BLASPHEMY ON STAGE?
Baumann, Paul
BLASPHEMY ON STAGE? "Corpus Christi': The play & the controversy Paul Baumann ast May, William Donohue, the ever-vigilant president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, raised...
...He's quite a kisser, that Judas, McNally is forever winking...
...So it was with some apprehension that I made my way up Seventh Avenue toward the MTC last month for the first preview performance of Corpus Christi...
...Sitting through the two-hour preview performance, I was at times irritated, amused, and intrigued, but mostly nervous and finally bored...
...For starters, the pronouns must be reversed...
...band of bar-hopping gay men...
...That decision outraged the theater and civil-liberties communities, and the MTC immediately reversed itself...
...Indeed, our hero, an insecure and vulnerable gay teen-ager adrift in a violent, homophobic world, becomes the grateful partner of a sexually predatory Judas...
...Perhaps most suggestive of all for McNally's subversive purposes is the mystery and power of the idea that Jesus offers us his body---Corpus Christi--as the means of salvation...
...Even twisted almost beyond recognition, the uncanny nature of Jesus' actions speak to us in Corpus Christi...
...We are a long way from Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew...
...Everything else is hidden from you," Joshua tells his occasional lover, Judas...
...The manger is a seedy motel room, Joseph a foulmouthed lout, Mary a blousy, cigarette-smoking and uncomprehending bit of white trash, the disciples a boisterous--"Boy did we party...
...Donohue, who has a gift for strained analogies that rivals McNally's own, has called the play "hate speech," "bigotry," and of course "blasphemy...
...Sure enough, they followed me and joined other protesters in front of the theater...
...The theological question is an old and abiding one: If Christ was "true man," how could he not have known sexual temptation...
...From the expletive "Jesus Christ" to the gospel's exhortations to brotherly love, every double entendre is both potential gag and a potential imprimatur of gay love...
...That said, I am not nearly as confident as Donohue and his allies that the tradition has always gotten sex right or that there will never be a way to reconcile the sense homosexuals have of their own identity and the demands of the church...
...Abuse meekly endured, love wanly extended to all, exhaust Joshua's spiritual vocabulary...
...My ordinary work and churchgoing seem intent on rendering the gospel reasonable...
...Resisting sexual temptation is never a serious consideration for McNally's homosexual Jesus (Joshua is his name...
...McNally wants a gay Christ and seems to think that homosexual suffering and homosexual love can reveal another facet of the Truth that is Jesus...
...Perhaps I would have been more offended if Corpus Christi were a better play--if it had given us a more credible Jesus...
...The play, or the scandal, or both, must go on...
...I'm just a guy like you...
...Really, wouldn't it have been more effective just to hand out a flier on equal rights...
...I could go on...
...Commonweal | 4 October 23, 1998...
...Adultery is forgiven, but then lust in the heart punished...
...Hate speech doesn't ordinarily disavow its motives...
...Though he assumed human nature, he was the "perfect man," not a representative or fallible man...
...ous orthodox answers to this puzzle, all reminding us that Christ was "like us in all things but sin...
...But that's another argument...
...You can come only as close as my body...
...It is this prickliness, this demanding, almost imperious solicitude that makes Jesus such an inexhaustible presence...
...Indeed, in Corpus Christi, which features an allmale cast, women are utterly superfluous...
...the next you are told to relinquish all worldly possessions...
...Access to the theater, however, was not obstructed...
...Joshua is an utterly banal and sentimental figure, without a hint of Jesus' fierce authority or enigmatic otherness...
...He has argued that a similar depiction of a black or Jewish religious figure would be roundly condemned...
...Even after eight years in New York, the sight of two men kissing passionately still makes me exceedingly uncomfortable...
...But the idea of crucifixion---of bloody sacrificial atonement--is much more difficult to get your mind around when presented plausibly on stage...
...McNally's Joshua is all used up in a mere matter of hours...
...Corpus Christi's uncompromising focus on Jesus' maleness, the play's insistence on eroticizing Joshua/Jesus' body, somehow made the crucifixion and the suffering more real...
...He is, at the very least, a relentlessly two-sided character...
...Worse, the salvation Joshua offers is new-age fluff and tasteless therapeutic theologizing...
...I would refer Donohue to a Jerry Seinfeld turn as Elijah on "Saturday Night Live" as evidence that the Department of Ridicule is an equal-opportunity employer...
...So I came out of Corpus Christi thinking oddly orthodox thoughts, thanks to a patently blasphemous play...
...The minute you are comfortable with him, he demands something else, something more, something impossible...
...Once inside, I had to pass through an airport-like metal detection system, but the rest of the evening proceeded without any noticeable interruptions...
...Following that controversy and in response to anonymous threats of violence, New York's Manhattan Theater Club (MTC) decided to withdraw the play from its fall season...
...McNally is no guide, but that hardly settles the question...
...McNally is not trying to expose the heretofore suppressed gay life of Jesus and his disciples...
...At the very least, McNally's tin--actually gnostic ear for the centrality of sexual continence and renunciation to any authentic appropriation of Jesus' story makes Scorsese look like Saint Augustine...
...One instant you are relieved to be able to give Caesar what he demands...
...There is a physicality to the theater that ups the ante, and Joshua's crucifixion is one of the play's more affecting moments...
