Julia May Jonas’s play-as-church service for LCT3 is imaginative, but falters as it nears the finish line.
Heathens! Faithful! Come join a house of worship. Or, in the case of Julia May Jonas’s new play “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” the Claire Tow Theater will do just fine.
Upon entering the theater, audience members are greeted with a selection of joyous carols and handed a program and church bulletin. A lectern stands at center stage, and a stiff-looking pew sits off to the side. But there aren’t any solemn sermons or routine parables in this play-as-church service by Jonas, who’s also the author of the fiery debut novel “Vladimir.” An imaginative though lopsided LCT3 production, which opened Monday, the show finds many instances of humor and insight in a story about a small-town youth group in 1996 New Jersey.
Rev. Kat (Hannah Cabell) is this parish’s requisite fun, progressive pastor: She’s blunt and well-educated, and runs the youth group, whose members include a high school senior named Chris (Cole Doman) with an alcoholic father. He’s bright and, between his teenage dialect of sputters, mumbles and interjections, has downright poetic moments of wisdom.
That’s what sparks a connection between him and Kat, who enthusiastically serves as both a theology teacher and his emotional sounding board. He’s not the only one struggling: Addie (Mia Pak), who likes Chris, has an eating disorder. As does Beatrice (Annie Fang), a new member of the group who often retreats to the background. And Brian (Savidu Geevaratne), whose parents are deacons, has been practically raised in the church but is overshadowed by the more popular Chris.
The cast has excellent chemistry. And as directed by Annie Tippe, they capture the familiar posturing and insecurity of adolescence, the awkward exchanges and playfulness. This all plays out in short scenes at the church, which, courtesy of Brett J. Banakis’s set design, elicits the feel of a local church that doubles as a community center (retractable walls, portable stage).
Though the use of the bulletin and structure of the play, meant to recall a church service, even with call-and-response, is more appealing in concept than in execution. The youth group’s big events mark the passage of time: a charity dance-a-thon, a liturgical play and a cross-carrying ceremony. Each interaction conveys the characters’ guilty rush of desire — whether for sex, food, connection or attention — or a type of abstinence, with Chris and Kat’s mutual attraction at the center.
Jonas’s “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” like Bess Wohl’s recent play “Camp Siegfried,” juxtaposes faith and sex as sibling hungers and balms. In “Camp Siegfried,” about two teens who fall in love at a Nazi youth camp in Long Island, that faith is in the cancerous myth of Aryan superiority. “Personal Exegesis,” however, embarks on a more philosophical examination of the topic, as when the skeptical Beatrice questions her peers about their beliefs. If Jesus is the place where divinity and humanity overlap, what’s in the spaces in between, Beatrice asks Addie?
And yet, a fundamental “why” is left unanswered: Why are we seeing this? The script offers part of the answer: It’s a memory play. Whose memory? Beatrice’s, though it’s unclear if she’s the architect of what we’re seeing and why she’s brought us here.
There are some signs that we may not be in an objective present: Rev. Kat introducing herself as a “youth minister at Redacted Church in Redacted, New Jersey,” and dreamlike sequences in which the characters act out tableaus of Renaissance artworks like the Pietà, or sing a song about lusting for “puffy nipples.” Some scenes and story lines are more blatantly allegorical than others, and initially it’s hard to tell whether these whimsical movements are from a single character’s perspective or just a characteristic of the work.
Even when she seems like another background character, Annie Fang’s Beatrice is incisive, a little offbeat, always trying to play it cool — the kind of relatable teen heroine who seems adopted from a ’90s film.
The whole ensemble is stellar: Doman’s Chris reads as a typical teenage boy but with such softness and grace that he’s elevated to a kind of messiah himself, a charismatic prophet who speaks the word and forgives sins. Cabell walks a fine line with Kat, whose authority figure is a welcome change from the go-to archetype of the predatory male pastor. As Kat she oscillates among the roles of devout mentor, shrewd academic and petty woman with a crush. Pak’s delicate performance as Addie is at turns adorable (“I had a rock in my shoe so I could feel Jesus’s pain,” she earnestly says of her participation in the Cross Carry) and wrenching, as when she tells the story of Jesus fasting in the desert, emphasizing his pious starvation. But ultimately Addie, who undergoes a fantastical transformation, is part of a story that feels like its own self-contained allegory that’s an awkward fit with the rest. Geevaratne’s wrings out the comedy from Brian’s tireless — and sometimes cringeworthy — efforts to be liked, but his character is noticeably less developed, written to serve just a limited function in the plot.
The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, gives intimate scenes a seductive candlelight feel and makes a bright overhead spotlight shine down like the eye of God. And Wendy Yang’s costume design, from baggy cargo pants with a chained wallet to a patchwork skirt and Doc Maartens, is an instant rewind to the time when millennials reigned.
Jonas’s script begins with a definition of “exegesis”: “The critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of Scripture.” Her play succeeds at using biblical stories and religious traditions to illuminate its characters’ internal thoughts and feelings, but in blurring the line between a translation of dogma and a concrete truth, it leaves us to wonder: the Gospel according to — whom?
Your Own Personal Exegesis
Through Dec. 31 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
