'The Gospel of John' on Stage

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk’s discussion of the nature of religious theater centers on a performance of The Gospel of John by his friend, actor Ken Jennings (not to be confused with the Jeopardy! star of the same name, b. 1974, currently appearing in a tournament with two other of the quiz show’s champions dubbed “The Greatest of All Time,” running on ABC television from 7 January until one contestant wins three matches, or on 16 January, whichever comes first).  The Ken Jennings on whose work Kirk is focusing is an accomplished actor with a pretty long resume whom I got to know slightly back in the ’70s and ’80s.

[I don’t remember exactly when I first met Ken, but it was through Kirk at some performance by Jersey City, New Jersey’s Attic Ensemble, where Ken often helped out.  (Ken’s then-wife, Christine, was a performer with Attic, but as a member of Actors’ Equity, the professional actors’ and stage managers’ union, Ken was barred from acting with the semi-professional company.}  

[I worked at Attic twice back before my union days, once as an actor (in Kirk’s staging of Macbeth in 1979) and once as a director (of John van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle in 1983); I also saw many of the troupe’s shows, especially if Kirk was in them or directed them.  I’d have met Ken somewhere back when I first started going to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, where the company was based.

[As Kirk observes below, Ken originated the role of Tobias in the première Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd in 1979-80.  (It was even said that Sondheim, so taken with Ken’s work in the role, wrote “(Nothing’s Gonna Harm You) Not While I’m Around” especially for him.)   

[On Broadway, Ken also appeared in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1975; directed by George C. Scott), Present Laughter by Noel Coward (1983; with Scott, who also directed, and Kate Burton), Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance (1997; directed by Joe Dowling with Brian Bedford), Side Show by Bill Russell and Henry Krieger (1997-98), and Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis’s Urinetown (2001; débuted Off-Off-Broadway and moved to Off-Broadway before transferring to Broadway).  Ken won Drama Desk and Theatre World Awards for Sweeney Todd.  

[Ken’s most recent New York appearance was in the title role in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s Off-Broadway production of E.Y. Harburg  and Burton Lane’s Finian’s Rainbow in 2016.

[The Gospel of John, conceived by Ken and performed as a 90-minute solo presentation, previewed under the direction of John Pietrowski at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture starting on 30 November  2019 and opened on 8 December; the production was scheduled to close on 29 December but was extended through 5 January 2020.]

The relationship of aesthetics and religion is a perpetually difficult topic, which I’ve written on before in this blog. [“Religious Drama,” posted on 19 January 2014] A discussion on the subject has to begin by defining what one means by “religion,” not an easy thing to do. One can identify religion with life, for example, and in that case every work of art is religious. But one purpose of words is to make distinctions, and if everything is “religious,” then does the word have a point?

Examples of this conundrum can be multiplied. One way to cut this Gordian Knot, however, is to do a play with a specifically religious subject, one where there’s no question that it’s “religious.” Even more conclusively, one can stage a performance of a religious scripture or book of some sort. Pretty definitely such an event can be called “religious.”

An example is The Gospel of John, a ninety minute-long presentation of the fourth gospel in the New Testament, “conceived and performed” by the actor Ken Jennings. I saw John at the Sheen Center, an attractive complex of theaters at 18 Bleecker Street in New York City, on Thursday, 19 December 2019.

The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, the “arts center of the Archdiocese of New York,” is named for the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979), properly addressed as “Venerable” since he is currently at that position on the road to sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop Sheen was the host for almost four decades of radio and television shows, usually called Life is Worth Living, in which, by himself and with no prewritten script, he addressed theological topics with aplomb and a bubbling, sly sense of humor.

As a little Presbyterian I watched his show every Sunday afternoon, the time when it was broadcast in Louisville, Kentucky, and loved it. Episodes can be found on Youtube.com, and are well worth watching. He was a fascinating and charming presenter of religious thought – dressed head to toe in his bishop’s vestments, initially sardonic, with a calm voice and a glint in his eye.

