On Religion

Although I usually detest seeing theater by myself, out of a sense of duty to a fellow producer, I went to see a play – or rather, a theater essay – called On Religion. I’ll admit that was immediately wooed by the notion of a “theater essay,” being particularly fond of the essay form in general, and I wondered how a play would perform such a thing. I was reminded of the traveling religious plays that were popular during the middle-ages and Renaissance. These plays were meant to both instruct and inspire religious feeling, and as I understand, they were quite entertaining. So, if we think about the play as a modern re-imagining of something like the passion play, On Religion did not disappoint.

I could tell you about the basic plot, I suppose, but plot takes a secondary role here. There are four players: a mother who is professor and a naturalist (not an atheist, she says), a father whom we can only call a post-modernist and a secular jew, a son who has decided that he is Christian and wants to become a priest (but whom I’d prefer to call a pragmatist), and a young woman who is going to have his child but has not agreed to marry him. The son dies, or has died. The mother grieves and does not grieve. But mostly, they talk around the kitchen table or conversely lecture and preach from the same podium. And by setting the audience on all four sides of the stage, one immediately feels as though she has pulled a chair up to the table. And in this way, it does engage you on that personal, intimate level of discussion like an essay does, slipping you in and out of different perspectives. Here we are. All together. Having a discussion on religion.

While pragmatism has certainly been on my mind a lot these days, I felt its presence most intensely in this “essay,” which is rightfully a piece of criticism that is also a performance. Although I initially felt most at home with the professor-mother’s arguments against religion and its divisiveness, I very soon understood how her son could react against his mother’s radical empiricism in favor of something else – especially when he sides with the atheists and makes the argument that there is no such “thing” as God, because God is not a thing… and also when he makes the very Rorty-esque argument that religions are like languages. We would never say that one language is more right than another language – they just offer different and unique ways to say the same thing. The son (Tom) is a pluralist. To him, religions are merely languages. In a turn that reminded me very much of William James, religions have value in that individual people are able to make use of them.

Indeed, in a modern world where “love” is deified and embraced, how can we deny religious feeling? Or are both defunct and empty – is kindness (an action, and not a feeling) the only thing we can count on? The play unfolds these questions subtly over the course of 2 hours, and I cannot get them off my brain… Not because they are fundamentally new questions, or ones I have not heard before, but because the way the play asked them without forcing answers. Leading the audience through the thought process of them, suggestively. I would compare the play toI Heart Huckabees, except that I feel like that might be an insult. Huckabees does an admirable job of leading the viewer through a series of existential exercises, but in the end forces an answer that feels like a non answer. It’s jokey and ironic and almost trivializes the investigation you’ve just been through. But On Religion does not do that.

Likewise, it does not take itself so seriously that one spends two hours contemplating the hopelessness of asking such questions. The father, for example, whose experience taking ecstasy is about the closest he has come to a religious experience, has a post-modernist sensibility that everything is ok as long as it makes you happy. And even the mother, superbly played by ex-punk rocker Marguerite Van Cook, conjures up a few blissful moments of neurotic hilarity. And in this sense, the secondary “family drama” allows for the play to act like a play instead of series of lectures and debates, which it more or less is.

And now, as is usual when I try to write about a piece of art that has moved me, I find that there is no replacement for having experienced it first-hand. Reminding me, as they play did, that cultural criticism is perhaps most effective when performed and not written in the dry tomes of a blogger/critic.