2017, Nottage was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science and, in 2018, into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, from which she had won their 2017 Award of Merit as “an outstanding playwright for her body of work.”

A comic rags-to-riches-to rags tale about a self-made Black American Princess from the projects of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, before that neighborhood (home to the Brooklyn Academy of Music) was transformed into an arts-and-culture hub, Fabulation is also a story about remaking yourself—and the consequences that can result.  Undine Barnes Calles (Cherise Boothe), who was born Sharona Watkins (Undine renamed herself after Undine Spragg of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, a social climber who goes from marriage to marriage up the social ladder), is a powerful and successful publicist for the rich and prominent.  Driven and ambitious—Nottage has said that she was inspired to invent the character after reading a biography of Condoleeza Rice—Undine runs her own “fierce boutique PR firm catering to the vanity and confusion of the African-American nouveau riche” and is married to a handsome and charming Argentinian named Hervé (Ian Lassiter).  So far from her working-class roots, Undine, now the product of a private school and Dartmouth College, has been letting on that her family died in a fire. 

In the midst of a busy day at the office, as Undine’s on the phone arranging ways to sell her clients and enhance their public images (and her own), her excitable assistant, Stephie (MaYaa Boateng), ushers her accountant (Dashiell Eaves) into her office.  He bears the frantic news that her husband has absconded with all her assets.  This blow to her carefully constructed self-image—‘fabulation’ means “To tell invented stories, often those that involve fantasy,” according to Wiktionary—shocks Undine’s system so sharply that she has chest pains (which she names “Edna” just to get a laugh) that send her to a doctor.  “Anxiety happens to other people,” she tells him.  But it’s not an anxiety attack that brought on Edna.  Undine is pregnant.

So, bankrupt, pregnant, 37, and abandoned by her erstwhile Manhattan friends (“There is nothing less forgiving than Bourgie Negroes,” says Undine’s childhood friend Allison, played by Nikiya Mathis, to whom she turned for help), Undine has nowhere to go but back to her Brooklyn family—whom she hasn’t seen since reinventing herself.  She laments that she must now return to “my original Negro state.”  So the former Sharona moves back in with her mother and father (Mathis and J. Bernard Calloway), a couple of college-campus security guards; her brother, Flow (Marcus Callender), who’s a Desert Storm veteran and a failed poet; and her heroin-addicted grandmother (Heather Alicia Simms), with whom she’ll be sharing a room. 

The grandmother persuades Undine to make a drug-buy for her and, never having done this before, Undine is caught by the police in the act and arrested.  Undine ends up in court and is sentenced to court-ordered rehab.  In her counselling sessions, Undine is thrown together with a motley assembly of characters, but she’s befriended by Guy (Lassiter), a recovering addict and ex-con who describes himself as “that brother you cross the street to avoid.”  But he’s sincere and is attracted to Undine, who finds the differences between Guy and Hervé (who are—not coincidentally, I think—played by the same actor at STC) make him appealing. 

As she becomes more and more engaged in her new circumstances, Undine experiences many of the same things her former friends and neighbors do every day, including bureaucratic insensitivity and inefficiency at public agencies and daily humiliation and neglect.  She learns that her family has known about her tale that they all died in a fire that had been part of her reinvention of herself.  She also hears that the FBI, who’d been seeking her husband for identity theft, has caught up with Hervé and she goes to visit him in jail.  At a counselling session, Guy tells Undine that he’ll be with her when her baby comes if she wants, and she accepts his offer. 

Facing the people from her past whom she callously and opportunistically cast aside as she created her new self-image, Undine comes to accept them and herself, learning that no one can ever truly outrun her past.  Although she loses her status, her wealth, and, initially, her pride, she comes to see that the values she espoused as Undine Barnes were false and gains wisdom and self-knowledge that had eluded her in her fabulated existence.

The final scene in the play is the birth of Undine’s baby with Guy and Undine’s family around her hospital bed.  The infant cries, and the lights fade.

I enjoyed the play—it’s an early Nottage, before she turned to realism for her Pulitzer winners.  (So was Vera Stark, 2011, which I liked better—though that could have been the production; I’ll see when I see the STC revival in February or March.)  She has (or had) a wonderful way of bending stylization that’s not really Absurdism or Surrealism (or whatever—I haven’t figured that out yet) with more Realistic moments and also taking stereotypes and clichés and making them self-commentary and, at the same time, real—you know, maybe like where the clichés came from in the first place. 

                       

I’m pretty sure Diana wouldn’t have liked this.  Diana likes plays that follow established rules, but Nottage, at least in Vera Stark and Fabulation, like Suzan-Lori Parks and Adrienne Kennedy, follows rules, but they’re rules she made up herself.  It’s going  to be hard to describe this work, though.  I’m not sure I can glean Nottage’s dramaturgical process enough to describe it for someone who hasn’t seen the performance. 

(Other reports on Parks plays are “Venus,” 7 June 2017[ “The Red Letter Plays,” 12 and 17 October 2017; and “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” by Kirk Woodward, 1 November 2017.  I reported on Kennedy’s play Funnyhouse of a Negro in “Signature Plays,” 3 June 2016.  Kirk has also posted two other articles concerning the writing of Suzan-Lori Parks that might be revealing: “A Playwright of Importance,” 31 January 2011, and “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” 5 October 2009.)

Something I wrote in my 2011 discussion of Vera Stark is applicable again in Fabulation and I think it’s key.  I said that even if we already know something about the situation and characters the playwright is portraying, “Nottage doesn’t just tell us or even simply illustrate her ideas, she demonstrates them for us, and she does it with great (and I do mean great) humor.”  (There’s something of Bertolt Brecht in this, though I wouldn’t list Brecht as one of Nottage’s obvious influences.  I suspect she’s simply absorbed Brechtian influences the way most American actors have absorbed Stanislavsky: it’s in the air they breathe.)  Little of what happens in Fabulation is surprising to us, but Nottage makes us look at it with eyes (and I’d add, hearts) more open. 

