Gospel Uplifts “Oratorio for Living Things” and “Oh Happy Day!”
So why did “Oratorio” ultimately leave me feeling wistful? Repetition, Christian tells us, is the agent of both measurement and meaning, and during “Oratorio” I found myself fixating on the tiny differences between this production and that earlier, seemingly identical one from 2022. (To everything there is a season, and perhaps the pandemic, oddly, suited “Oratorio.”) Evans has again directed the performers to smile frequently, to make eye contact with us as they sing. Three years ago, this made them appear like fellow-congregants shaking hands across the pews, but now some shift has happened—maybe our escalating sense of crisis, maybe their higher degree of polish—and that smooth graciousness can seem a little cloying. As the show moves on from its glorious first hour, the last thirty minutes veer toward the saccharine. “If you’re here, you have to change,” someone sings, and it sounded to me at that moment more like Sunday school than Sunday service.
Christian has long been interested in the church clock, and she has written several works celebrating the old canonical hours, including the extraordinary “Terce,” from 2024, to be performed at nine in the morning, and the streamable “Prime,” which you should listen to at 6 A.M. Obeying the logic of the breviary, I believe “Oratorio” should be brought back at regular intervals; every repetition will change it, inevitably, again. Even now, I’m thinking about the astonishing beginning of the show, which is somehow overwriting my memory of the less fulfilling end. Time moves on ceaselessly, Christian’s libretto proclaims, which is her version of the good news. “We are in the middle,” Christian assures us. “We aren’t at the end / of a loop.”
There’s a very different kind of pseudo-church service taking place inside “Oh Happy Day!,” Jordan E. Cooper’s own Biblically inflected piece, playing downtown at the Public. A frustrating but occasionally beautiful production, directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, it operates as a kind of devotional-for-one—a simultaneous baptism, prodigal return, and apotheosis for Cooper himself.
The playwright and actor, who was nominated for a Tony for “Ain’t No Mo’ ” two seasons ago, plays Keyshawn, a man who’s come back home under duress: in fact, he’s recently dead, but his spirit must complete a task before he can go to his reward. Thrown into the streets as a teen, long ignored by his homophobic father (Brian D. Coats), and estranged from his sister, Niecy (Tamika Lawrence), and her son, Kevin (Donovan Louis Bazemore), Keyshawn has been divinely ordered to somehow rescue them all from a flood (the capital F is implied), which is about to wash away their neighborhood in Laurel, Mississippi. Keyshawn’s furious, of course, that God wants him to set aside his very valid resentments in order to save his family. Why didn’t his father ever come looking for him, especially once he knew Keyshawn had turned to sex work to survive? But God, who appears in the guise of each of the various members of Keyshawn’s family, won’t hear “no” for an answer.
The show is narrated by three angelic “Divines” (Tiffany Mann, Sheléa Melody McDonald, and Latrice Pace), wearing shimmering violet evening gowns. (Qween Jean designed the costumes, some of which, hilariously, light up.) The Divines buoy Keyshawn’s mood by singing several new works written by the gospel composer Donald Lawrence, who cleverly integrates the language of stage performance into his lyrics. “If you want to change what you’re seeing . . . reset!” the Divines sing, as bright as the trumpets at Jericho, while Keyshawn rearranges the theatre props—say, a chair he’s just flung across the yard—to try a particular family encounter again. The play, too, repeats its gestures, sometimes wearingly: Keyshawn continually flings himself against his family’s callousness whereupon a vision of God chastises him. The goal is Keyshawn’s eventual weeping breakdown. Luckily, the singing is there to bear the rest of us up, up, up.
It’s striking that there is suddenly so much theatre-but-make-it-church material this fall. New York Theatre Workshop recently produced “Saturday Church,” a Sia musical that contains a queer ballroom version of a service, in which J. Harrison Ghee presides as Black Jesus and the dancers regularly tear off their choir robes; Playwrights Horizons just premièred Jen Tullock’s solo play “No One Can Take You from the Hand of God,” about a woman who leaves her abusive religious upbringing only to admit that she is homesick for her faith. And at Ars Nova, the glittering “pastor’s kid” writer-performer Brandon Kyle Goodman acts as both preacher and joyful sex-educator (imagine a Mr. Rogers who sports both a cardigan and fetish gear) in the deliriously sex-positive “Heaux Church.” Their gospel includes cheerful teaching interludes by puppet genitalia—Floppy the purple penis struggles with feelings of shame—and plenty of congregational participation, including some hands-and-tongues-on instruction using glazed donuts.
You can’t swing a censer in this town right now without hitting someone who, though raised in the Christian church, doesn’t feel at home in the service as it is. It’s no coincidence that so many of the projects are explicitly queer reclamations of its structures and ornaments. all find value in its musical traditions. (One joyful noise can sound like another.) We are clearly in a time of desperate spiritual seeking, and it’s notable that so many have found answers inside the theatre. In “Oh Happy Day!,” Keyshawn can’t understand where he’ll get the materials for an ark until he notices how easy it is to dismantle his father’s house. The wood for a new construction is in front of him; he just needs to tear down the old place and build something new. ♦
