Opening night of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi at the Rattlestick Theater in New York was a benefit for the Matthew Shepard Foundation and a perfect reflection of how prophetic the 1998 play really was. The show portrays Jesus (or, as he is sometimes called, Joshua) as a young persecuted gay man who’s eventually executed -- strung up -- much as Shepard was 10 years ago in Wyoming (he died the day before the play's world premiere). But before that climactic scene, Jesus presides over a gay marriage of two of his disciples. And when asked about Leviticus’s oft-quoted statement that two men lying together is an abomination, he simply asks, “Why would you choose to memorize such a nasty passage?” While gay marriage and reclamation of religion were the stuff of fantasy back then -- Corpus Christi is all the more poignant today because we’ve seen so much of it come to pass.
The play dramatizes classic biblical stories, but McNally incorporates fresh twists to them with references to television, the paparazzi, and football. The main character, Joshua, is a sexually confused young man from Corpus Christi, Texas, who gets picked on a lot and molested by priests. He tries to date girls until he meets Judas, who helps him defeat the bullies and becomes his high school love. Years later, the two meet again as Joshua is accumulating his disciples, all gay men. Their love story threads the play together and makes the inevitable ending all the more difficult. (Mary Magdalene is not in this production, but there is still a prostitute character.) McNally turned one of the oldest stories ever told into a tale of tragic romance.
Corpus Christi first premiered amid a great deal of controversy. The religious right was in an uproar. A fatwa was declared on the play. The show seems tame by today’s standards -- there is, however, a scene in which Judas and Joshua make love (fully clothed) and others in which a male prostitute bares his penis (obscured) and moons the audience. But the idea that Jesus could be a gay man and that being gay enabled his understanding of tolerance and love blew more than a few minds in its time.
The theater troupe 108 Productions has been performing Corpus Christi, directed by Nic Arnzen, around the world for more than two years. But the group arrived in New York for the first time Sunday, the night before the show opened at Rattlestick. With no patron and no stage, the troupe meets sporadically in Los Angeles “at whomever is willing to have the group over to their house,” says Steve Callahan, who plays Judas. The troupe includes women, so many of the characters didn’t register as gay men as they did in McNally’s original version. But the performance was full of life, helped in no small part by the audience, which included McNally, Edward Albee, and Larry Kramer among others.
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