There’s a notable difference with Vera Stark: that play was about a part of Hollywood history that effected African-American actors (and, by extension, all actors of color and women actors); the situation in Fabulation is not tied to any American of a particular race, ethnicity, or gender.  While the dramatist’s story is about an African-American woman and her family and friends, and many tropes from that cultural milieu are depicted, what Undine suffers and overcomes in Nottage’s play could happen to any of us or to someone any of us knows.  (Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and its depiction of the fate of Wall Street wolf Sherman McCoy comes to mind.)  While the truths the playwright reveals in Vera Stark strike each viewer from a different perspective, what Nottage shows us in Fabulation should hit all of us from the same angle.  It is a universal tale.

What was most astonishing in this production is that I could swear I saw a cast of 26 (the Times counted the parts)—but in reality it was eight actors playing two dozen-plus roles.  (One actor plays only one role, Cherise Boothe as Undine; the other 25 characters are played by seven actors.)  I never figured out which actors were which group of characters (I didn’t know any of the cast)!  Not one of them was a caricature or a one-dimensional portrayal, however.  It was magnificent work!!  (The director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who also did Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at Signature, which I saw in 2016—see my report on ROT on 1 December 2016—gets a lot of credit for this, too.)

Divided into 15 scenes, each a shift in setting, an average of seven minutes each over the two acts, the play couldn’t sustain a Realistic, or even quasi-Realistic, scenic design.  (I’m calculating on the basis of a two-hour running time minus a 15-minute intermission.)  Director Blain-Cruz moves the action along snappily, as she must—more cinematically than episodically, with scenes flowing one from another almost seamlessly.  The production of Fabulation is complex both stylistically and technically, but Blain-Cruz mounts it  adeptly and smartly.

To accomplish this, of course, scene shifts have to be kept minimal, so set designer Adam Rigg has devised an fluidly evolving acting environment.  Aided immensely by Yi Zhao’s lighting, Rigg’s spare design, based on white cinder-block walls, instantly transforms into a variety of locations by bringing on a few set pieces, just enough to define the place and accommodate the scene’s action and no more.  Palmer Hefferan’s sound design was also effective.  It’s a plain but elegant staging solution.

I’ve mentioned the acting nut the company has to crack, the 25 characters played by seven actors, and I said the cast and director tackle it beautifully.  As the actors morph from one persona to another from scene to scene, though, the unique and distinctive costumes of Montana Levi Blanco and the remarkable hairstyles and wig designs by Cookie Jordan help the performers to transform seemingly instantly and to give theatergoers immediate clues to the characters. 

As excellent as the ensemble is, it’s Cherise Boothe who carries the show as the title character.  It’s a showpiece.  Since Undine is self-invented, she’s artificial, a performance.  Boothe has to play the role as if Sharona were playing Undine.  Then she has to play Sharona re-emerging after she returns to Brooklyn.  Of course, it’s not just Sharona who appears when Undine finds herself back in Fort Greene, but a Sharona who’s now confused and angry with the world.  Boothe pulls off all of these permutations convincingly, movingly, and humorously.  Even as the actor makes us laugh at Undine’s diminishing circumstances, however, she also lets us see the real pain and fear Undine’s experiencing.  That’s a precarious tightrope for an actor to walk, but Boothe struts along it with confidence and bravado.  Undine is an unlikeable person, and in less adroit hands, the audience might cheer her demise—but Boothe has a dry and tart delivery that makes liking Undine a (perhaps guilty) pleasure.  Her Undine may be a figure we’re meant to laugh at, but she’s also someone we empathize with and root for.

Boothe also has to handle Nottage’s stylization, that proprietary style I haven’t been able to name or even describe successfully.  Like the supporting ensemble, much of Undine’s part is a sort of over-the-top Realism—the kind of slightly eccentric acting employed for characters who say and do outrageous things as if they were perfectly ordinary behavior.  It’s common in many farces—even on TV sitcoms.  But Boothe’s character also talks directly to us to comment on the action of the play; she’s the only one who does this.  Those moments of direct address, when Undine steps out of the narrative, aren’t stylized in the same way all the other dialogue in Fabulation is—but it still has to seem like Undine, not Boothe, the actor.  She handles this as smoothly and convincingly as she does the other part of her role. 

This performance is the very exemplar of what makes these plays of Nottage’s, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, theatrically special.  She takes stock characters, characters that could easily descend into caricature and cliché, and endows them with truth and honesty.  It depends on the actors and directors to convey this to the audience, so the writer’s taking something of a chance—but when it works out, the play and the production sparkle and move us.  The same is true of Nottage’s signature stylization—the cast has to pull that delicate maneuver off or the production becomes a travesty.  I guess it’s obvious that I think this company, with Boothe setting the pace and Blain-Cruz at the helm, meets the challenge. 

That’s why I love theater.  When something like Fabulation happens, when the singular artistry of a Lynn Nottage comes together with the vision and craft of a Lileana Blain-Cruz and the talents of the company she assembled . . . magic occurs.  There’s nothing else like it in creation.  (Is my geek showing?  Gets loose sometimes.)