...Joshua is mocked and killed by self-loathing heteros because he is "King of the Queers...
...However, given the frank and unapologetic homosexual world in which the play is set, the fact that one of the men is a kind of Jesus figure did not add appreciably to my discomfort...
...All men are divine---that's the secret," he instructs those with ears otherwise deadened by disco...
...Instead, McNally is playing around with a number of Christian tropes and themes in an attempt to appropriate the moral prestige of the gospel to vindicate the dignity of homosexual love...
...It's both spiritually ambitious and psychologically inert, as is any drama driven by political argument instead of character...
...Moral didacticism struts and preens upon the boards...
...The hateful heterosexual world that crucifies Joshua is present here as little more than a collection of caricatures mouthing idiotic prejudices...
...Ho, ho, ho...
...Corpus Christi also draws our attention, again and again, to Jesus' divine (in both senses of the word[) sonship and to the significance of his embodiment as a male...
...My anxiety was not lessened by the phalanx of blue-wimpled nuns who suddenly materialized on the sidewalk behind me...
...Only Catholics and their beliefs, Donohue insists, are held up to such ridicule...
...The self-sarisfaction Joshua and his disciples exhibit is as theatrically sterile as it is religiously fraudulent...
...But McNally's sexual/political agenda doesn't leave much room for three-dimensional characters...
...Jesus, Corpus Christi tells us by way Commonweal | 3 October 23, 1998 of warrant, "belongs to us, too," or words to that effect...
...Donohue has described the play pungently as "hate speech dressed up in artistic robes...
...Sins are pardoned, yet judgment is everywhere and uncompromising...
...We're each special, we're each ordinary, we're each divine...
...This is our way," says a disciple at the play's conclusion...
...As the philosophical expression goes, it looks like a category mistake to me...
...Anson Mount plays Joshua as a little lost lamb, as helpless before his adolescent tormentors or in the beefy arms of Judas as he is before his executioners...
...If the very notion of a sexually active Jesus is blasphemous, then Corpus Christi is certainly blasphemy...
...You get the picture...
...The play officially opened, along with the renewal of Donohue's public campaign against it, October 13...
...The threat the play posed to my spiritual weU-being remains to be determined...
...His claims to our sympathy rest entirely on his status as a victim...
...In synopsis it can read that way...
...Joshua's carnal awakening takes place in the men's room on prom night at Pontius Pilate High...
...His one moment of adult anger is directed at a "priest" who anachronistically objects to samesex marriage...
...Christian symbolism is steeped in sexual imagery, and McNally insists on reading every ambiguity literally...
...Recently, liberation theologians have given us a revolutionary Jesus, neocons dress him like a corporate executive, and a good many feminists seem eager to turn him into a gelding...
...Corpus Christi takes the gospel story and overlays and intertwines it with Joshua's prosaic American upbringing...
...Despite Corpus Christi's trivialization of the gospel, I left the theater struck by how resilient the Incarnation story remains as drama...
...Corpus Christi': The play & the controversy Paul Baumann ast May, William Donohue, the ever-vigilant president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, raised quite a ruckus about the fact that Corpus ChristL Terrence McNally's playin-progress, featured a gay, Christ-like protagonist who has sex, off-stage, with his male disciples...
...In short, he didn't inhale...
...The play is set in Corpus Christi, Texas, in what feels like the 1950s...
...Thus Judas's kiss of Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane--certainly the most notorious same-sex kiss in Western culture---is thoroughly eroticized...
...If we have offended, so be it...
...Scorsese, whose film was also the object of protest and boycott, took a shot at dramatizing this metaphysical conundrum by giving us a resolutely heterosexual Jesus who, however fleshly his fantasy life, still won the battle against sexual desire...
...Jesus is a compelling figure to the extent he is a discomforting figure...
...It's not enough to say that "he belongs to us, too...
...You are told to honor your mother and father, then to abandon them...
...The satirical skits dramatizing Joshua's coming-of-age, with their stock impersonations of sadistic nuns and sexually conflicted priests, are trite and old hat...
...In truth, Corpus Christi is by turns cloying and crude, but not, I think, malicious...
...Not even the Romans would crucify someone for taking this drivel seriously...
...A nyone made uncomfortable by explicit talk about sex, especially gay sex, or by the irreverent treatment of religious figures or things Catholic, will certainly be offended by McNally's brazen marriage of gay self-realization and Christian redemption...
...But the playwright makes a point of assuring the audience that "no malice" is intended...
...There is certainly a measure of truth in the latter proposition, but it is not a truth that will be found in Corpus Christi...
...hristians, historians tell us, have a penchant for C demanding a Christ who reflects their own culture and aspirations...
...Theologians have variPaul Baumann is executive editor of Commonweal...
...Indeed, it would take an exceptionally literal-minded theatergoer to mistake the Joshua of Corpus Christi, Texas, for the Jesus of Palestine---or for the Jesus of any realistic dramatic rendition of the Gospels...
...Like Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), McNally takes Jesus' sexuality as a potentially rich subject for imaginative exploration...
...Jesus' sharp-edged righteousness or humbling purity never darken the stage...
...Go figure...
...In conceding McNaUy's sincerity--let's call it a pettish sincerity--I don't want to pretend to be more worldly wise than I am...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 18
