Election Section

There have been plenty of docudramas based on interviews or on confessional monologues, even a glut in recent years, but The Faith Project (playing Tuesday and Wednesday at the Ashby Stage) stands alone on this familiar ground. 

The unusual process of it s creation incorporates elements both so personal and so elusive as to defy cliché. It is a kind of auto-documentary of its own origin, and its testimony hits registers unusual to the live stage. The dynamics of these outpourings and the way they’re inte rlaced alone justify their staging. 

“Confessional, testimony, justify”—these words function as puns for the primarily Christian (Catholic and evangelical) outpourings of faith and doubt that make up the show. (Karuna Tanahashi adds energetic and humorous diversity telling about her Jewish-Shinto roots.) For me (and, I think, for the rest of the audience), the most profound moment experiencing this outpouring came when I became aware that these were direct statements, performed by the cast out of the mate r ial of their own lives, their own wrestling with faith and disillusion. 

This realization seeped gradually into the consciousness of audience members, who usually watch from a critical distance as actors perform stories about other people, real or imagi na ry. Not even the program notes really hint about what’s going on. 

Director Susannah Martin later explained her conception and the way it became fleshed out in the “brief talk-back” after the intermissionless show (running under 90 minutes). This was much more worthwhile than many post-performance discussions, if only for the unusually forthcoming nature of the cast. 

After 9/11, Martin became fascinated to discover what people in America (the presumptive home of tolerance versus “religious extremism . . . over there”) were really thinking about religion, belief, faith. She put out a call for multifaceted performers, and the five cast members wrote—and now perform—the script from their own backgrounds, life experience and musings. Martin’s hope, that t he experiment produces something greater than itself, “some modicum of both insight and entertainment—spectacle and reverence,” is realized. 

The Faith Project is put together with strong theatrical intelligence. A choir of six enters at the start with ca ndl es, singing and processing behind the audience. In the darkness after the candles are blown out, the performers’ multiple overlapped stories are told in gesture and movement using a great deal of the theater’s space, with fine singing, mostly melismat ic a nd rhythmical. 

The production’s wayward, almost formless shape avoids the artistic problem of the most familiar docudramas (for example Anna Devere Smith’s performance derived from interviews after the L.A. riots): lack of real theatricality, of anything  

really happening onstage in a truly dramatic sense, ending up as nothing more than a live depiction of the media’s endless talking heads. There are points when The Faith Project comes off like sociological cabaret, but the integrity and suppleness of th e cast make up for much of this structural lack. 

Takahashi, Samantha Blanchard, and Erica McIntire provide a show-stopping burst of song, the almost overly appropriate “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” This comes in the midst of grief recalled by Chri stopher Maikish, and excellent contrasting tale-telling by Carolyn Doyle, who goes from the humor of an unfamiliar Catholic summer camp to her anguish upon coming to grips with her son’s autism.  

This is real acting. Martin’s comment: Doyle found her own character, and played it. Playing yourself onstage is considered one of the most difficult tasks in many acting traditions. 

The cast’s stories are blended with taped interviews of people on the street (some conducted by assistant director-dramatu rge Kar en Marek, others by cast-members) as well as dance and physical theater. There’s something of a parallel to the excitement John Cassavetes’ films provoked in the candor of this piece still in progress, which is unusually polished and stageworthy f or a “la b” piece. But that’s what it is, subject to change as it evolves, a project of Shotgun Theater Lab, a program supporting collaborative ventures by mentoring emerging artists at the Shotgun Players’ new home at the Ashby Stage. 

A last thought for this pro ject and what Martin talks about as its “impetus . . . political, personal, and creative”: Bertolt Brecht’s recognition that, though the beginnings of theater are definitely religious, as soon as it becomes truly theatrical, it’s different from its origi ns, unique. 

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