Press coverage of Fabulation was spotty, especially for a play by a two-time Pulitzer-winner.  Though three daily papers, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Times, ran reviews, none of the weeklies like New York magazine or the New Yorker covered the production.  Variety didn’t run a notice and none of the radio or TV outlets I often quote did either.  The on-line review sites, however, seemed to have been out in force.  On the basis of 25 reviews that did assess the STC production, Show-Score gave Fabulation an average score of 77, not a terribly high rating.  In the site’s tally, 92% of the notices were positive, 8% mixed, and none negative.  Show-Score’s highest rating was a pair of 90’s (Front Row Center and Carole Di Tosti, both websites), backed up by two 85’s (This Week in New York Blog and one of two notices on New York Stage Review); the lowest score on the site was a 60 for scribicide, preceded by a 65 for The Wrap.  My review survey will comprise 16 outlets. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout labeled Fabulation “a saber-toothed satire about a snooty member of the black bourgeoisie” and confessed that when he first saw the play in 2004 “how flummoxed I was to discover that the author of a play as bleak as ‘Intimate Apparel’ [Nottage’s immediate previous play in New York City, a mere three months earlier] could also be really, really funny.”  He continued that the STC “staging, directed with farce-worthy propulsion by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is full of comic punch—wrapped, as is Ms. Nottage's wont, around a hard core of tough-mindedness.”  (Teachout also declared that in the ensuing years, the playwright has established herself “as a fixed star on the horizon of American theater [and] one of our best playwrights.”)  The Journalist lavished great praise on Boothe, who “[n]ot only . . . rise[s] to the play’s previous comic occasions, but . . . has the underlying gravity.”  He concluided, “This production would be worth seeing for her alone, but there are countless other reasons to go.”

The New York Times’ Jesse Green reported that Times reviewer Ben Brantley had said of Fabulation in 2004 that it was a “busy, robustly entertaining comedy.”  “It still is,” said Green, but admonished us readers that “the world around it has changed so much that the comedy feels, if just as busy, less robust.”  Noting that Fabulation is “something of an outlier for Nottage” in comparison to her Pulitzer-winning plays, which Green said are “undamentally naturalistic and tragic,” the Timesman posited, “Perhaps that’s why ‘Fabulation,’ and thus Ms. Blain-Cruz’s production, feel most accomplished the farther away they get from spoof and closer to reality.”  In conclusion, Green asserted, “What makes ‘Fabulation’ a comedy, albeit one with a bitter edge, is that our heroine is at least allowed to approach her happiness, once she stops trying to be a success.”

“At once mordant and cheerful, Fabulation is melodrama with a method to it,” characterized Max McGuinness in the U.S. edition of the Financial Times.  In comparison with Nottage’s Sweat, McGuinness thought, “Fabulation never lurches into miserabilism and remains consistently hilarious over the course of Lileana Blain-Cruz’s brisk two-hour staging.”  He lauded the performance of Boothe, who “anchors the play with uncommon wit and charisma while seven other actors playing two dozen supporting roles help spin a satisfyingly picaresque yarn.” 

Raven Snook of Time Out New York gave her readers a heads-up that they “may be surprised at the frequent and hearty laughs in Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine.”  She warned, “On the surface, at least, Nottage’s 2004 satire of NYC’s black bourgeoisie is a delectable treat.  But it leaves a serious aftertaste.”  The woman from TONY found that “Lileana Blain-Cruz’s whirlwind staging of Fabulation at the Signature puts humor first, helped by a versatile supporting cast of seven with a knack for sketching broad new identities at the drop of a wig.”  Snook warned again, “You may be cackling too loudly to take it all in as it unfolds but, like a good fable, the play has a message that lingers past its scrappily-ever-after finale.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck’s “Bottom Line” was “Satire with a bite” and pointed out that it “reveals the playwright working in a distinctly silly mode.”  He reports that “the play earns big laughs with its cheeky, audacious humor.”  The play “occasionally feels too sitcom-like in its approach,” felt Scheck, and “overly reliant on narration” (the soliloquies I mentioned).  “But the play is often very funny indeed,” the HR review-writer reported, “delivering sharp observations about social and racial identity that feel even more relevant today than when it was written.”  He found, “The many one-liners get the intended laughs, but it works even better when it digs a little deeper thematically.”  Scheck deemed Blain-Cruz’s staging “skillful” as it “never allows the pacing to lag” and he dubbed Blanco’s costumes “fun.”  He decided, however, “Most of all, it’s the performers who truly sell the material,” especially Boothe, who “is a hoot in the title role.”  In the end, Scheck affirmed, “Fabulation follows a predictable arc; theatergoers will earn no points for guessing that its title character will have different values by the end of the evening.  But it effectively demonstrates that its talented playwright can make important points via laughter as well as tears.”

In the first of two notices on New York Stage Review, one of the two scoring second-highest on Show-Score with an 85, Steven Suskin proclaimed the play “a wildly funny and wildly outlandish modern-day Everyman.  Or Everywoman.”  Suskin believes that Nottage “is not interested in the road to success” nor “in moralizing.”  The NYSR writer reported, “Every step along Undine’s Job-like path is played limned with sharp jabs of humor, with sometimes sketch-like interludes” as well as those “sardonic and often contradictory” commentaries.  With praise for the design team, Suskin affirmed, “The episodic and escapadish manner of Undine’s un-fabulation is well handled by director Lileana Blain-Cruz.”  He felt that the “return visit of Nottage’s early Fabulation is worthy and highly enjoyable.  The playwright’s unrestrained humor sparks the play with flashes of lightning” and added, “Theatergoers who make it to the Signature for both Fabulation and By the Way, Vera Stark  are in for a back-to-back double treat.”

Michael Sommers, who penned the second NYSR notice, proclaiming Nottage “[o]ne of America’s finest playwrights,” labeled Fabulation “a broad comedy” and the STC production “a dandy . . . revival.”  Also praising the designers, Sommers thought that the director “confidently spins out Undine’s tribulations with a quick and easy hand.”  On Theater Pizzazz, Carol Rocamora declared of Fabulation, “It was a razor-sharp satire in 2004, and it hasn’t lost its cutting edge today” and dubbed it an “absurdist comedy.”  Rocamora praised the “agile ensemble,” who performed under Blain-Cruz’s “slick direction.” 

