Man's struggle with accepting the existence of God is a staple of thought-provoking theater.
But it has never been dissected
as dynamically as it is in Stephen Adly Guirgis'
Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, where jailers
and incarcerated murderers in New Yorkers
in New York City's Riker's Island taunt, torture
and test each other's faith or lack of it
in a foulmouthed battle among junkyard dogs.
And thanks to the scrappy Underdog Productions and The Collective, audiences witness a shattering theatrical assault on the mind and emotions.
Director Elena Maria Garcia propels the tale through the night like a junkie's fever dream, with her cast crouching and circling like feral animals on burning sand.
The plot tosses together Lucius Jenkins (Bechir Sylvain), a psychopathic serial killer fighting extradition to Florida's Death Row who genuinely has found religion; Angel Cruz (Arturo Fernandez), who killed a cult leader claiming to be the Son of God; and Valdez (Sheaun McKinney), a sadistic guard who calls his charges "live-stock".
Guirgis' genius is to position the very protagonists seeking redemption as the conduits for the senseless violence that make so many people question the existence of God.
Each character is maneuvering for position and power. Civilized guards surgically inflicit brute violence as a strategic assertion of supremacy. Animalistic inmates use their wits to taunt and resist.
The prisoners' terrents of obscenities are not half as brutal as Valdez debunking a prisoner's hope for a salvation beyond their immediate pain-filled lives. At one point, he ends one of Lucius' riffs with "God hates you."
This 2000 off-Broadway play made Guirgis' reputation for a phenomenal command of language, a barrage of profuse profanity and profound philosopghy blended into the poetry of urbanspeak.
"You are a defect of evolution like a three-legged dog, and when you get to Florida, they gonna put you down," Valdez says.
The show is not perfect and the performances stumble occasionally, but the actors pour manic energy and smoldering frustration into this razor-edged street brawl of intellects. Stoop-shouldered as if carrying a burden, yet moving with a liquid grace, Sylvain convincingly gathers into once soul the capacity to murder without remorse and the ability to appreciate the flight of a bird in the sunlight.
With virtually no budget, Gracia has staged a bare-bones presentation in the roun inside American Heritage's Experimental Space, a black box so painfully intimate that you hear every whispered prayer and every muttered curse.
This is pure theater: a brilliant script that poses questions for the audience to wrestle with hours after the house lights return, executed not with perfection but with passion and intelligencee. |
