Election Section

It’s hard to recall, to represent the atmosphere—the immediate sense, much less any deeper one—of the scandals and violent deaths in November 1978, in the Bay Area and Guyana. The People’s Temple, now in its world premiere at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, in association with San Francisco’s Z Space, which originally commissioned and developed the piece, begins with traces, voices and images. 

Out of a white storage box, from metal stacks full of shelves of such boxes, a man (James Carpenter) takes a red choir robe, which he holds with a far-away expression of remembrance, as Miche Braden appears in such a robe singing gospel—a memory—the presence of a community member, of the community itself, all gone.  

Other cast members open boxes, costume themselves in “personal effects,” start clapping and singing along, while Carpenter, still distant, moves his lips to the lyrics; after the song he plays Tim Carter, a Jonestown survivor, describing aerial photos of the site, telling of flying to Jonestown over rivers, saying that Guyana means “many rivers”—“from the size of a footpath ... we cleared over 1,000 acres by hand ... I saw future generations, my grandkids, playing in Jonestown.” 

The show loops back through the founding of the Temple in 1955 in Indianapolis, by minister Jim Jones and his wife, Marceline, and its career of feeding the poor, faith healing—and self-promotion. John McAdams plays Jack Beam, a founding member and on the board of the temple, describing Jones’ split from the Disciples of Christ in 1961 to create a fully integrated congregation: “ ‘God is no respecter of persons’ ... I was still racist back then; people still had that problem. They wanted the healing, but they were all tore up over the race problem ... he had to phrase it all in loving Biblical terms.” 

After moving to Redwood Valley, near Ukiah—apparently in response to an Esquire article citing its safety in case of nuclear war!—a new recruitment begins. Cast members play different converts, all with different backgrounds and reasons for joining—though the one reason most have in common is articulated by Lauren Klein, playing Liz Forman Schwartz, Jewish red diaper baby: “What did they have that I always wanted? Community!” 

The show—which emphasizes moving forward rather than looking back—scores with its impressionistic strokes (“sculpting interviews” and staging them, like its predecessor, The Laramie Project) in giving a sense of both the trajectory of the Temple into political wheeling and dealing and internal policing, and the prismatic viewpoints of members, associates and outsiders on the group and its doings and intentions. Colman Domingo plays a street brother, recruited on a sweep through the Midwest, who sees Jim Jones as a con-man, but joins up to find himself with more friends than he ever had, and a sense of purpose—and, with the making of Jonestown out of jungle, accomplishment. Domingo also does a brief, funny sketch of Willie Brown introducing Jones at a rally as “a combination Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein and Chairman Mao.” 

Bob Ernst is, for a moment, San Francisco Supervisor Robert Mendelsohn, telling a Chronicle reporter (Barbara Pitts) “everybody loves this guy, he gets things done,” then calling back to say “maybe you shouldn’t quote me about it.” 

Jones’ rhetoric, the hallmark of his “socialist temple,” is given in soundbites by John McAdams and James Carpenter: 

“All of you are God, you, I ... heaven is on earth ... our romance together is on a higher plane.” Others tell of how families were broken down, of sexual games, of the large percentage (75 percent of the Jonestown dead) that were poor and older black people. 

Margo Hall plays a convert who had been a Father Divine follower. Adam Wade, suspiciously checking out the temple for his family, remarks that Jones, in a velour shirt and shades, didn’t look like a minister: “He was cool!” 

There are grim reminders, too, of the crudest racism used to manipulate both black and white members. Lauren Klein and James Carpenter play Barbara and Rev. John Moore of Glide Memorial, whose two daughters “with the social worker instinct” died at Jonestown. They hear from one daughter (Kelli Simpkins): “I was born into capitalist sins, racist sins—and he’s the only one who could deliver you,” Her calm, bitter letter from Jonestown’s last hour is one striking testimony, and her father’s “Hundreds of actors in that tragedy—I was one of them,” another, one that sums up the piece’s method in a way. 

One testimony flows into another almost seamlessly. The excellent cast of 12 (including San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Velina Brown, as well as veterans of The Laramie Project) and the writers (Leigh Fondakowski, who also directs, chief writer of The Laramie Project; Stephen Wangh; and cast members Margo Hall, of San Francisco’s Campo Santo and Word For Word, and Greg Pierotti) have made a very professional production, and an affecting one. Something comes out of it—but it’s more a feeling, something indefinite, than that imaginative concentrate the audience takes away from a dramatic form like Tragedy. 

Cleverly pieced and dovetailed together, these various voices out of a somewhat undefined past (a confused social-political situation, many cults and “orgs” attracting followers from a broad social spectrum) may do something to open up the deadlock that began nine days after the Jonestown tragedy, with the strangely related assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by ex-Supervisor Dan White, when “all real dialogue ... ceased.” 

But this impressionism can become a blur, with no grounded point of view, no more than sound-bites. Are they meant to incite questions, conversation? To put a tragedy to rest? These and other intentions are stated or implied, but not given enough context, either historically or in relation to the present. Certain voices challenge the media image, endlessly repeated, of Jonestown: “I want to take anybody that says it was suicide and choke their throats!” But the questions arising from these fragments would be necessarily vague questions, nothing easily pursued conversationally, communally. 

Threads of stories, monologues and soliloquies from interviews, letters, Temple archive oral histories remain powerful. There are testimonies to the more than 900 dead (who John McAdams, as Jones’ son Stephen says, need to be given names.) And then there are those who had to find a way to go on. These are family, friends and even those who were there, who carry the label, a stigma, (as Margo Hall, playing Shanette Oliver, finds when she Googles her name): Survivor.  

The People’s Temple plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theater through May 29. $20-$55. 647-2949, or www.berkeleyrep.org.V