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp thought that Fabulation, receiving “a splendidly staged and performed” revival at STC, “lacks the depth of” Ruined and Sweat.  “Very broad satiric humor like [Fabulation] tends to overwhelm the underlying seriousness,” asserted Sommer, but she found that director Blain-Cruz made the play work.  Hayley Levitt characterized the play as “a jaunty balance of camp and commentary” on TheaterMania, but advised that “unlike trips to Nottage’s [Ruined and Sweat], you can leave your box of tissues and paper bag for hyperventilation at home.”  Levitt found, “It’s fun and games for us, but at each punctuated point along this entertaining learning curve, Nottage tucks in glimpses of the generations-old baggage that motivates Undine” to reinvent herself—and the playwright and director “have plenty of fun with the cultural stereotypes.”  The TM review-writer deemed Fabulation’s “patchwork structure . . . unsettlingly sloppy,” but felt “there’s something liberating about the play’s blatant disregard for organization.” 

James Wilson labeled the play “sweeping and satirical” on Talkin’ Broadway, but added that it “seems like a minor work” alongside her more recent plays.  Wilson found that “the play moves swiftly” thanks to Blain-Cruz’s direction, “and there are a number of very funny bits,” but because “most of the characters are broadly drawn and the sketch-like scenes circle around a gag or punchline, the play does not pack the wallop one might expect.”  The TB reviewer complained, “The play’s poignancy and fable-like morals come through in narration—fourth-wall breaking monologues—rather than in the actions of and interactions among individual characters.”  He had praise for the acting of Boothe and the ensemble, however, and the work of the design team, which “presents New York City’s grit, glamor, and matchless energy.”  In conclusion, Wilson found, “While it is easy to get caught up in the fast-paced, vibrant world of Fabulation, Nottage’s play presents hard truths about issues of class, race, and gender.”

Front Row Center’s Donna Herman, whose notice received Show-Score’s highest rating (90), declared, “If Lynn Nottage wrote a prescription, I’d buy a ticket—I know it’d cure what ails me.”  As she explained, “She brings razor edged clarity to everything she writes, and undeniable truth.”  In Fabulation, Herman added, the playwright also “has a gleam of fun in her eye.”  Director Blain-Cruz “has done a masterful job staging this complex piece smoothly and elegantly,” assisted by her designers.  The cast includes “a great ensemble,” but FRC’s reviewer averred, “Cherise Boothe knocks it out of the park as Undine.”  (Herman’s review was also posted on New York Theatre Guide.)

On scribicide, the site with the lowest-scoring review (60), Aaron Botwick characterized Fabulation as “fairly typical Lynne Nottage” because it “is consistently engaging and funny without ever transgressing the boundaries of conventional American theater.”  What Botwick meant was, “The action is lively and fast-moving but always safe.”  Nonetheless, the scribicide writer found, “Boothe is excellent in the title role, sharp and cynical and commanding,” though “ultimately the material is unambitious, making Fabulation an enjoyable if somewhat unremarkable evening of theater.”

Samuel L. Leiter labeled Fabulation “episodic” and its “excellent revival, vibrantly directed” at the Signature Theatre Company on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  “Moments of true feeling, even of sentimentality, now and then intrude,” reported Leiter, “but the play’s overall tone is comedy bordering on farce.”  He found the humor “cartoonish,” but he “did appreciate several sketch-like scenes.”  The TLS blogger declared, “There’s no disputing the excellence of the versatile ensemble . . . nor the splendidly realized Undine of Cherise Boothe.”  To the prospect of the rest of Signature’s Nottage season, based on this production, Leiter stated, “Fabulous.”

Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater observed that “In the hands of director Lileana Blain-Cruz, ‘Fabulation’ . . . seems to promise an over-the-top satire in the very first scene”; however, “as the play progresses, and Undine regresses, ‘Fabulation’ turns into something more clever and pointed than just broad comedy.”  Mandell explained, “If there are laughs in ‘Fabulation,’ the play thus doesn’t stray as far as it may initially seem from Nottage’s socially conscious dramas.”  The NYTheater reviewer concluded, “Like any comedy, ‘Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine’ ends on a hopeful note, perhaps even a happy one for the characters.”

Labeling Fabulation a “hard-edged picaresque fable” on TheaterScene.net, Darryl Reilly observed that Nottage “is in a lighter mood here but her comic sequences have a bracing tone and the dialogue has her customary skillful depth.”  Reilly asserted that the dramatist “gleefully depicts the shopworn situations through a solid episodic structure that predictably culminates in enlightened redemption.”  As most other reviews had, the TS.net writer lauded the designers and reported that Blain-Cruz’s “vigorous staging energizes the preponderance of clichés on display.”  He called the acting ensemble “robust” and said that they “vivaciously portray a gallery of” characters.  Reilly pronounced Boothe “ the play’s electric centerpiece.  Radiating vitality, the beaming and expressive Ms. Boothe’s breakneck performance grandly personifies the character’s defensive arrogance and touching contemplativeness.”  In sum, the review-writer concluded, “Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine is a lightweight fantasia dusted with a sheen of societal significance. Its high caliber theatricality puts it over as barbed entertainment.”

[I want to draw readers’ attention to a publication in which some might be interested.  Back in the spring of 2017, The Dramatist, the magazine of the Dramatists Guild of America, ran an interview with Paula Vogel and Lynn Nottage by Tari Stratton.  It was entitled “In Conversation: Lynn Nottage & Paula Vogel,” published in volume 19, number 55 (May/June 2017), and I also posted it on ROT on 7 October 2017.  ROTters who are interested in hearing more about or from Nottage are urged to find a copy of The Dramatist or scroll back to the posted version on this blog.]

