Church
Through Nov. 5 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Written by Young Jean Lee. Performed by Matthew Lotschic, Laura Gragtmans, Kate Attwell and others. Directed by the ensemble, with Sunder Ganglani. Sound: en Goodwin. Lights: Masha Tsimring. Choreography by the female members of the cast plus Mary Laws and Sunder Ganglani.
I come late to the Young Jean Lee party. I know she’s been a hot theater talent for a decade now, and I’ve read about her in American Theatre and elsewhere, and that she has an Obie and a 2011 Googenheim Fellowship. But I hadn’t been exposed to her work yet.
I’m rather stunned, for two reasons. One, for a modern experimental playwright of renown, Church is remarkably low-key. Two, the play’s mood fits in so well with what’s been going on at the Cabaret so far this season that it could have written for the space, (It was commissioned five years ago by New York’s P.S. 122 and other theaters.)
Church is not only not showy, it’s not showy about its subject, evangelical Christianity. It doesn’t overtly mock or mangle or upbraid the concept of faith. It explores it in about as delicate a manner as you could wish for while still being a provocative theater.
Church openly structures itself around group-worship conventions such as prayer requests (in which audience members share sincere prayers) and long confessions of the revelations that brought them to Christ. You keep waiting for the other shoe (or show) to drop, but the play is not forcing any issues. It’s as honest and evenhanded an exploration of such a loaded subject as one could hope for, imbued with laughter, beauty and serenity while remaining admirably distanced and a tad skeptical.
The performers, who use their own names as “Reverends” of the church which they say the Yale Cabaret has generously given them the room to emote about, are given a lot of leeway to tune Church into a naturalistic, informal, familiar and interactive experience. Mostly, they proselytize and move exuberantly around the sparse space. But what really makes Church different from, you know, church, is the audience’s participation. Even if you buy in to premise, and commit to these performers and their vows and (occasionally outlandish) stories, you are in a theater context and thus have license to laugh, grunt, drink and do other things you would avoid doing in an actual place of worship.
Church fits in snugly with many of the Cabaret offerings this year. There’s been an emphasis on new ways of seeing and feeling theater. Boundaries have consistently been tested regarding the need for narrative, the amount of physical movement required, dance as a pivotal component of theater, and matter-of-fact delivery that suggests reality more than performance. Church might have been planned as a culmination of some of these ongoing experiments, but in fact it was a last-minute addition to the Cabaret sched, replacing the new work Paul & Tim Fight a Bear (which was scuttled due to a school-based scheduling conflict of one of its creative team).
Church is a meditation which I’m surprised to see works so well as open discourse. The reserve, reverence and genuine good-spiritness of the cast—which includes current Cabaret co-artistic director Kate Attwell and Managing Director Matthew Gutschick—certainly helps. But so does an audience that’s already been primed for such nuanced reflection by recent shows such as Rey Planta, Persona (which featured Laura Gragtmans, who resurfaces here), Creation 2011 and hundredyearspaceship (in which two of Church’s cast appeared).
Two more shows left in the Cabaret semester. I’m a devoted follower, and Church has helped me understand why.