On Halloween a
waterfront warehouse in Brooklyn, N.Y., featured a
striking bit of experimental theater called Hell
House, based on the haunted-house tours given by some
evangelical churches around the country to scare
people away from sin.
While an earlier
show in Los Angeles called Hollywood Hell House
satirized the moralizing of the evangelical haunted
houses, the New York version avoided irony in hopes
that audiences will draw their own conclusions. The stories
involved a cheerleader undergoing a painful, bloody
abortion, two gay men wedding just before one dies of
AIDS complications, and a ''nerdy'' girl being raped
at a rave, then shooting herself in the head.
Each Halloween,
hundreds of evangelical churches stage "hell house"
performances in communities across the United States, a
tradition started by notoriously antigay televangelist Jerry
Falwell in the 1970s, according to the Bloomberg news
service. The hipster theater group Les Freres
Corbusier re-created a hell house that stuck to the
script by a Colorado pastor who sells "Hell House Outreach'"
kits to churches.
The production
wasn't meant to mock the beliefs of fundamentalists,
Alex Timbers, the 28-year-old director of Hell
House and Les Freres Corbusier's artistic director, told
Bloomberg. Although he called real hell houses
"theater of hate,'' he said it's important for secular
liberals to realize that fundamentalists feel their
values are under assault. "The best way to understand is to
present it as a nonjudgmental, sociological
artifact,'' Timbers said. "People can draw their own
conclusions.''
Real hell houses
are designed to convert people to evangelical
Christianity, but Hell House audiences in
Brooklyn weren't expected to take the preaching to
heart: At a preview performance, a fair number of
souls in jeopardy laughed heartily at the sentiments
expressed in the play. (AP contributed to this report)