"Showcasing the Range of Indigenous Performance"

by Siobhan Burke

[In March and April of last year, I posted a series of eight articles from American Theatre magazine called “Staging Our Native Nation.”  The series (24, 27, and 30 March 2018, and 2, 5, and 7 April 2018) was about the theater being created and performed by American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Inuit theater companies all over the United States.  On 2 January 2019, I was interested to read in the “Arts” section of the New York Times an article about a conference, First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking, that’s taking place in various locations in Manhattan; First Nations Dialogues, which also includes  work being created by native Canadians and Australia’s Aborigines, started on 5 January bugt will continue through12 January.  (The New York Times article is also available on line as “‘The People Making It Are Indigenous, but Indigenous Is Not a Genre,'" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/arts/dance/02firstnations.html.)]

The weeklong First Nations Dialogues directly challenge the concept of ‘diversity.’

For the Brooklyn-born playwright Muriel Miguel, a founder of the Native American feminist collective Spiderwoman Theater, the word diversity raises suspicions.

“Diversity means if you check the box, well, you did diversity,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “I’m always a little leery about how do you get diversity? It seems to me that it needs to be more than just checking the box.”

Known as a grandmother of the Indigenous theater movement in the United States and Canada, Ms. Miguel is among the 30 or so artists participating in this year’s First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking. (Lenapehoking is the homeland of the Lenape, the original inhabitants of the area encompassing New York City.) Taking place at multiple downtown theaters, the Dialogues bring together Indigenous performing artists from Australia, Canada and the United States for a week of performances, discussions and other gatherings, beginning Jan. 5.

After a low-profile first edition last year, the series is returning in an expanded, more public form. Coinciding with the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals — which draws thousands of visitors from around the world — it is presented in partnership with 13 festivals and organizations, including American Realness, the Lenape Center, the American Indian Community House and Performance Space New York. Deliberately, it will be hard to miss.

“I hope that it’s immersive,” said Merindah Donnelly, an organizer of the series and the executive producer of BlakDance in Australia, speaking by Skype from Brisbane. “I hope that people can’t avoid having encounters with the First Nations Dialogues, though” — she added with a smile — “I’m not sure that we’re quite that big yet.”

In drawing attention to the breadth of contemporary Indigenous performance — with works spanning dance, theater, performance art and genres in between — the Dialogues are something rare for New York, if not unprecedented. Describing what to expect is not easy and not intended to be. In deciding what to program, the chief organizers — Ms. Donnelly, the choreographer Emily Johnson, and Vallejo Gantner, the former director of Performance Space — set out to challenge a notion they often come across, that Indigenous performance fits any single description.

“It’s contemporary art, it’s live, it’s experimental, it’s multidisciplinary, it’s cabaret, it’s queer, it’s drag, it’s theater,” Ms. Donnelly said. “The people making it are Indigenous, but Indigenous is not a genre.”

As Mr. Gantner put it: “You can’t say, ‘This is what Indigenous work looks like.’ That’s like saying, ‘What does European work look like?’ ”

A centerpiece of the week will be KIN, a subseries programmed by Ms. Johnson at Performance Space, in the East Village. [KIN is described in its publicity as “a series of Indigenous led presentations that explore kinship, care and the transmutation of grief through ceremonial language.”] The offerings here — many of which deal with themes of trauma, grief and healing — include Ms. Miguel’s Pulling Threads Fabric Workshop, in which storytelling and quilting serve as tools for mending old wounds; and SJ Norman’s “Cicatrix 1 (that which is taken/that which remains),” a meditation on the deaths of incarcerated First Nations people in Australia.

While the tone may be somber at times, there is also much to celebrate. SJ Norman, an Australian artist of Wiradjuri and Wonnaruah heritage, said in an email that the opportunity to gather in New York “feels like an honoring of the continued existence of our peoples in the big city, as well as the dynamism and globalism of our peoples, which is absolutely vast.”

Far from merely checking boxes, the Dialogues grew out of a wariness similar to Ms. Miguel’s about diversity, or a related hope: to build lasting institutional support for Indigenous performing arts worldwide. “This is about a deep cultural shift, deep cultural change,” Ms. Johnson said. “We are very adamant that this is not about just putting your name on something, not about doing the least amount of work.”

A Native Alaskan artist of Yupik ancestry, Ms. Johnson has been working tirelessly to counter what she calls “the perceived invisibility” of Indigenous performing artists, particularly in the United States. Funding for Indigenous performance is more robust in Australia and Canada, and said Ms. Johnson said that in her home country she has often found herself wondering: “Where are the Indigenous works? How do we bring this work forward?”

Mr. Gantner, who grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and lives in New York, has observed similar disparities. “Here it’s kind of stuck into a corner of folk or community practice, or traditional or ritualistic,” he said. “In Australia and elsewhere in the world, it’s not; it’s understood as a dynamic contemporary expression of a culture.”

One approach to bringing the United States up to speed is an ambitious pilot program, the Global First Nations Performance Network, which will be in development during this year’s Dialogues. (Planning sessions are closed to the public.) The envisioned network will include 15 institutions from Canada, Australia and the United States — with the potential to expand to other countries — all dedicated to commissioning and presenting works by Indigenous artists.

The network also requires, of each presenter, a commitment to undergoing what Mr. Gantner calls “a kind of decolonization process.” This could involve steps like hiring Indigenous board and staff members, building relationships with local Indigenous communities and implementing land acknowledgment, the practice of honoring the native inhabitants of a place.

Ms. Johnson sees this year’s Dialogues as a microcosm of what the network may eventually accomplish, including opening up international exchange. For the Australian choreographer Mariaa Randall, whose “Footwork/Technique,” part of KIN, explores the footwork of Aboriginal dances, a highlight of the Dialogues is the chance to simply talk and listen with peers from around the world.

“In our countries we can become kind of siloed,” she said. “I want to be able to sit with and see and hear from other First Nations females: what their struggles are, their achievements, and how they continue to keep their culture and their practice together, to keep moving forward, because sometimes it is really hard.”

