I am working on a play that is also working on me.  I've taken as my source a news clipping from a year ago about a BBC multi-part production called "Son of God."  For the series, researchers combined information from skull measurements of dead first-century Jewish males, mosaics, contemporary accounts of social and political life in Palestine, and so on to construct a bust of what Jesus might have looked like.  The published picture of the results, of course, looks nothing like our imagined Jesus.  This Jesus is swarthy, heavy-set, with short coarse hair and beard, in other words, "just folks," as my friend from Virginia would say.

The set-up for the play concerns the team that put the picture together (based on accounts contained in the news stories).  The time has come to unveil the picture as part of the series' promotion, and they are just about to go to a press conference to do that (the picture, though, has been circulating in the newspapers for the previous week, as a kind of promotion of the promotion of the show) when the Jesus that appears in their picture appears at their office door, saying to them, "You got it right."  What happens next is what is in process now.

In the beginning I sketched out the story of the play (I "storyboard" the scenes in my scripts before I pen dialogue, stage directions, etc.) as something brief and light and somewhat plot-mechanized: the "trick" of the appearing Jesus basically setting up an opportunity for the characters to talk about religious stuff in a way that would appear erudite without necessarily taxing the audience member too much about understanding or belief (sort of like Heather McDonald's a-little-bit-troubled ex-priest in An Almost Holy Picture).  In other words, the piece had the conceptual skin of a ten- to fifteen-minute play, something quickly puzzling and intriguing and light-fingered.

But the more I looked at this picture of Jesus, the more it demanded something different -- something more marinated.  And what was that?

Jesus -- or the story of Jesus, for those who disbelieve in the divine "J" -- is one of those unignorable forces in our culture. Accept or dismiss him, yes -- but indifference, no.  This picture, in its earth(l)iness, in its de-magnitude, made me hungry in a way all my Catholic upbringing never had -- hungry for something of what Jesus must have offered to the rude men and women who threw themselves over to follow him: peace of spirit in the midst of storm and brutishness.

When I'm cultivating a play idea that is not fruiting easily, I find the universe offering me things for consideration and inclusion.  The marvelous Maria has been reading Leonardo Boff's book on St. Francis' prayer for peace, and our discussions about the quiet spirit St. Francis tried to midwife in people have filtered down.  I picked up on a book on radical Christian writings at the local used bookstore, something I normally would have passed over. For class I've read, again, Gorki's The Lower Depths and have been impressed in ways I wasn't before with Luka's offer of solace to the dying Anna.

And then there are my own changes to add to the hopper: recently turning 49 embarked on a writing career that at times seems more joke than justified, riddled by doubts about whether anything of what I am trying to do will add up to that proverbial hill of beans, one more chimera in a life pot-shotted by the skeet shooting of fate.

And so, this play is not about Jesus at all but about a hunger for a moment, a lengthened moment that would cover like a comforter, when all slings and arrows would cease slinging and arrowing, when taking up arms is done, when it might be possible to re-link (even fitfully) with some of that "oceanic feeling" Freud described as the baby's birthright. 

The struggle in writing the play, then, is not only how to convey this idea to a contemporary American audience buzzed on caffeine and modernized into irony but also how, through theatre, to bring them out of Plato's cave, out of allegory and metaphor, and into something more direct and unmediated and suspensive (that is, suspended and pensive).

Is this theatrical material?  If conflict (and its somewhat-resolution) is the essence of playmaking, what is the conflict here?  Who could dislike Jesus if he decided to make a (re)visit?  What would keep the play from simply being a gabfest, positions trotted out and moved around like checker pieces?  Or do I move into something closer to what Artaud was confecting, spectacles closer to techno-raves washing away critical sensibilities in order to open up other doors of perception?  And what would such noise do to the quiet core at the core of this sensibility?

But I suspect that the questions about approach indicate deeper questions about the purpose of theatre and its place in my American culture.  I think what I am asking myself is this: How to create a theatre that can actually reach deeply into people's lives and give them both reason and rhythm to change themselves -- something, like Jesus, that might get them to at least consider throwing over what they have accepted as acceptable and tempt them toward an abyss' edge that might also be a threshhold?  Other media have done this.  Accounts abound of people's lives changing because of a book, a painting, a piece of music.  Why can't this happen with theatre?  And why hasn't it happened in theatre?

I suspect that I may be over-reaching, may be stained with hubris -- but, like the rest of the team in the office, I am watching the Jesus figure stand at the doorstep and waiting for the nudge in the back that tips me over and pours me out.

©2002 Michael Bettencourt

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays produced in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles, among others. Continued thanks to his "prime mate" and wife, Maria-Beatriz click here for other Commentary by Michael Bettencourt

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