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The oft-heard edict among patrons of the arts is that "Christian" makes a great noun but a lousy adjective. Within the performing arts world, Christian theater reputedly tends toward the churchy, the didactic, and, perhaps most offensively, the untalented. Add to that a suspicion of the theater as inherently un-Christian that goes back for many centuries, the reputation of contemporary drama in particular for being steeped in moral relativism and downright hostility toward religion, at least in its orthodox form (note the controversial 1997 production in New York of Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, in which Jesus and his disciples are depicted as sexually fraternal homosexuals), and it's no wonder that America's Christians have been staying away from the theater in droves.
But among practitioners of this ancient medium are theater artists who are responding to this void, filling it with new works rooted in a Christian sensibility. Across North America in select urban markets, there are new Christian drama companies, often founded by theater artists in their 20s and 30s who feel duty-bound to supply an alternative for Christians' entertainment dollars. Some are groups of theater professionals who happen to be Christians, while many are companies that have their evangelizing focus written into their mission statement, such as Art Within, a young group that operates out of Atlanta's 14th Street Playhouse at the center of the city's arts community.
"In the popular art and media of the day, we're constantly being shown sin glorified and justified, but we never get to see it redeemed," says Bryan Coley, Art Within's artistic director. "As Christians we're very good at criticizing the mass media, and looking at the large influence that the media has on our lives; but I feel that God has convicted me on that, and it's not enough for me to sit and complain—I need to put something in its place."
Coley, now 37, launched the theater company in 1997, when he was a manager of new technology at Turner Entertainment Networks. "At the time, I was subscribing to many different theater groups in Atlanta, and I was walking away from these plays that were holding up dysfunctional lives as art." In response, he formed a small team of playwrights and actors that would borrow for its motto the words of Michelangelo: "Criticize through creating."
In the early days, Art Within struggled with the problem that besets virtually every Christian theater group: a dearth of good scripts. Compounding the problem, artistic directors of Christian performing arts companies are contacted by patrons who would rather see yet another revival of The Music Man or The Sound of Music than a new work that features profanity and morally complicated characters, even when the new work is deeply Christian. This urbane grumbling certainly falls upon the ears of upstarts like Art Within, with their operating budget of $212,000. A case in point is Art Within's recent show, The Song of the Bow, by Wayne Harrell: two large faith-based organizations from the area rescinded their funding when they learned the play dealt with homosexuality. But pressure to stick with "safe" family drama is felt even by the directors of larger, long-standing companies, like Lamb's Players Theatre's Robert Smyth. Having led Lamb's Players Theatre as artistic director since 1985, Smyth has a budget of almost $4 million to work with each year.
"A lot of our letters start out, 'I thought you were Christian,'" Smyth says. "We are not explicitly a 'Christian company,' since it is not written into our mandate; but a lot of people expect us to be preachy because we're Christians. Christ's example was that he was a preeminent storyteller. This included a variety of different metaphors and ambiguous ways of telling a story." While the Lambs don't set out to provide a safe haven for clean entertainment, their choices are still very tame by the standards of the general theater community in San Diego.
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