A terrifying play

A Bright New Boise

Went to go see a play yesterday, one of civilization’s delights.

Watching the audience watch the play, if you can pull yourself out of it for just a moment, is one of my favorite things to do. Love to see people rapt all together, transfixed on the stage.

And also plays in new york solve a kind of problem I hadn’t fully felt I had, the low-lying irritation of there always being a not-so-great actor in the mix, the world where all the actors are good, not just one, two, or most.

But aside from these pleasures, it turned out the play I went to was truly terrifying. Saw another by the same author last spring; let us say that this one was not as cheerful.

A Bright New Boise is about a man who left his church upstate and started a new job, happily where his natural son happens to work, and whom he intends now to befriend. But the church upstate was one that was built around the immanence of armageddon, where as he thinks, something about the modern world will and ought to be solved by its immanent destruction. He prays for this, repeatedly. He is upset that it does not happen, now.

For most of the play, you the viewer are not quite sure what the man thinks about his old church. Sometimes he lies a little bit about it, and sometimes he does not. The actor playing him did an extraordinary job of portraying someone whose mind is always a little bit elsewhere; and who as you learn, bit by bit, is captivated by a cosmic metaphysic that he does much to conceal but in the end, can’t help but reveal in order to fully express his true contempt for the world; contempt for Idaho, and the people who inhabit it. At one point he yells at a lutheran, right in her face. She’s going to hell, he says. (It is because she is too nice.)

Raised in the roman church, I often find myself a bit naive about the ins and outs of the wilder forms of protestant christianity. I sang in choirs from age six or so that were largely composed of non-roman christians; I loved my mormon and pentecostal friends and the stories they would tell, where our families all slogged us to different churches together. I think the closest I came to the narrative of destruction was when one friend carried us off to a baptist tent revival in (?) middle school. The preacher drew little souls falling into hell that you couldn’t see while he talked, until other lights being dimmed, he finally shone a black light upon them.

But my scattered youthful knowledge of the mainline was for the most part an excellent buffer for many things, the true desire for armageddon among them. Likewise, all the metaphysic that the roman church possesses is right there on the table, no need for hidden drama or secret signs, things you aren’t allowed to tell other people (save that of opus dei, perhaps; the rest reserved for the masons).

When the actor finally pretended as an actor to pray for the armageddon, for the light of the earth to be put out forever, so that a few elect souls would turn into souls of eternal light, well to me it was fucking terrifying. It seemed to me as though this guy with the church upstate wanted in some sense to become demonic and almost achieved it, as humans sometimes do. Hours before, the guy had talked to his natural son about this cosmic situation, talking him into a suicide attempt as well; he refuses to visit the child after the attempt, preferring to pray some more for more of the same. The play ends not long after there.

Watching the audience, which after a point I was fairly terrified of doing, I wasn’t sure what they were thinking. We were rapt, even when no one on stage was saying anything. The play was a good play as such. But while to me at least, Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning managed to draw all the disparate sorts of viewers in, to make distinctions between motivations and to understand the good in what the various all too human characters desire from their trad roman college, something different was happening here, that a day later I’m still unsettled by.

The thing is, how many times have I heard people wish Idaho didn’t exist? Or Alabama or what not, you name it, and let’s also include the place I’m from. So the audience has to reckon with the fact that they in no small part identify with the demon: they too hate the sprawl of the mountain west, they too hate the company that the characters all work for (it’s hobby lobby), and they too wish the meaningless lives, as they think, of these people into oblivion. Sitting there in New York, where no one would wish to consider as other than civilization, I wonder if they got the joke.

I left too quickly to see. But what the play left out of the story, that I’m committed to myself, is that there is an option left between the beauty of a world and country where, as the store manager puts it, one can make a hundred percent profit selling quilting materials and silk flowers to bozos, and the desire to put an end to this misery as quickly as possible. It has something to do with God’s love, which at the present time I am not adequate to the task of describing, other than to say, I do not think it is either nice or hateful, and I do not think it wishes us to keep our cosmic thoughts to ourself.

I think what kept me up last night and what will undoubtedly keep me up tonight as well is the hollow look in the actor’s eyes as he pretended not to have contempt for what he saw in front of him. Love would not look like that, even or especially love that was honest. But then, what would it look like instead?