Evangelicals on stage: Guys, Dolls & Ted

I suppose it goes without saying that there’s quite a bit of theater in many religious services. The clothing, the singing, the physicality of so much prayer – it’s no wonder that worship often finds its way onto the stage.

Last weekend, on a trip to New York, I had a chance to see two very different depictions of evangelicalism on stage, in productions written six decades apart, both with a quasi-journalistic underpinning and a heavy overlay of caricature.

The flawed-but-boisterous revival of "Guys and Dolls" now running on Broadway offers the musical depiction, familiar to theater-lovers, of a gifted gambler who falls in love with the upright, and uptight, leader of an urban Protestant mission clearly modeled on the Salvation Army. Based on a short story by the sometime newsman Damon Runyon, the show features what must be one of the greatest stagings of a prayer meeting ever – the scene in which a gambler named Nicely Nicely Johnson offers a testimonial of faith in the form of a sung dream about a conversion experience (“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,'' in photos above and at right). Although it’s not clear whether his testimony is sincere, and although the moralizing Save-a-Soul Mission is depicted as prudish, earnest, and condemnatory, the play ends with the apparent conversion of its hero, Sky Masterson, who joins the mission after falling hard for, and marrying, its leader, Sarah Brown.

Off-Broadway, I managed to catch the final performance of “This Beautiful City,’’ (in photos at left and below) a finely woven and highly entertaining exploration of the transformation of Colorado Springs into the evangelical capital of the United States. This production is so-called documentary theater – a now-familiar genre (think of "The Laramie Project," or the oeuvre of Anna Deavere Smith) in which the creators go out and interview people about a subject, and then actors portray those interview subjects, speaking or singing their actual words, on stage (in this production, there are some composite characters, which I suppose could be seen as artistic license, or as a storytelling cheat, depending on your perspective). “This Beautiful City,” which has an uncertain future but clearly deserves to be produced and discussed beyond New York, is more often funny than moving, but manages to provide a fascinating window into several evangelical congregations, as well as some of the skeptics who surround them (including a pamphleteer of sorts who refers to Colorado Springs as Middle Earth and the evangelical section of town as Mordor). Of course, the show is helped by the fact that one of the congregations it focuses on is New Life Church, and, while the theater company, The Civilians, was gathering its material in the fall of 2006, the congregation’s pastor, National Association of Evangelicals President Ted Haggard, resigned after acknowledging that he had been paying a male prostitute for sex and methamphetamines. (Haggard and his wife came to the show last week; no word on what he made of it, but the show’s writers did say that the Denver regional theater has passed on an opportunity to produce it.)

The parallels between the plays are obviously limited, but each does, to a degree, explore the collision between evangelicalism and a broader culture that greets it with suspicion. I'm viewing these with my religion-reporter hat on; there are other ways to think about these performances, but for those of you with an interest in how religion is portrayed in popular culture, these would be worth checking out.

(Photo at top, by Carol Rosegg, shows Tituss Burgess as Nicely-Nicely Johnson performing "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat" in "Guys and Dolls"; photo at right, also by Carol Rosegg, shows Mary Testa as General Cartwright in the same number. Photo at left, by Craig Schwartz, shows Brad Heberlee in "This Beautiful City"; photo at bottom, also by Craig Schwartz, shows Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brandon Miller, Alison Weller, Brad Heberlee, Stephen Plunkett and Emily Ackerman in that production.)