Blasphemy as Theatre

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[It is my pleasure to hand the reins of Babylblog Blogbylon over to a guest commentator: cast member Heather Lee Rogers, who will be playing the role of Erishka in the show.   Take it away, Heather! --JL]

Reading Jeff’s blog about being a kid in church brought up a lot of memories for me.  I was raised in the Episcopal church, in a very church-active family.  My father remains the fix-it-man “Saint” of Saint Andrews and my parents switch off years on vestries and outreach committees.  So as a kid I did time in Sunday school and children’s choir.  As a teen I babysat in the nursery, cleaned tables for pancake breakfasts, and spent years as an “Acolyte” – like an alter boy for you Catholics, but girls do it too.  Our church, affectionately called “Saint Andrews By The Tracks”, had the Boston commuter rail running right between us and Main Street.  And no matter when the service started, as they adjusted over the years, the train would inevitably blast by right in the middle of the sermons and Bible readings.  I remember thinking the adults were so dumb because they never tried to speak any louder when the train went by!  One Sunday, they did a Youth Participation Service or something I was asked to read a Lesson.  I was a big hit, got invited to join the adult reader pool, and that was the end of lighting candles in acrylic robes for me.

I loved doing the Bible readings.  Not because I had much interest in the Bible, but because it was a really challenging thing to do!  The church secretary would mail out the section in advance  and I’d mark it up like crazy.  Where in those 14-line sentences were the VERBS?  Where did I need to pause or stress a word to drive home the point of all that begetting and begetting and begetting?  And then I’d practice it out loud a few times to make sure I didn’t trip over names like, say, Belshazzar or Nebuchadnezzar.  All said, I only put in about a half hour of preparation most weeks, but it made a big difference.  The little old ladies who sat in the back pew would shyly tap my elbow during coffee hour to whisper, “We love it when you read, Dear.  You’re the only one we can hear!”  And the better speakers in the congregation would give me little winks and shoulder pats.

My mother, on the other hand, didn’t like it one bit.  She thought I was showing off, said I was using church and the Bible as an opportunity to PERFORM which she thought was disrespectful and inappropriate.  It’s ironic to now be performing in a play about religion, set in a pretend temple.  My mother is a reformed Catholic.  She also disapproved of the fact that one of our Ministers would let her voice spin off into glorious improvised descants during some of our more joyful hymns.  I just thought she prayed best when she sang.   We were both sinning in her book.

But the thing was, I WASN’T trying to perform or show off.  I was just trying to do a good job and tell the story.  Make sense of archaic text, make it understood, make it heard above the train! Tell the story.  And one thing I’ve been rolling around in my head as we rehearse Babylon Babylon is how much religion is dependant on good storytelling.  How much of a person’s faith is wrapped up in their love of these stories our cornerstone tenets just happen to be couched in?  Do some religions thrive for centuries while others die out because the survivors have the more dramatic, emotional, juicier stories?  I mean what percentage of the world’s Christians can name all Ten Commandments, but EVERYONE knows how freakin cool Moses was when he stood up to that Pharaoh, parted the Red Sea and hexed the Egyptians with locusts and frogs!   I mean FROGS, people, falling from the sky!

So in Babylon Babylon we’re preparing to tell you a lot of good stories that would have been part of the vernacular of this diverse city in some fantastically entertaining ways.  My character works in the Temple of Ishtar and I’m beginning to think that the key to her faith has got to be her relationship to these stories.  Maybe they were the recruiting factor in her career choice, maybe it’s her childhood love of them that draws her back whenever she has doubts.

I was lucky as a kid.  We had some great Ministers come through my church and the most effective were always the best storytellers.  There was this one, Father Paul, who gave both a sermon for the adults, and a story for the kids at every service.  He invented character voices, used his whole body, and he was full of passion.  My mother thought he was a frustrated actor.  But he knew what he was doing.  He knew that long after the weeks’ psalms, lessons and sermons were forgotten, it would be that beautiful Stone Soup story for the kiddies that would nag on your conscience the next time a stranger held out a hand.

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