Ms. Miguel, who founded Spiderwoman Theater with her sisters in 1976, noted that, historically, gatherings of Indigenous people have often been banned or met with state violence. “I think we’ve been separated for a very long time,” she said.

Ms. Johnson is the first to point out that while the First Nations Dialogues may be new, the work that she and her colleagues are doing is not. They see themselves as building upon a foundation laid by Ms. Miguel and her contemporaries over the course of many decades, right up to today. Ms. Johnson recalled a moment at last year’s Dialogues when the conversation turned from hypothesizing to taking action.

“Auntie Muriel was like, ‘I’ve been talking about this for 80 years. I want change!’ ” she said with an appreciative laugh. “So, we felt that push.”

[After a brief meeting 50 years ago in Harlem between a small group of Native American performing artists, the first First  Nations Dialogues convened in January 2018.  As Siobhan Burke stated above, it was a “low-profile” affair.  It Made possible, however, this month’s larger, more inclusive gathering.

[Burke is a dance critic for the New York Times and a contributing writer for Dance Magazine, where she was an editor from 2008 to 2013.  She has written for Open Space, Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, the Performance Club, Hyperallergic, Art in America, Pointe magazine, the Village Voice, and other publications.]

Sight & Sound

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend Kirk Woodward hasn’t sent an article into Rick On Theater since “George Abbott” on 14 October, but he’s back now with “Sight & Sound,” a report on a Christian religious-based theater company two of whose productions Kirk recently saw.  From his perspective as both a practicing Christian and a theater professional, Kirk describes and evaluates the work of this company.  Sight & Sound fills a niche in the American theater scene that I suspect most of us don’t experience, or even consider, very often, and I think Kirk’s well-considered examination of it is well worth acknowledging and looking at. 

[Just to remind ROTters, Kirk’s recent guest posts on this blog have included “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion,” 23 April; “Stephen Schwartz,” 2 August; “Agatha Christie: Dramatist,” 1 September; and one half of “The Originalist Squared” (with my second half), 7 August.  (For other posts from Kirk, ROT’s most generous and reliable contributor, use the search engine, above left, and type in “Kirk Woodward.”  His work, always provocative and interesting, goes all the way back to the beginning of the blog in 2009.)]

Religion is a belief system; theater is a craft of performance. It might seem easy to combine the two – why not simply do a performance about a belief system? But in practice the two don’t always blend easily. Theater’s purpose is, in Hamlet’s words, to “hold the mirror up to nature,” but a religion promotes a particular definition of what that mirror ought to show.

The results of “using drama to prove a point” are often unsatisfactory. There are exceptions, one of which I described in an article in this blog on the play “The Tidings Brought to Mary” by Paul Claudel (see “Religious Drama,” posted on Rick On Theater on 19 January 2014). But Claudel’s play is deeply mysterious, and in any case exceptions tend to prove the rule.

Clearly “religious drama” can mean nothing more than a drama with a religious subject. For example, the play Saint Joan (1923) by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) dramatizes a number of issues involving religion, such as the relation of individual experience to the teachings of church doctrine. Shaw does not appear to promote a particular church or a particular established theology; his play holds those elements in tension, and the result is powerful theater. In many other plays of this sort, their creators' intentions are possibly interesting but mostly irrelevant. 

Sometimes, however, a dramatic work appears, at least, to be created on the principle that the role of art is to serve God, and that therefore art is to be judged by how well it does God’s work. Tolstoy adopted this idea in later years; he found himself unable to see how purely aesthetic interests mattered, when God’s work was so important.

By this standard, categories of “good” and “bad” art are irrelevant; what matters is how well the work does God’s work. One problem with this approach is that it tends to be adopted by censors, fanatics, and dictators, who have their own ideas of what the good is and who also have the means to impose their standards on others.

Another problem is that, with religious art and practically any other kind of art, a work that’s created with a teaching purpose may well be dreary. How can it help it? There’s limited joy of discovery in creating something that’s already figured out what it wants to say.

Another approach, which we might call the aesthetic approach, is to say that there is no such thing as religious art at all. There’s only art, whether good or bad. Art takes as its subject whatever it wants, whether it’s religion or politics or love or whatever.

This approach ends all arguments, because it makes ideas of religion irrelevant – which is also its problem. Religion has its own claims. For example, one can read the Bible for its imagery, but it wasn’t written simply as a literary work, and at some point that fact may insist on being taken into account.

If we are of a scholarly turn of mind, we can take an anthropological approach and say that works of art reflect the ideas of religion held by people at the time. This approach looks backward into history, noting, for example, that the ancient Greek tragedies were performed as elements of religious festivals. The approach also looks beyond Western art, to non-Western cultures, looking at the way different cultures present themselves, often without attempts at value judgments on their beliefs or art forms. A limitation of this approach, again, is that it tends to trivialize religion, and whatever else it may be, religion is not a trivial matter.

A more recent version of the anthropological approach is the modernist declaration that today’s world has destroyed the coherence of works of art so that it’s meaningless to say that a work is “religious”, or for that matter to label it in any other way.

A post-modernist critic versed in deconstructionism would go even further and say that no matter what its intent, a work of art can only reflect the oppressive power structure of its time. This approach negates the experience of art, particularly the distinction between greater and lesser works.

Or we can go in the other direction, and say that on the contrary, all art is religious. The limitation of this viewpoint is that if everything is religion, then nothing is – what’s the point of talking about religion at all if what we mean by religion is “life”?

I offer these reflections because, as noted above, I recently had the opportunity to see two stage productions based on Bible stories, Moses (at a movie theater near my home) and Jesus (with a church group), created by Sight & Sound Theatres. I offer these reflections because, as noted above, I recently had the opportunity to see two stage productions based on Bible stories, Moses and Jesus, created by Sight & Sound Theatres. I had heard about their productions for years, and people I know at a church in New Jersey have made an annual bus trip to see Sight & Sound shows for years. A friend convinced me that I ought to see at least one of their productions, if only to see their brand of theatricality for myself.  

