Notes from Forum Theatre

Frank Britton, who plays Pilate and Uncle Pino, on doing JUDAS again:

Frank Britton as Pontius Pilate

Venturing back into Jenn’s (our stage manager extraordinaire) office building a few days before Thanksgiving, I experienced an almost overwhelming but wonderful sense of deja vu. It was March 2008 again: the same weather, the same hour. Only this time it was like a family reunion.

From Frank Moorman, who plays Butch Honeywell in JUDAS:

Frank Moorman as Butch (with Jason MCool as Judas)

When I got to our first reunion rehearsal, I was a little late, so I just sat down at my place along the wall, waving to a few people who spotted me. Almost as soon as I hit the seat, I started laughing at a line in Veronica’s Saint Monica monologue. It felt as though I had just been there the day before, and I felt right at home. I’ve been in about three remounts, including one of “the play that must not be named” earlier this fall, but there was a special quality of being at home with this cast, this play, and this character of Butch Honeywell.

That feeling has carried over into performances, with the extra enjoyment of seeing how we all are playing slight variations on the characters and performances, a sign of how comfortable we are with this old friend.

Since the ending of our first run, I have been playing with the idea of writing some comments about one particular line in the play. That post no doubt would have been intricate, thoughtful, probably ponderous, and ultimately confusing. Instead, here are a few comments about some of my favorite lines, at least those I remember now, since my script dropped down behind the bleachers on the night of our preview talkback with the U of Michigan students.

“Intelligence and faith are two different things.” (Sigmund Freud): This is the line I kept thinking about, largely in connection with Hannah’s report of a woman who had asked her after a talkback whether any cast members had rediscovered their faith while working on the play. My unstated response to that has been to note that I can’t imagine anybody asking whether any cast member had rediscovered their intelligence after working on this play, which is really a sign of just how different faith and intelligence are. I’ll stick with the latter.

“I remembered how Jesus had said that God had the biggest love for the least of his creatures and Judas was the leastest creature I had ever seen.” (Saint Monica): This is one of many lines in the play that, in my judgment, challenges Christians to truly believe what their religion is supposed to be about. Jesus’s entire monologue presents that same kind of challenge. I often think of the ending of Sister Helen Prejean’s book, Dead Man Walking, about her work with death row inmates. In an epilogue, she speaks of meeting with the father of a girl who had been brutally raped and murdered by one of her convicts. The father told her that, when he had been called to the crime scene and seen what had been done to his daughter, he said to himself, “I forgive whoever did this.” When I repeated this to a literal-bible Christian I worked with at the time, she immediately said, “I’d kill him. Then I’d forgive him.” It seems to me that the father truly met the challenge of Christ’s teaching, and I say that as a non-believing father of two daughters.

“If you don’t love me, why are you here?” (Jesus, after Judas has looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t love you.”) – This is one of many lines that has both theological and personal overtones, and I think it has implications for how I’ve viewed Butch and his life. A common story-line these days is that, if somebody cheats, then the partner leaves, divorces, murders, cheats in revenge, etc. My experience is that, while people do things like that, some people, and I include myself in this batch, muddle through with levels of unhappiness, disappointment, betrayal, ignorance, and much more, and many stay together through it all. Is it because they don’t see any alternative? Is it because they see divorce as too expensive and marriage having some economic benefits? Or is it that, in one way or another, whether they can even see it or not, they still love each other, just not in ways that they might have imagined in the first flush of passion and devotion?

As with so much else in this play, the lines raise more questions than they answer, and that is one of its great strengths.

–Frank

Just a head’s up—we’ve just added 2 more shows to the JUDAS run, thanks to great sales.   You can buy tickets to the 2 Saturday matinees (12/13 and 12/20, 2pm)  here.

Photograph by Melissa Blackall Photography.