Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by David Lafontaine
Unit 102 Actors Company, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto
January 31-February 16, 2014
Lucius: “Don’t sit there crying in the darkness when you got a flashlight right there in your hand”
It may be cold outside, but the temperature is high inside the Unit 102 Theatre. Ronnie Rowe and Andy McQueen are giving fiery performances in Unit 102’s production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ breakthrough play, Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train (2000). Guirgis wrote it for the LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York where it was directed by the sadly deceased Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had championed Guirgis’ work. As usual for Guirgis the setting, a prison for dangerous offenders, is grim and the language is crude, but, also as usual, Guirgis’ question is what value faith has in the modern world.
The play, set in Rikers Island Prison in New York City, begins with Angel Cruz (McQueen) trying to say the Lord’s Prayer that he only barely remembers: “Howard is thy name, Thy kings may come ....” The action then shifts to the recent past and alternates between the story of serial killer Lucius Jenkins (Ronnie Rowe), also in Rikers Island, and works its way forward. As we discover in Angel’s meetings with public defender Mary Jane Hanrahan (Tommie-Amber Pirie), Angel has lost his best friend to a religious cult run by a Reverend Kim. After repeated attempts to rescue his friend from the cult, Angel stormed one of the cult’s meetings and injured Reverend Kim by shooting him “in the ass”. Events takes a turn for the worse when Kim dies on the operating table while the surgeons try to remove the bullet. The charge against Angel is now murder.
Meanwhile, on Rikers Island, Lucius enjoys the one hour a day he is given in the sunlight on the prison roof. He has found God while in prison awaiting extradition to Florida where he faces the death penalty and exercises while praising Jesus and reciting the books of the Old Testament backwards. D’Amico (Anthony Ulc), the first guard we meet, has becomes friends with Lucius and does favours for him. For that very reason, however, he is sacked and replaced with Valdez (Scott Walker), a sadistic man who enjoys his power and treats Lucius as scum. When Angel is transferred to Lucius’s wing and is giving the same one hour of daylight, Lucius takes it as he duty to save Angel and bring him to Jesus.
Despite the setting and Guirgis’ gift for absolutely naturalistic dialogue, Guirgis distances the play from naturalism by including scenes, set at some time after the events we witness, where D’Amico, Valdez and Mary directly address the audience. Mary has the majority of these scenes and tells us why she is attracted to hopeless cases like Angel’s and how his trial led to her being disbarred.
Other than their connection to crime and criminals, what unties all these characters is their connection to faith. The most obvious case is Lucius who used to live in darkness but whose new-found faith almost comically fills his every hour with joy. Angel, too, will move from agnosticism and a hatred of false religion like Reverend Kim’s to an attempt to recall the Catholic faith of his childhood. Mary takes on Angel’s case because of faith in him and, as she says, because she hopes to lead him to “redemption”. D’Amico is someone who has been converted to a belief in Lucius’ change. Valdez, however, who claims to worship the Devil, is the only atheist among the characters and the only one not to believe that Lucius has actually become religious.
The play itself is a test of faith for the audience. We see Lucius’ present joy and we see him pray for strength to resist the taunting of Valdez. Yet, when we hear of the eight people, including children, that Lucius murdered, often in horrific ways, we have to wonder whether the sudden all-consuming enthusiasm for Christianity is just a different phase in his psychosis. Guirgis asks us whether we believe the characters’ faith is sincere, convenient or a delusion.
McQueen has an entirely different emotional arc. He begins full of hatred and mistrust, so much so that Mary walks out of their first interview. McQueen shows us how he gradually gains faith in Mary until he is willing to entrust his life with her. After being brutalized in prison, Angel mocks Lucius’ faith, but again McQueen shows us how Angel’s repeated questioning of Lucius is also an attempt to find something worth believing in to help him through the horror of prison.
Pirie is well cast as a young lawyer who is much tougher than her outward appearance would suggest. The monologues are the strongest part of her performance. The interchanges with Angel are quickly paced but she doesn’t always avoid the tendency to rush her words so that sometimes the ends of her sentences go missing.
It is an intentional irony that the most frightening character in the play is not Lucius but the guard Valdez. The mockery of religion, his blatant racism and homophobia and his view that criminals are no longer human reminds us of the danger throughout history caused when one group demonizes another. Walker communicated this sense of menace and makes us fear for what might happen whenever his character enters the scene. Ulc’s D’Amico, in contrast, is so taken with Lucius that, while we don’t doubt his sincerity, the doubt arises whether he has been duped.
This is a relentlessly aggressive play, but it is exhilarating at the same time. David Lafontaine has created a rapidly paced production and knows when to slow down just enough to let us catch our breath before the dialogue revs up again. You don’t go to a Unit 102 show for the production values, but for the choice of repertory and the acting. And here they combine in such a hard-hitting experience you feel the breath has been knocked out of you. But you breathe in again in admiration for the total commitment the director and cast have given the play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Tommie-Amber Pirie and Andy McQueen; Ronnie Rowe as Lucius Jenkins. ©2014 Michael Osuszek.
For tickets, visit www.unit102theatre.com.
2014-02-02
Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train