Sight & Sound is a for-profit commercial company with a Christian evangelical mission, founded by Pennsylvania farmer, Glenn Eshelman and his wife, Shirley, who began with a traveling slide show for churches in 1964 that expanded into a theatrical production company aimed at general audiences – but always with a Christian bent. Sight & Sound presented its first full-scale stage production (Behold the Lamb) in 1987, and to date has presented twenty or so different shows at its two theaters in Ronks (in Lancaster County), Pennsylvania, and Branson, Missouri. I saw a film of the stage production of Moses, and I saw the company’s newest production, Jesus, in Pennsylvania.

                                                                                                

Because of the Biblical subject matter of these shows, I ought to say something about my own background. I’m an active Christian, and I preach in churches in the Presbyterian Church USA, a “mainstream” denomination. I’ve also worked in theater for years, as director, playwright, and actor, on plays of all sorts. In particular I’ve written a number of plays that have been produced, and some of them have had religious themes.

I tend to resolve the conflict between religion and theater (if there is one) in my own mind by supporting the right of a playwright to write whatever kind of play she or he feels called on to write. Playwrights take their chances on the success of their plays, but if one feels compelled to write a play with a theme, let the chips fall where they may.

My position, however, does not extend to Moses, because the script for that show was not written primarily as the result of an artistic spark, but as a “work for hire.” How do I know this? Because no writers are credited for the work. In fact no one who works on the production is credited by name. (There is also no “curtain call” at the end of a Sight & Sound show.)

This policy is not unique with Sight & Sound; I have observed it in other Biblical spectacles presented by churches. The theology involved, apparently, is that everything in the production is done for the glory of God, so individuals should not be named.

I find this idea both pretentious and un-Biblical. Moses and Jesus, just to name two figures in the Bible, are both identified by name in that book. Shouldn’t writers, actors, and technicians be named as well? The Apostle Paul lists many of his co-workers in his letters in the Bible. Why shouldn’t theater co-workers also be listed? 

In any case, the script of Moses appears to have been created by committee. Maybe it was – the script is notably uneven. Dialogue is elevated and lofty one minute, modern and conversational the next. Plot lines appear and disappear. The musical numbers frequently seem to have been heavily influenced by  Broadway shows (Les Miserables comes to mind), and occasionally from Disney films. 

However, the quality of the writing is not a major advertising point about Moses, or for that matter about Jesus. Two things are primarily important in these shows: they are based on Bible stories, and they are spectacular. To take them in reverse order:

Spectacular – Sight & Sound’s stages are huge (the two theaters are close to each other in design), some 300 feet in total length, making Broadway houses seem cramped by comparison. The performance area includes three sides of the theater – the regular “stage,” which is huge, and along the walls on the right and left of the audience – plus a center aisle that can be either a conduit for audience members or a playing space.

Using a mixture of set pieces and projections, plus numerous special effects, the shows achieve an almost cinematic effect. For example, when Moses escapes from Egypt, he walks on a small, multi-directional treadmill, on a stage floor filled with smoke, while behind him sweeps a scenic panorama that takes him from Pharaoh’s palace, past the pyramids and the Sphinx, across the desert, and into the mountains, while music blares.

Big scenes, in other words, are the theater’s meat, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Opera, of course, tends to run toward spectacle – “grand opera” is often an accurate description. Parsifal (1882), written by Richard Wagner (1813-1883), is certainly a spectacular opera with religion as its subject, although the exact nature of that religion is open to debate. Wagner, however, wrote the entire opera himself – it was anything but a committee creation.

Sight & Sound is an avowedly “evangelical” company – each show ends with an “altar call,” an invitation for audience members to join with members of the company in counselling and prayer. Not surprisingly, then, their productions are all Biblically based, usually centered around the stories of individual characters in the Bible, as can be seen from the titles of recent productions: Noah - the Musical, Joseph, Jonah, Moses, Samson, and the enormously popular current production Jesus.

Dramatizing a story from the Bible is not necessarily easy. Our era wants to know about the psychology of a character, often conveyed through a “back story.” The Bible provides little of either. Instead, it describes emblematic moments.

A dramatist often must, so to speak, “fill in the blanks” in the Biblical narrative, and the risks of this process surely are evident. Biblical incidents are presented side by side with recent inventions by (in the case of Moses) faceless writers; audience members may even imagine that they’re hearing scripture when they’re only hearing contemporary dialogue.

To say the least, the literary contribution of a contemporary writer may not quite equal that of a work that has held the interest of readers for over three thousand years.

One possible reason stories in the Bible are so memorable is that their readers are able to create details of the stories for themselves – perhaps drawn from their own lives. On the other hand, a drama on stage gives stories, as a character in William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream says, “a local habitation and a name,” limiting the audience’s imagination in the same way that a music video is likely to become tightly associated with the song it illustrates.

INTERLUDE

A friend of my daughter auditioned with Sight & Sound for the role of the archangel Michael in their production The Nativity. He had learned the assigned song and expected that at the audition he would sing the song and read from the script.

As soon as he came on stage, however, a crew fixed him in a harness, strapped on him two angel wings each about ten feet long, and hoisted him into the air. He had had no idea this was going to happen. Nevertheless, he started to sing.

Then the wings malfunctioned, a technician ran onto the stage shouting "Stop!" and the crew worked on the system for a few minutes, coaching him how to move the wings in order to help fix them.

Finally they lowered him, quite shaken, to the ground. They took off the wings and the harness, and as he stood there, breathing heavily, the director said to him, "Okay, let's take the song from the top!"  The actor was offered the role as an understudy. He declined.

