The Christians review - a mature and elusive play about faith

Whether or not you believe in God, you should believe in Lucas Hnath.

Hnath is a youngish playwright with an interest in form, argument and the stories we tell in order to consolidate our lives and beliefs. His latest play, The Christians, at Playwrights Horizons, delivers on the earlier promise of Isaac’s Eye, a heavily fictionalised and heavily footnoted treatment of an episode in the life of the young Isaac Newton, and A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, a loosely biographical tribute to the showman, structured as a table read in a blandly corporate conference room.

At The Christians, you enter the Playwrights Horizons main stage to a room transformed into a luxurious, queasily tasteful megachurch – lots of polished wood, cultivated greenery and recessed lighting. Pastor Paul, the mildly folksy and pleasantly charismatic Andrew Garman, begins to deliver his sermon. It’s a big day for the congregation. This church has “thousands of seats, classrooms for Sunday school, a baptismal font as big as a swimming pool”. And Paul is here to tell us that as of today, those building costs have finally been paid.

But Paul has other news, too. Good news. But not the kind that this evangelical congregation is used to hearing. As a chorus sways behind him, he announces that he has had a revelation that threatens to upend much of what his congregants believe. And he has citations in scripture to prove it. The play’s remaining scenes, which also take place on the church altar as though in the middle of the sermon, show church officials and congregants (an elder, an associate pastor, the pastor’s wife, a single mother) struggling to make sense of Paul’s hermeneutical detonation.

Mature plays about faith aren’t typical. More often they’re freighted with melodrama or laden with arguments that seem sophisticated, but break down under the least pressure. Hnath is playing a more complicated game, not least because he exerts pressure on every argument and counterargument, trusting the audience to judge their strengths and weaknesses. Similarly he humanises each of his characters while also letting them occasionally look ridiculous, careful not to overbalance anyone’s moral and rhetorical scales. This is a play asking legitimately difficult questions about belief and behaviour (though perhaps they are slightly less difficult if you don’t believe at all) and not providing much in the way of answer.

Still, it might seem a more conventional script, were it not for Hnath’s careful formal choices and for the infinite restraint that the director, Les Waters, who debuted the play at the Humana festival in the midst of the Bible belt, brings to the service. With their help, we have a clever, searching and elusively profound work. Amen to that.