The Sheen Center, according to the program “aspires to present the heights and depths of human expression in thought and culture, featuring humankind as fully alive . . . to deepen, explore and challenge ourselves, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, intellectually, artistically, and spiritually.” The Gospel of John is an obviously appropriate choice for a booking for one of its theaters.

Ken Jennings is not the first to present an entire gospel as a one person show. The best known instance is The Gospel of Mark as performed by the British actor Alec McCowen (1925-2017) beginning in London in 1978. Others followed suit with Mark’s gospel, which is considerably shorter than John’s. (John has over 15,000 Greek words, compared to Mark’s just over 11,000).

I have known Ken Jennings (b. 1947) since the 1970’s, when we worked in various capacities for the Attic Ensemble in Jersey City, New Jersey. By that time Ken was already a professional actor. He went on to a Broadway career, notably creating the role of Tobias in the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), with book by Hugh Wheeler and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Ken won Drama Desk and Theatre World Awards for that role.

Before the beginning of the performance of The Gospel of John that I saw, Ken told the audience that he started learning the text by heart “as a prayer” during a difficult period in his life. There seems to be no question that for him the piece is a religious experience.

What fascinates me, though, is that in order for the written Biblical text to be transferred onto the stage, a series of aesthetic choices have to be made. A Christian theologian would call this process “incarnational,” that is, embodiment, in the sense, interestingly enough, of a famous verse in the first chapter of the gospel that was being presented on stage: “The word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

One of the earliest aesthetic choices involved is the creation of a “gospel” in the first place. The word “gospel” originates in the Greek word euangelion, which means “good news” and from which we get words like “evangelist;” the equivalent Latin word is “evangelium.” In early English versions of the Bible, the word was translated into “god” and “spel” (“story”), from which the musical Godspell (1971) got its title.

So a gospel is “good news,” but it comes to us in a literary form, as the great Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) points out in his monumental work Mimesis (1946). Auerbach uses for illustration the gospel of Mark, rather than that of John, but the point is essentially the same, illustrated by the incident where Peter, Jesus’ disciple, denies that he knows him. Auerbach, comparing that incident with passages in the Iliad, points out that

The incident, entirely realistic both in regard to locale and dramatis personae – note particularly [the] low social station [of Jesus’ followers] – is replete with problem and tragedy. [Peter] is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense. How tremendous [Peter’s story] is, viewed in relation to the life a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee normally lives, and what is going on in him!

But, Auerbach points out, the nature of this “gospel” is a new aesthetic development in the history of literature:

The nature and the scene of the conflict . . . fall entirely outside the domain of classical antiquity. Viewed superficially, the thing is a police action and its consequences; it takes place entirely among everyday men and women of the common people; anything of the sort could be thought of in antique terms only as farce or comedy. Yet why is it neither of these? Why does it arouse in us the most serious and most significant sympathy? Because it portrays something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could never have assumed in antique literature.

In other words, writing a “gospel” involves aesthetic decisions as well as spiritual ones. This fact can be seen clearly if one looks at “gospels” written within the couple of hundred years that follow the birth of Jesus. Typically they do not make the same choices that the gospels in the New Testament do, being much more magical and symbolic, and much less interested in the doings of ordinary people.

To continue the theme of aesthetic choices, Ken Jennings’ The Gospel of John is simple in many ways – a single actor in street clothes on a stage with nothing on it except a small bench, with a curtain behind the stage. Anyone familiar with Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) or the plays of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), however – to  choose two examples – will know how full of meaning a “simple” set can be.

That single bench becomes a rock on a hillside, a boat, and many other things. The lighting design (by Abigal Hoke-Brady) turns the upstage curtain into shades of sky, and uses the space under the platform stage (designed by Charlie Corcoran) to suggest, though not represent, the Sea of Galilee, a fire-lit courtyard by night, and other locations. Similarly the subtle sound effects (designed by M. Florian Staab) hint at crowds, thunder, and water, but always by low-volume suggestions.

