New Haven Theater Company Takes A Leap Of Faith

Marty Tucker as Pastor Paul in The Christians. New Haven Theater Company presents Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, from Thursday, Feb. 27 through Saturday March 8. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

Pastor Paul can all but see the boy burning to death in front of him. In one universe, he is there, on the ground, watching the flames devour his body until only ash is left. The smoke, the smell, the cries of humanity are overwhelming. Blink, and it’s just another Sunday morning at church, and the sanctuary is packed to the gills. A cross, glowing blue and white, rises imposingly in the background. Paul keeps speaking, a microphone just inches from his lips.

So does the boy go to heaven because he is fundamentally good? Or is he condemned to the fires of hell because he is not a true believer?

That question is at the core of Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, which opens this Thursday at New Haven Theater Company. Set entirely in a megachurch, the work tackles a crisis of faith and the fallout that comes from it, telling the story of a community as it splinters and breaks in real time. As it follows one pastor’s unspooling, it becomes a testament to the fickle nature of belief itself—and an open-ended question about what people should do with it.

Performances run Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through March 8 at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven. It is directed by Deena Nicol-Blifford with an intimate cast of just five. Tickets and more information are available here.

“Having these raw kinds of conversations with people is becoming increasingly difficult,” said Nicol-Blifford in an interview last week. For her, the play “kind of flexes that muscle, of being able to have good, clear conversations. Learning something about yourself and probably about the topic that you’re talking about.”

J. Kevin Smith as Elder Jay and Marty Tucker as Pastor Paul. New Haven Theater Company presents Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, from Thursday, Feb. 27 through Saturday March 8. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

First premiered at Playwrights Horizons a decade ago, The Christians follows the gentle and dynamic Pastor Paul (Marty Tucker) as he makes a major, public and doctrinal faith decision that affects the members of his church immediately and in ways he could not have imagined. After 20 years, it’s a seismic shift, so much so that his body often seems like a live wire in the middle of the sanctuary.

Or as he says, “There is a crack in the foundation of this church, and I’m not talking about the building.”

Maybe the timing is right to take a leap of faith. The church has paid off its debt, and Paul has his ostensible allies, including his wife Elizabeth (Susan Kulp) and longtime supporters like Elder Jay (J. Kevin Smith), a board member who keeps an eye on the church’s financial survival. But there are others who struggle with a new set of beliefs, among them longtime congregants (Margaret Mann as Sister Jenny) and conflicted fellow faith leaders themselves (a fiery Gavin Whelan as the associate pastor, Joshua).

What follows, then, is a dispute over divinity, doctrine and the limits of grace, all framed as a series of weighted and thoughtful conversations between Paul and the members of the church. Trading off a set of black, handheld microphones like those used in churches across the country, parishioners struggle aloud with their faith, sharing enough of themselves to seem entirely human. Around them, the set is a kind of sixth character, with a larger-than-life cross, lectern-turned-pulpit and two bright, often animated monitors that situate the audience in the heart of a large sanctuary.

In one sense, this is a play that feels uniquely about Christianity, including the fixed and unchanging nature of belief and the consequences Paul faces for stepping out of spiritual line (credit to Tucker, whose offstage experience includes years as a deacon in the United Church of Christ). There’s a central, sometimes painful question about what it means to live and die in God’s image, and what is at stake when the hard boundaries of that image suddenly shift, and the bottom falls out. 

Margaret Mann as Sister Jenny. New Haven Theater Company presents Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, from Thursday, Feb. 27 through Saturday March 8. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

If there are faith traditions that welcome dissent—plenty of Protestants are universalists, for instance; Jewish people have a whole book about faith leaders asking questions and arguing with each other—the Evangelical Church is not really one of them, and Paul pays for it. At moments, The Christians feels like an embellished biography of Rev. Carlton Pearson and his dramatic fall from grace (Hnath has suggested that a stronger parallel is Antigone). 

But the play—in a credit to both the cast and to Hnath, who grew up in an Assemblies of God megachurch in Orlando—is also about so much more than a disagreement over doctrine or a commentary on the performative nature of faith. It’s about how people order the world around them, and struggle to bend when that order is tested. In Paul’s inelegant unraveling, surely there is something that members of the audience can recognize in themselves.

Yes, the belief in God is an act of magical thinking: it defies logic for something so big and intangible that it’s often hard to articulate. But so is choosing to have children, or aiding and abetting a crime to save a person’s life, or practicing joy in a world that is turned completely on its head. In a country defined by political extremes, the show breaks down boundaries one conversation at a time, suggesting in the process that dialogue might be the way forward.

At its center, a small but mighty cast and crew carries this production. In Nicol-Blifford’s able hands, every character brings another dimension to the show. Kulp, who is juggling multiple performances this spring, brings a depth to Elizabeth that makes her so much more than the meek and obedient church wife, somehow steel-spined and soft, communicating whole worlds of understanding at the same time. Smith, who moves in a kind of spiritual locktstep with her, is big-hearted and generous with a cool and cautious edge, and we see that tension play out in real time.    

Gavin Whelan as Associate Pastor Joshua. New Haven Theater Company presents Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, from Thursday, Feb. 27 through Saturday March 8. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

Whelan stuns as Associate Pastor Joshua, whose decision to break with Paul causes ripples in the church that undo decades of trust in a matter of weeks. In the role, he nimbly walks a line between tempered compassion and immense cruelty, so personally torn that the audience can almost feel it (imagine a cross between Jonathan Edwards and J.D. Vance, but with a little angel dust sprinkled unexpectedly in). The result is a character who is hardened to the world, and yet hopeful that he has the knowledge and the skills to heal it. Woven in through it, smaller but soulful performances like Mann’s make the church feel like a real place.      

But the show belongs to Tucker, whose own struggle with the loss of a community feels deeply human and equally timely. From the moment he delivers an opening sermon—and introduces the central tension of the play—we in the audience can see Paul grappling with his faith, with his decisions, with his world as it falls apart and also comes together in a new way. As he becomes the character, Tucker is explosively expressive: his face does the work of conveying everything his words and tone cannot.

Susan Kulp as Elizabeth and Marty Tucker as Pastor Paul in The Christians. New Haven Theater Company presents Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, from Thursday, Feb. 27 through Saturday March 8. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

It creates a show that both moves quickly and is hard to look away from. And audiences shouldn’t: if they sleep on the current performance for too long, they’ll miss it entirely. Instead, they might do well to step out on faith, and give it a chance. After all, its cast members have done the same. 

“I’ve already thought a lot about all these questions all throughout my life, and come to a very good place where I know what I believe,” said Tucker, who has a little bit of Pastor Paul in him on any given day of the week (his own church practices the United Church of Christ’s LGBTQ-friendly Open and Affirming (ONA) movement, which has itself caused a rift within the greater UCC).

“And I’m strong in that faith. It’s not terribly far away from Pastor Paul’s new vision, it’s not the exact same, but I would understand why bringing this new idea that he brings … this would shake the foundation of any of the megachurches. This would be a radical change. He gets beaten up through the play, but he still has his faith.” 

New Haven Theater Company presents Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, from Thursday, Feb. 27 through Saturday March 8. Tickets, performance times and more information are available here. To listen to an episode of WNHH Community Radio's “Arts  Respond” or "LoveBabz LoveTalk," both with NHTC members, click on or download the above links.