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Beate Hein Bennett
About those four evangelists and biblical truth: In Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot," one of the characters, Vladimir raises the question about the divergences in the four Evangelists’ narratives about the life and death of Jesus, more particularly about which of the two thieves, crucified like him, he saved from death. Vladimir assumes that “the four were there… or thereabouts.” Estragon dismisses this as a simple disagreement among them. In fact none of the four Evangelists were contemporaries of Jesus. That leaves us with the question whom or what to believe in the New Testament, which is the foundational document for all Christian creeds, and which has been for millennia the source of communion as well as dissent, even violent dissent, among the faithful and their leaders. Monty Python’s irreverent farcical movie “The Life of Brian” also deals with this subject. The present Theater for the New City production of “Four Evangelists Walk Into a Fog” by Douglas Lackey is a comic thought experiment about how and why four different gospels by four different Evangelists came to be the New Testament, as we know it.
Playwright Douglas Lackey who is also a Professor of Philosophy at Baruch and the CUNY Graduate Center has written a number of “comedies of ideas," as he calls his plays, in which he explores serious philosophical ideas, often based on historical figures, and their political and cultural consequences. His use of satire, parody, and farce heightens the absurdity of unquestioned concepts while illuminating the depth of dialectical conflicts or paradoxes in traditional conventions of religious creeds or philosophical theories. With “Four Evangelists Walk into a Fog” he presents a basic question: Who was Jesus? And how and, more importantly, why did this historically unprepossessing Jewish man capture the imagination of mankind? Was He the incarnate Son of God who rose from the dead? Or was he a Son of Man transfigured into the Messiah, the miraculous ‘Savior’ of Mankind, by being sanctified as God’s sacrificial lamb? Was this the consensus of some rebellious Jews, his Disciples, who at his death betrayed and denied him but then declared that he fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament?
Douglas Lackey squeezes this subject into three short acts, played under Director Mark Harborth’s tight, lively direction in eighty swift minutes without intermission. He scripted a brilliant argument among the four Evangelists John, Matthew, Luke, and Mark , spiced up with the later addition of firebrand Saul/Paul of Tarsus, famous for his stentorian Letters to the hedonistic Ephesians, and the delightful apparition of Mary Magdalen who speaks as the only person who knew the real Jesus, maybe even in the ‘biblical’ way, and was eye witness to his crucifixion (around 35 C.E.) All characters meet in some undisclosed location during the second half of the first century C.E. Paul is the one who adds the Greek “Christos” [the Risen] to Jesus’s name, thus the followers of Christ are named Christians. A nice little historical point is the argument about language: Jesus spoke Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Evangelists and Paul is Greek—the New Testament was written in Greek while the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the predominant ancient language of the Jews.
Director Mark Harborth, who also designed the setting and the lighting, has brought together an ensemble of six excellent performers whom he puts through their paces. Matthew Foley plays John, the first to arrive, who acts as a kind of self-declared leader, because he is named after John the Baptist and is presumably the most educated. Next to arrive is Nick Freedson as Luke, known as the painter, who pulls out a sketchy portrait of Mary “worked from reports”-- he never met her. He likes to grandstand a bit. The next two to tumble in through the fog (fog machine in action) are Matthew (Zephyr Caulfield) and Mark (John Gionis). Mark distinguishes himself immediately by greeting everyone with “Shabat Shalom”—it got a laugh—the others had greeted each other in Greek. Mark’s comment: “I see you three don’t use Aramaic…You can’t tell the story of Jesus. Only I can tell it. My gospel is in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Yours are in Greek, a language he didn’t know.” John Gionis plays Mark with the deadpan Jewish humor that deflates the others who play up the Greek sophisticates. Their haggling over whose version of the Jesus story should be the true gospel eventually is resolved by their agreement that each gospel is to be included in a certain order to constitute the New Testament for the new Christian faith.
Paul of Tarsus, the “troublemaker” enters in Act II as the first interrupter who disturbs the Four Evangelists in their negotiations. Andy English plays him as one who fiercely challenges all the established Jewish customs—he is a radical reformer—with his “dangerously eloquent” logic. He is the one who introduces the concept of Love as a principle of faith rather than keeping to the strictures of the law which is the core of the Jewish faith. With this novel concept of Love, (but not carnal love), the door is opened for the entry of Mary “the Magdalen," the adulteress, whom Jesus reputedly rehabilitated with the famous dictum: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Barbara McCulloh is a spectacular Maria who outwits and out-argues all five of the men with logic, charm, and humor, and her status of being the only one with real knowledge of Jesus and the Apostles. Here I would also like to commend Anthony Paul-Cavetta’s lush brilliantly colored costumes.
If you like to see and hear a play of ideas with lively dialogue and a wink-of-the-eye that brings great ideas that have moved the world into a human scale where we can appreciate the historical legends and myths as an effort to exert social influence (for better or for worse), come see “Four Evangelists Walk Into a Fog”—the fog of bigotry will lift, I promise.
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