In the beginning were the words, and in the end were other words: the dialogue in Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi.”
After all of the heated talk flung about here during months of controversy — court filings, letters to the editors of the two local newspapers, anonymous hate mail to the play’s director, Jonathan Gilbert, callers to local radio shows — the words that ultimately mattered most were the ones uttered on stage in Friday’s opening-night performance, the first of six sold-out shows.
It was a wonderful production, filled with passion and poetry and humor, as well as a kind of luminous spirituality that quickly transcended the contemporary frame that McNally has jammed down onto this ancient and, to some, most important of all stories. “Corpus Christi,” which chronicles the life and death of a gay Christ figure and his lively disciples, has started arguments in many of the places, from its 1998 New York premiere onward. As Gilbert and his talented troupe made clear, however, it’s well worth the fight.
The production staged by the Indiana University-Purdue University at Ft. Wayne (IPFW) theater department had to clear two legal hurdles before the student actors could take the stage. Last week, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago refused to issue a preliminary injunction to halt the play. The decision upheld last month’s ruling by U.S. District Judge William Lee. Seeking the injunction was a coalition of Indiana state representatives and Ft. Wayne residents who find the play blasphemous. They maintain that, since the government cannot promote religion, a taxpayer-supported institution such as a university should not be allowed to attack religion, either.
Except for a smattering of religious activists who brandished signs and yelled through bullhorns at playgoers entering Studio Theater, though, all of the significant action Friday night was on the stage. (Sample signs held by protesters outside: “Got AIDS Yet?” and “Fry in Hell, Faggot.”) University officials had beefed up security, but there were no arrests or skirmishes.
On a bleak black stage bounded by split-rail fencing that was obviously meant to recall the death of Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming man beaten to death reportedly because of his homosexuality, “Corpus Christi” unfolded. By turns funny and enormously moving, the play’s core message of tolerance and love ended up as a quiet but forceful rebuke to those who had sought to put a hand over its mouth. Updating the biblical story did not dilute or ridicule the sacred message, but rather revealed why the tale still is so urgently relevant.
Especially noteworthy was the performance of Brian James Porter as Joshua, the Jesus figure, who must mature from a sensitive gay teenager growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, to a dynamic leader. Porter’s dark good looks and intensity made him a captivating figure. Playing the roles of disciple Thomas and a God figure — all of the actors except for Porter play multiple characters — Reuben Albaugh was a ham with a born performer’s effortless flourish. Josh Richey’s James the Less gets the most powerful line at the play’s end — as Joshua dies on the cross, he implores the audience, “Look what they did to him” — and he delivers it with desperate power.
IPFW Chancellor Michael Wartell, who attended the opening-night performance, has made it clear that the university does not endorse McNally’s views. But a university must be “a marketplace of ideas,” he said Friday, and that sometimes means providing a forum for ideas that are challenging and offbeat. That is why the university fought hard to see that “Corpus Christi” was produced.
The man who started all the fuss, Gilbert, 20, was a nervous wreck just before the show, smoking cigarettes, drinking a Wild Cherry Pepsi and keeping an eye on the small knot of protesters. Gilbert chose the play for his senior directing project months ago, never dreaming, he said, that he would set the whole town abuzz and draw journalists from across the country.
“I certainly didn’t think this would happen,” Gilbert said before the show, over a hasty dinner at an Italian restaurant. “I figured we’d have a few protesters. That was it.” He bristled at suggestions that he deliberately chose a controversial play to make him a more attractive candidate for the graduate playwriting programs to which he plans to apply. “I don’t sleep. I’ve lost weight. We have to have `Mission Impossible’ tactics to get into the theater,” he said, referring to security checks and bomb-sniffing dogs at the theater. “This isn’t pleasant.”
But in the end, the play rose above the fray, its message undiminished by misunderstandings. “We are all mother, father, brothers and sisters, each to the others,” Joshua says, and it is those words, not the ones shouted through the bullhorns, that resonate.