Another aesthetic choice is that of what words to use. The gospel of John in the earliest extant versions was written in Greek. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of translations of the gospel into English.  In a performance of The Gospel of Mark before an audience found on YouTube.com (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oOaIeythFw&list=PL63YmxIB5KwET9Tw6z_7yXZ5mF0NiNfb1), Alec McCowen tells how he was asked after one performance, “Did you write it?”

No, of course, and in his performances he used what’s known as the Authorized or King James Version. Ken based his performance on the New International Version, but he told us that he also borrowed from other translations when he found phrasing that he thought worked better on stage, and in a few cases came up with his own way of putting things.

The most important aesthetic decision, though, by Ken and his director, John Pietrowski, goes to the heart of the nature of an actor’s performance. Ken told us he was aware of the scholarship that has filled volumes about John’s gospel. In particular he is aware of the widely accepted scholarly theory that the gospel began as oral reporting, at some point took on written form, and also underwent revision as the years went on.

However, Ken made the aesthetic decision to present the gospel as though he were an eyewitness to the events of the gospel, reporting what he had seen. This pivotal acting choice shapes the performance, giving the performer a strong, straightforward “objective” – “I want to tell you what I saw!”

A consequence of the decision to present the gospel as though told by someone who was there, means that it is not necessary to emphasize or “underline” particular passages to make theological points; Ken simply tells what “he,” the character in the play, has witnessed.

If carefully done, “telling a story” on stage can be powerfully effective. If overused, the same device can seem limp and undramatic. The audience, I would guess, was mostly predisposed to accept, or at least listen to, a performance that consisted entirely of a book of the Bible. I was, and I’m pretty familiar with John’s gospel.

Were there any aesthetic choices that did not strike me as embodying the spiritual content of the source material of the play? I’d raise one. The gospel of John, unlike those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, presents a preponderance of speeches by Jesus, as opposed to stories by and about him.

Several times in The Gospel of John, when Jesus was quoted extensively, an echo effect was added to the sound, making the lines sound more portentous – or perhaps pretentious, and, at least to me, distracting. The effect was to pull the audience (or at least me) out of the “eyewitness” choice.

I wonder how someone with no background or interest in the Bible would feel about the show. As an actor Ken is typically energetic and enthusiastic, and he “sold” the story, I’d say, convincingly, so he would probably have kept that person’s attention to some degree. What the effect might have been beyond that, I’m not able to say.

The Gospel of John is clearly “religious” theater. It doesn’t solve the question of what that means; rather, it illustrates one end of a continuum of theatrical choices. But it strikes me as an important contribution to the discussion.

[I saw Ken Jennings some time before I actually met him.  My family used to vacation on Cape Cod for many years, and we went to shows at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis from time to time.  One summer evening, we went to a performance of a new play and later, after I met Ken through Kirk Woodward, I discovered that Ken Jennings had been in the cast.  I still have the program: it was called Ho! Ho! Ho! (it was Christmas themed) and starred Ruth Gordon (1896-1985), who also wrote the play, and was directed by her husband, Garson Kanin (1912-99).  It ran from 30 August to 4 September 1976. 

[Joey Faye (1909-97) was featured in the cast, but no one else had a name I recognize.  There was talk that this was a pre-Broadway try-out, but the play wasn’t anywhere good enough for a New York run, so, as far as I know, it died after Dennis.  (It was silly without being very funny, as I recall.)

[When I reminded Kirk of this, he told me: “I’ve heard Ken talk about that experience a number of times.  He didn’t think much of the play at all, but was fascinated to be around those people.”  That’s the reaction I would have imagined from Ken.  Being in our biz and in a situation like Ken, around people such as Gordon, Kanin, and Faye—real old-time pros with long resumes—would be awe-inspiring.  (The play wasn’t good, but it wasn’t embarrassing.) 

[And Dennis would have been a pretty neat place to spend a few months in the summer—there were plenty of things to do on Cape Cod on a day off!  The Cape Playhouse is moderately famous—one of the last remaining straw-hat theaters of that era.  And the Cape Cinema, also in Dennis, has a legendary WPA art-deco interior painted by renowned set designer Jo Mielziner.]