Theater Corpus Christi: Why it irks us
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN
Due to the outsize publicity given
Terrence McNallys Corpus Christi, which opened at the
Manhattan Theatre Club in New York Oct. 13, its savage treatment at the hands
of secular New York reviewers is already common knowledge. Is there a point in
postmortems?
I think so. Though the play itself deserves only a footnote in a
survey of modern drama, its worth trying to look at it calmly. What one
might call the Corpus Christi Case merits extended reflection,
especially by Catholics.
Its worth noting, for example, that thanks to the angry
protests of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the play sold
out its 8-week run before the opening. If the league had not fanned the fires
lit by papers like Rupert Murdochs New York Post, there would have
been lots of empty seats by the third night, when I saw it. The league
couldnt care less, of course, since the controversy undoubtedly attracted
new members, thereby financing more advertising to exploit the very real fact
that public expressions of anti-Catholicism are often allowed a spurious
respectability.
Although the notion of presenting Jesus as gay is at first
disturbing to many -- including a straight type like me -- McNally deserves the
benefit of the doubt. As the author of Love! Valor! Compassion!
along with The Master Class and my personal favorite, The
Perfect Ganesh, there is no reason to believe his motive was
exploitative. If he was trying to be offensive, it was primarily to force
people like myself to seriously consider his basic metaphor: Jesus the
queer.
He isnt offering a historical rereading of the Jesus story.
Profoundly disinterested in recent New Testament scholarship, he includes bits
and pieces from the gospels with the naiveté of a pre-Vatican II
Catholic high school drama group.
Only theological thuggery would pronounce the play blasphemous.
For members of the Christian Coalition, with their loathing for homosexuals and
their assumption that gays are inherently evil, presenting Jesus as homosexual
is contemptuous. For a homosexual playwright such as McNally, however, to do so
would seem an effort to offer praise and to claim an identity with him.
In the play, 13 pleasant young men gather in a circle on a raised
wooden platform. One comes forward to tell the audience that theyre going
to present an old and familiar story, one that has never been told
right before. After a sweet rendition of Were You There When They
Crucified My Lord?, John (Michael Irby) calls the men forward and
baptizes them one by one. I bless you and I baptize you and I recognize
your divinity as a human being, he proclaims, and each apostle is given a
brief moment of self-identification -- as a lawyer, a fisherman, a hairdresser,
a hustler.
Sense of tradition missing
McNallys alteration of the gospel text hardly seems worth
sending on to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, although someone steeped in the
tradition would have presented a deeper sense of an ancient and respected
Christian ritual; here the material has simply been rendered trite. The
playwright wants to say that each of us is a son of God (hes not very
strong on daughters of God), and hopes that well feel challenged, perhaps
usefully outraged. Unfortunately, his rendering of the material is a
sentimental parody of humanism.
Proceeding to a retelling of the life of Joshua (clearly intended
to be Jesus), McNally wants to make a plea for tolerance and love but casts the
material in such simplistic terms that we pat ourselves on the back for being
more sophisticated than the protesters across the street. Although it must have
been difficult to grow up homosexual in Corpus Christi, Texas, (McNallys
home town), its heavy-handed to cast Fr. McMullen as the ultimate bad guy
because he wanted Joshua to play football or for Judas to become Joshuas
first lover on the night of the high school prom.
To be fair, the sex in the play is never lurid, but reviewers who
suggest that few theatergoers would be upset are disingenuous. The intimation,
no matter how lightly sketched, that after a days preaching Joshua,
played by Anson Mount, and his disciples celebrate with a drunken orgy, is
deeply offensive to believers -- and tasteless to others.
Even worse from a dramatic point of view, the central figure of
the play is weak and uninteresting. Though Joshua occasionally hears a voice
saying, This is my beloved son, and says, You can come no
closer than my body; everything else is hidden, we never understand why
others would be drawn to him. He is a Jesus that neither homosexual nor
heterosexuals would bother following.
Nor do McNallys hardworking actors, some of whom play
multiple parts, have material with which to individualize whatever apostle they
portray. You might think the fact that Joshuas lover is the one who
betrays him to the fag-haters in priests robes would create
some powerful stage moments, but Judas remains a sinister stick-figure whose
motives are never explored. At Catholic University I once wrote a play about
Judas that Walter Kerr wisely decided not to produce, but even my Judas was
more interesting.
Only nervous laughter
McNallys plays have often been criticized for lack of
structure, but he has consistently shown a real talent for humor. When an HIV
positive character in Love! Valor! Compassion! complains,
Im sick of straight people. ... Theres too goddamn many of
them, its both funny and affecting. In contrast, the laughs in
Corpus Christi seem nervous and adolescent.
Whats worse, changes in the New Testament story that might
have a point are not followed up or even weaken dramatic impact. For example, a
minute after Joshua tells the centurion, Your faith has made you
whole, the latter reappears to say his wife is dead, but the situation is
simply dropped. Later, a crucifixion sequence is interrupted by a brief scene
in which a sadistic nun strikes a young girl on the hand with a stick.
It is equally hard to understand why McNally presented Mary as a
lush, and Joshuas refusal to allow her to enter the room just as the Last
Supper is about to take place seems like an odd attack on the womens
ordination movement.
If McNally is no Chekhov or Brecht, he has a reputation as a
serious playwright and is in the enviable situation of working regularly with a
solid New York theater eager to produce his plays. Over the years he has
prepared the upper middle-class audience of the Manhattan Theatre Club for
greater acceptance of homosexual themes; this time he has committed dramatic
hubris. At the very least McNally should have emphasized Joshuas concern
that all our relationships, heterosexual and homosexual, transcend manipulation
and that we make sure others are never reduced to objects.
To his credit, McNallys plays do not idealize the homosexual
milieu he draws on. If he wants to influence a wider public than the in-group
audience at his theater, however, he needs to create credible positive images
with which more people can emotionally identify. Though I suspect that most of
those who picketed Corpus Christi would have disliked the play,
McNally has already gone some distance in the direction of creating credible
images with Love! Valor! Compassion! in which four homosexual
couples share friendship, heartache and betrayal. At the end, there is
recognition of a common frailty and of the characters capacity for love
and community.
Would it not be possible to present the experience of a similar
group who share their lives with someone they come to recognize as a spiritual
leader and plumb more deeply their religious (not necessarily institutional)
yearnings?
To cleanse ourselves of fury
My parish bulletin urged me to join the Catholic Leagues
protest of a blasphemous play. Apart from the idea of condemning something
without seeing it, such a reaction sees no need to cleanse ourselves of the
anti-homosexual fury that pervades both church and society. Why is it that I
have never heard a sermon insisting that homosexuals be treated with the same
respect as others? The U.S. bishops have issued some exemplary statements on
this theme; why arent they drawn upon?
Its not only that Corpus Christi opened the same
week that a young homosexual student was killed in Wyoming; anyone aware of the
psychological pressures on Catholic high school boys knows that there is
immense work to be done. Church authorities and moral theologians need to
engage in open dialogue on norms of behavior. We must begin now to teach each
other, by word and example, that McNallys metaphor of a gay Jesus may be
just a contemporary extension of Isaiahs image of the suffering
servant.
Joseph Cunneen, NCRs film reviewer, taught drama
in Fordham Universitys theater department.
National Catholic Reporter, October 30,
1998
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