I saw the Sight & Sound production of Jesus on November 1, 2018, at the Millennium Theater in Ronks. In appearance the theater is a cross between an idea of a building in ancient Jerusalem and a Los Vegas casino, a feeling that continues in the lobby with its lights, displays, cafes, and shops. The wide auditorium seats just over 2,000 people in a series of sweeping rows.

The “special effects” in Jesus are stunning. Fishing boats float on the sea and rock appallingly in storms. Live animals behave just as they’re supposed to – camels, horses, pigs, doves. Rocks split, wind blows (in the auditorium!), rain falls, people travel among towns that effortlessly glide onto the stage, reconfigure themselves, and glide off again.

(Well, not entirely effortlessly – the stage does not have a turntable, and one could occasionally spot human beings pushing set pieces from one area to another, which I found comforting.)

The elaborate production values in Jesus are its calling card, of course, and deservedly may bring in audience members who might not have a vested interest in its religious theme.

Thinking ahead, I assumed that a major problem with the show would be the characterization of Jesus, who of course is not physically described in the Bible at all. I actually had no problem there. The actor playing the role is personable and physically not at all intimidating. I would like to know more about him as an actor but, as I mentioned earlier, his name is not available to the audience.

(From news accounts it appears that one actor playing the role – apparently there are two, but judging from a photo he is the one I saw – is Brandon Talley, who graduated from Elon University in 2004 and has worked ever since with Sight & Sound. I know this because of a published article, not from the show’s program, since there barely is one.  Elon is a liberal arts school in Elon, North Carolina, founded in 1889, originally but no longer officially affiliated with the United Church of Christ denomination.)

For Jesus exactly one name is offered in the program: Joshua Enck is credited as “Producer/Director.” Enck, now 41 years old, became the president and chief creative officer of Sight & Sound in 2015. (The chief executive officer of the company is Matt Neff, also 41.) Enck’s name does appear in the tiny program, called “Insight,” and his director’s note offers a clue to the success of the production.

“What you are about to experience,” he writes, “is not a history lesson on the most famous person ever to walk the earth. It is not even necessarily a story of Jesus’ life.” Enck tells how a theme of “love that rescues” began to emerge as the show’s creators (otherwise unnamed) read the gospel accounts.

The theme of “rescue” does provide a thread through the entire show, and so there is a dramatic continuity to Jesus that the script of Moses simply does not have. Enck and his team could have chosen other themes, but to choose one and stick to it, whatever it is, is essential for a production of this scale. I conclude from the coherence of the storytelling in Jesus that the theater’s current leadership, at least, is as committed to theatrical excellence as it is to proselyting.

One example from Jesus may suffice. Mark 5:1-20 tells the story of the demon-possessed man running amok in a graveyard, healed by Jesus. In the Sight & Sound production, the graveyard is situated along a seaside cliff. On the left, as the audience looks at the stage, a boat loaded with Jesus’ disciples tosses realistically on what appears to be a rugged sea, while the “sky” above the scene seems to be heading for a storm.

On the audience’s right, the insane man rages on top of a craggy, almost inaccessible promontory, leaping from rock to rock and shouting imprecations at everyone, including the people in the boat, while further to the right is a crowd of townspeople, alternately yelling at the man and trying to figure out what to do about him. The effect is one of chaos wherever one looks.

In the midst of all this upheaval, Jesus clambers from the boat onto the rocks and slowly begins to make his way up the cliff, never rushing, occasionally shouting friendly encouragement to the lunatic above him, taking his time, deliberately climbing over one rock after another, while the disciples in the boat urge him to turn back, or at least to be careful. He is the only calm, almost cheerful element in a wild scene. After a while he disappears behind the rocks, while the turmoil continues. Eventually we see him again – he has made it all the way to the top, and he unthreateningly moves toward his encounter with the screaming man…

I hope it is clear from this representative description that what could be a fairly routine depiction of a miracle is powerfully presented, but in a way that serves the story. The contrast between Jesus’ calmness and the frenzy of everyone else in the scene, and the slow, deliberate way in which he moves toward his encounter with the madman, is both thematically and theatrically effective.

I have a few reservations about the show. I felt a loss of focus toward the end of the first act. (The second act, the story of what Christians call “Passion Week,” Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem, is dramatic in the gospel accounts and similarly dramatic on stage.) I also felt that the action, or really the lack of it, immediately after Jesus’ death on the cross was too drawn out.  

The musical numbers in the show are merely functional, and a short dance interlude seems obligatory and unnecessary. The motivations of Judas, who betrays Jesus, are mostly slapped together in one song and seem to be arbitrary decisions on the part of the writers, not based on what the audience had seen before that point.

I also feel that Sight & Sound has an uneasy relationship with Judaism and I was extremely uncomfortable, both in Moses and in Jesus, with what one might call “religious appropriation.” In Moses I fell this particularly in the Passover scene, where elements of actual ritual are mixed with at least one major Christian symbol, when a cross mysteriously appears over a house where Passover is being observed. In Jesus the issue surfaced in the scene where the Sanhedrin, an ancient tribunal of elders, gathers.

Obviously Sight & Sound is a Christian enterprise, but sorry, folks, it is not acceptable at any time to take someone else’s living ritual and employ it for your own purposes.

Having said those things, I’ve covered my objections. In general the production comes across as open-hearted and cheerful. (I have no way of knowing, of course, how many if any people experience the show as a religious turning point in their lives.) Artistically speaking, it accomplishes what it intends to. Scenically, it is overwhelming. The acting level is high, and the story, on its own terms, is coherent.

We may note, nevertheless, that Jesus doesn’t solve the question of the relation of religion and art; it merely illustrates one possibility. Jesus is a work of religious art because it says it is – there’s no question about it. Sight & Sound explicitly considers its productions opportunities for evangelism. So they answer the question of the nature of “religious art” to their own satisfaction. Other issues remain.