The Christians

Lucas Hnath just might have hit the nail squarely on the head with his new provocative and thought provoking work, The Christians now playing over at Playwrights Horizons.

Mr. Hnath was supposed to be a preacher but he felt too much weight of the souls of others on his back.  What he kept with him as he transitioned to a playwright instead was a keen ear for the preacher's sermon and the delivery of a message.

Andrew Garman (Pastor Paul) makes you truly believe he is a devout and earnest preacher. Joshua, the associate pastor (Larry Powell), takes some time to show his power but when he does in a 1:1 confrontation with Paul it's all guns blazing.  An unexpected and potent foil to Paul is Emily Donahoe (Jenny) a simple, common choir member who confronts his message with plain spoken yet biting words.

Words have meaning.  Words are translated and interpreted.  So many viewpoints.  So many opinions.  Who is right?  Is anyone wrong?  If you don't believe what I believe, can we survive together?  These and many other powerful issues are bright up and laid bare before the audience with tender, thoughtful, and intelligent dialogue.  There are many question.  And even more answers.

It's not very often that at the end of the play you really wished the playwright would come out and take a bow but this is one true exception.  His words were a certainly a palpable placeholder for his physical presence.

Burning

Everything about Burning, Thomas Bradshaw's new play, is less like a flaming tinderbox and much more like the wet smoldering ashes of a rained out campfire.  The painful 3 hours in the theater included just about every issue and topic that might be featured individually in a well written avant-garde show downtown - all thrown in with reckless abandon aimed at provocation with the result being disgust.   Decide for yourself.

This play includes 3 audacious and intertwined stories.  A gay 15 year-old in California who's mother, the crackhead, overdoses and dies after which he runs away to NYC to be an actor and ends up living with an older gay couple as their houseboy and sex-toy.  He sleeps with a friend of theirs who has AIDS, runs away to Cologne, Germany for 3 years and watches his new boyfriend die.  In another story we get two grown children of Nazi parents who have died - the daughter inexplicably confined to a wheelchair.  They carry on the Aryan Nation tradition and beliefs of their parents.  The skinhead brother has to care for his sister and ultimately has to resort to pleasure her sexually in the bathtub with his fingers.  In the third story we have a mixed race couple.  The black man is an artist who paints provocative works about race and doesn't let anyone know he is black before they meet him.  He travels to Germany to the gallery where the Nazi guy works.  The Nazi guy doesn't know he's black, learns the truth upon meeting him and ultimately ends up murdering him in a dark movie theater when the black guy is with a prostitute with whom he has fallen in love - she's black and he's never been with a black woman because when he was 5 his older sister would use him as a decoy when having sex with her many boyfriends - and of course he saw her and ever since was repulsed by black women.  Then there's a time warp effect where the young guy in the first story i mentioned grows up and meets the cousin of the black guy and here we have homophobia, coming out, unprotected sex on purpose with an HIV positive gay man.

I could go on... and on.... and on.... but I just might get sick to my stomach all over again.  There were some beautiful and talented people on stage - both fully clothed - as well as fully unclothed - and I honestly question if some of the many sex scenes were really simulated... Don't get me wrong - I'm not a prude - quite the opposite actually.  But the intentional over-saturation with issues, naked bodies, orgasms, hairy ass cracks and other sordid details was completely forced and not natural at all.

Some fine acting by the cast which includes Hunter Foster cannot be overlooked or go unmentioned but was completely overpowered by the playwright's hubris and over-blown, throw-in-the-kitchen-sink approach to forcing an avant-garde feeling on us - - failing miserably every step of the way.