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Story of Jesus in 'Corpus Christi' lends insight into growing up gay
Monday, November 16, 1998 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
NEW YORK -- The newspaper and petition wars have faded into the black hole of last week's news, the chanting counterdemonstrations have packed away their placards, the few remaining protesters seem less passionate than dutiful and even the metal detectors stand forlorn, more pro forma than threatening.
But there's still an extra swell of anticipation as you approach the Manhattan Theatre Club to see Terrence McNally's "Corpus Christi," the controversial pageant in which a group of 13 young male actors reenact the story of Jesus.
Arrive early, because the theater can't predict what kind of commotion there might be. The run sold out long ago; the 300-seat not-for-profit theater is always packed.
The controversy began last spring when the theater announced "Corpus Christi" and began to get protests from, among others, the oddly named Catholic League for Religious Civil Rights. After receiving threats of violence, the theater canceled, only to suffer an answering firestorm from the national theater and civil rights communities. The play was rescheduled, and the opposing sides took to the streets as previews began. Then, in mid-October, the theater critics swept in, expressed their disappointment or sneered their sneer and departed.
Anti-climax, they said. Less drama on stage than on the street. But who lets theater critics do their thinking for them?
"Hate Crime Against Jesus," says the handbill I accept with that exaggerated courtesy with which we First Amendment liberals turn the other cheek of political disagreement. Two intermissionless hours later, the play seems to me the reverse, an act of love - but to some Christians it's the wrong kind of love, because in this version of the story, Jesus is gay and is killed by gay-bashing thugs.
The title refers to McNally's hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, where the play is set. On a bare platform stage, 13 young men gather in modern street clothes. John baptizes each, giving him his own actor's name and then his name in the story. The young man playing Andrew is a masseur, he tells us; Matthew is a lawyer; James the Less is an architect. The 12 are simultaneously New York actors, talking frankly about their craft; young men reflecting on what life was like growing up in Corpus Christi; and the characters in the Bible story.
They have been drawn together - the young Texans and the Bible group, both - by the charisma of another young man, Joshua. A cult, I think we'd call it, but a cult animated by a loving idealism. Not all the young men in either overlapping story are gay; certainly their growing up includes fumbling relationships with women. But the most vivid of the 12, Judas, introduces a confused Joshua to homosexual love.
And Joshua keeps hearing the voice of a demanding father. There is some great destiny in store, resist it though he may.
The title also refers literally to the physical body of Christ - to his very human embodiment, that is, in Jesus/Joshua. It is a secular life of Jesus that McNally imagines, complete with joys and torments refracted through the prism of (one assumes) McNally's own experience. It feels devotional to me, a loving exploration, at least, in which the story of Jesus is appropriated and applied to a grim tale of growing up gay in America.
I think this is how Christians should see the play - as an attempt to make sense of this great theme in unfamiliar terms. After all, every version of Jesus' life is a human construction generated out of selected texts, interpretation, tradition and faith. Jesus has been enlisted to support military preparedness, radical pacifism, you name it: Who can be shocked to encounter a gay Jesus? The shock would be if Jesus were not considered central enough to be appropriated to different experiences of the world.
Theologically, "Corpus Christi" seems to me murky, or rather, incomplete. Who could suspect anything else of a two-hour play?
But theatrically, I found it often impressive. I particularly enjoyed the interweaving of Texas and Holy Land; the layer in which the actors are supposedly themselves seems extraneous. The worst you can say about the play theatrically is that its determined artlessness is sometimes forced, just another example of theater too much in love with its own illusion.
Still, the platform with its simple benches does have the air of a primitive church. The scenes of gay-bashing may be stereotypical, but they chill. And then we come to the crucifixion, where the power of a familiar story retold is greater than in any traditional passion I have ever seen.
Clank, clank, clank - the spikes are driven with slow, fearsome insistence -and the near-naked body is hoisted aloft, contorted with pain, red paint smeared on hands and face, all the more vivid for being brusquely symbolic. Gradually, the body starts to sag, slowly, slowly, slowly, almost as life must ebb from a crucified body.
In this version, the play then ends. "We've told our story," the actors say. There is no resurrection - fittingly so, because this is Jesus in his human guise, not divine. It is the man who dies, and die he emphatically does.
The image of that bloody body crumpled in the air is powerful stuff. But the answering image that leaps to mind is that of Matthew Shepard, the poor battered young gay man, crucified on a Wyoming fence. Centuries of crucifixion art vibrate behind it, but this is a contemporary gay man on stage, slaughtered out of hatred and fear of difference.
"Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it," says Shakespeare's Theseus. McNally's play isn't simple, and I wouldn't presume to peer into his soul to discern his intentions, but "Corpus Christi" feels sincere, not prurient or exploitative.
And McNally is certainly a good enough playwright to know what he's doing. The "let's do the play right here in the stable" amateurish mode of the script (and of director Joe Mantello's production) is fully planned. Once you relax your expectations of theological or political bombshell, it has some charm to accompany its more lurid power.
But when the first theater tackles it in Pittsburgh (and who will, now that the Upstairs Theatre is gone?), we'll send the religion writer as well as the drama critic.
Manhattan Theatre Club is at City Center, 131 W. 55th St. The run ends Nov. 29 and is basically sold out; if tickets are available, they are at 212-581-1212.
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