Home to Jesus
‘This Beautiful City’ questions the faithful
By Don Shirley
The current economic disasters haven’t completely overshadowed the culture war barricades that rose in previous election years.
Last Sunday, a band of right-wing ministers openly defied the tax code’s prohibition against endorsing candidates. Their chief issues: abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Let’s pray – yes, brothers and sisters, pray – that their actions will not only result in the loss of their tax-exempt status but will also help energize California’s battle against the vicious Proposition 8, which would write anti-gay bigotry into the state Constitution.
Meanwhile, on the same day that the ministers behaved in an awfully un-Christlike manner, This Beautiful City opened at Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre, dramatizing a panorama of evangelical activity during the 2006 mid-term election campaign – all of it in Colorado Springs. The city is the home of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, as well as the New Life megachurch once operated by Ted Haggard, then-president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
The Civilians – the New York-based troupe that created This Beautiful City – spent parts of 2006 interviewing a cross-section of Colorado Springs citizens about their experiences with the religious right. Two Civilians, Steve Cosson and Jim Lewis, converted excerpts from the material into sung lyrics and spoken text, resulting in a provocative, engaging docu-musical staged by Cosson.
Fortunately for the dramatic arc, 2006 was the year Haggard crashed and burned, after being exposed as a meth abuser who frequently hired a male prostitute. Several of the characters speak about Haggard’s fall, although apparently the Civilians didn’t get to interview him. But his public comments to the media at the time of his collapse are briefly re-enacted, and a character who appears to be his wife sings a song about the importance of standing by her man, in what looks like a rare departure from the verisimilitude of almost-verbatim quotes.
Actually, if the Civilians had been able to interview Haggard, their production might have become more conventional, about one man’s rise and fall. Instead, it goes for breadth more than depth and offers glimpses of the “civilians” more than the generals. Two other churches get prolonged examinations – a black evangelical congregation whose minister shocked his flock by voluntarily coming out as gay before Haggard was exposed, and a small congregation that’s almost literally underground, in that they take congregants into caves in order to fight the emissaries of evil.
We also hear from individuals outside church settings. The most striking of these are a former civic designer who came out as a transsexual and lost her job, if not her faith, and the explosively angry veteran and father of a Jewish cadet at the nearby Air Force Academy who mounted a campaign against Christian proselytizing at the Academy.
A woman who was truly saved from a loser life by her church affiliation offers a positive look at evangelicalism, while a local alternative newspaper editor (you know the type) offers amusing rumblings from the other side. But it might have been illuminating to have heard from at least one liberal churchgoer. After all, since 1891, a Unitarian Church has existed in downtown Colorado Springs, according to the church’s website.
Six actors (Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Brandon Miller, Stephen Plunkett, Alison Weller) play many roles, including rangers in the nearby Rockies who periodically offer brief, metaphorical tips about how to stay safe while hiking. The transition between characters in different scenes confused me only once.
Michael Friedman’s songs are often in the same rock/folk vein as that of his score for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, seen at the same theater last January. They’re performed with enough conviction that you begin to see the appeal of Christian rock. But that doesn’t mean we’ll join the choir.
This Beautiful City, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Culver City. (213) 628-2772. CenterTheatreGroup.org. Closes Oct. 26.
For more reviews, click on Currently Playing at lacitybeat.com.
Published: 10/01/2008
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