The oft-heard edict among patrons of the arts is that “Christian” makes a great noun but a lousy adjective. Within the performing arts world, Christian theater reputedly tends toward the churchy, the didactic, and, perhaps most offensively, the untalented. Add to that a suspicion of the theater as inherently un-Christian that goes back for many centuries, the reputation of contemporary drama in particular for being steeped in moral relativism and downright hostility toward religion, at least in its orthodox form (note the controversial 1997 production in New York of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, in which Jesus and his disciples are depicted as sexually fraternal homosexuals), and it’s no wonder that America’s Christians have been staying away from the theater in droves.
But among practitioners of this ancient medium are theater artists who are responding to this void, filling it with new works rooted in a Christian sensibility. Across North America in select urban markets, there are new Christian drama companies, often founded by theater artists in their 20s and 30s who feel duty-bound to supply an alternative for Christians’ entertainment dollars. Some are groups of theater professionals who happen to be Christians, while many are companies that have their evangelizing focus written into their mission statement, such as Art Within, a young group that operates out of Atlanta’s 14th Street Playhouse at the center of the city’s arts community.
“In the popular art and media of the day, we’re constantly being shown sin glorified and justified, but we never get to see it redeemed,” says Bryan Coley, Art Within’s artistic director. “As Christians we’re very good at criticizing the mass media, and looking at the large influence that the media has on our lives; but I feel that God has convicted me on that, and it’s not enough for me to sit and complain—I need to put something in its place.”
Coley, now 37, launched the theater company in 1997, when he was a manager of new technology at Turner Entertainment Networks. “At the time, I was subscribing to many different theater groups in Atlanta, and I was walking away from these plays that were holding up dysfunctional lives as art.” In response, he formed a small team of playwrights and actors that would borrow for its motto the words of Michelangelo: “Criticize through creating.”
In the early days, Art Within struggled with the problem that besets virtually every Christian theater group: a dearth of good scripts. Compounding the problem, artistic directors of Christian performing arts companies are contacted by patrons who would rather see yet another revival of The Music Man or The Sound of Music than a new work that features profanity and morally complicated characters, even when the new work is deeply Christian. This urbane grumbling certainly falls upon the ears of upstarts like Art Within, with their operating budget of $212,000. A case in point is Art Within’s recent show, The Song of the Bow, by Wayne Harrell: two large faith-based organizations from the area rescinded their funding when they learned the play dealt with homosexuality. But pressure to stick with “safe” family drama is felt even by the directors of larger, long-standing companies, like Lamb’s Players Theatre’s Robert Smyth. Having led Lamb’s Players Theatre as artistic director since 1985, Smyth has a budget of almost $4 million to work with each year.
“A lot of our letters start out, ‘I thought you were Christian,'” Smyth says. “We are not explicitly a ‘Christian company,’ since it is not written into our mandate; but a lot of people expect us to be preachy because we’re Christians. Christ’s example was that he was a preeminent storyteller. This included a variety of different metaphors and ambiguous ways of telling a story.” While the Lambs don’t set out to provide a safe haven for clean entertainment, their choices are still very tame by the standards of the general theater community in San Diego.
“The way I see it, if we’re getting flak from the church and flak from the secular press, we’re probably doing the right thing,” says Smyth, whose company can claim nearly 8,000 season subscribers and is widely regarded as a standard-bearer among Christians in the performing arts. “Metaphor does not communicate the same way a sermon does, so when you take the didactic style and try to put it in a legitimate theater, the message loses a lot of its effectiveness. But theater can be a great educational tool, particularly since it’s a word-based medium.”
The success of Lamb’s Players Theatre is proof that Christians need not abandon the stage. So too in other regional arts scenes—in Vancouver, for example, where the third-largest resident company is a Christian group, Pacific Theatre. In spite of declining theater attendance overall, Pacific Theatre is growing steadily, while gaining increasing acceptance by the local arts community and media.
“In the last few years in Hollywood, and in the performing arts world too, there has been an increased openness to spiritual talk,” says Ron Reed, Pacific Theatre’s artistic director. “In America and Canada we’ve seen tv shows and movies that may not be specifically ‘Christian,’ but they have Christian characters who aren’t just in the story to be lampooned—they’re people who the audience is asked to take seriously. And yet as secular as the U.S. is, Canada is even more so, so the arts community is naturally very suspicious of Christianity. But over the last four years or so, we’ve seen a great relaxation over our Christian mandate. People are acknowleding that these spiritual questions are worth asking, and the appeal to what we’re doing has grown.”
The asking of these questions, and an ongoing dialogue between believers and atheists, has been encouraged in some instances by talkback sessions. After each performance of last fall’s The Song of the Bow, Art Within hosted an onstage conversation in which audience members could interact with participants in the play. The talkbacks have led to some heated discussions between gay and straight audience members, as well as across religious boundaries. Coley says that non-Christians who aren’t used to seeing Christians disagree with each other are encouraged to see that not all Christians “think the same things.”
The Song of the Bow asks how Christians should respond to people whose values conflict deeply with their own, encouraging its Christian patrons to not hide behind the culture war’s badge du jour of tolerance. “Christ didn’t call us to be tolerant, he called us to love people,” Coley says. “All this talk about tolerance in our culture makes Christians indifferent, and mousy, and makes us not want to take a stand against anyone with any conviction, since to do so would turn ourselves into bigots.”
Like Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre, Art Within has begun to enjoy greater acceptance within the local arts community while seeing attendance increase each year; they have just been nominated for their first Abby Award (Atlanta’s arts awards). But if the history of more established groups is any guide, it won’t get any easier to stick to their agenda of consistently challenging fare—or to avoid the occasional threat of insolvency.
“It wouldn’t be fun if it didn’t come close to crash-and-burn every once in a while,” Smyth says from San Diego. “God has kept us on the edge of rigorous excitement and many near-disasters: he’s always kept us on the edge, but then he extends the edge. I think it’s where most of us want to be. It’s dangerous, but I’d rather be there than in an institution that doesn’t have to be constantly creative and dependent on grace.”
Arthur Menke is a writer who lives in Chicago. He is the author of the plays Dollar Store, Midnight Posse, and The Make Believe Savage.
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