Preachin' at the Guthrie Theatre

The congregation/choir, resplendent in gowns of wine, gold, purple, and blue, streams casually onto the stage while the organ’s wooing fills the air. The setting, reminiscent of a Sunday night gospel service, is ripe with expectation.

“I take as my text this evening, the Book of Oedipus,” says the messenger, and the play has begun. From that opening to the closing pastoral charge (“Now let the weeping cease; let no one mourn again. The love of God will bring you peace. There is no end. No end.”), The Gospel at Colonus is theater at its best.

Director Lee Breuer and composer Bob Telson articulate the play’s message through black gospel music, using real black gospel professional and church musicians rather than actors copying their style. And composer Telson’s score, which combines qualities of both traditional and contemporary gospel music, helps to turn Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles’ tragic tale of fate, into a celebration of hope. The play’s message: Ultimately, one can be blessed before dying, despite a life of hardship and curse.

At the play’s climax, the choir—swaying, clapping, tambourines a-flailing—leads the audience to an emotional high: “I’m crying hallelujah / Yes, I’m crying hallelujah,” they sing, “For I was blind, but he made me see.… / Lift him up in a blaze of glory / In a choir of voices … heavenly / Lift him high / Lift him high / … Higher.” At such points, the play gets close enough to an ecstatic spiritual experience that some Christians may long for the cooler logic of traditional theater.

Enthusiastically received by audiences nationwide, Colonus has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, taped for PBS’s “Great Performances,” and has won several awards, including a 1984 Obie from the United Gospel Association. It is a daring and successful attempt at blending the emotional with the conceptual, the heart with the head.

Breuer’s inspiration for entwining Greek tragedy and black gospel emerged from his study of Greek theater as catharsis and the realization that “the only living cathartic form we have is black preaching, the black church, and gospel music.” Envisioning a blind, black Oedipus—“sort of a Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder figure”—Breuer landed upon Clarence Fountain, a blind gospel singer who, together with his group, The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, play the lead character. The play is “sitting on the line,” says Breuer, between acting and entertainment.

Model Preacher

As Colonus emerged over several years from workshop form to polished stage production, a central figure in its development was the Reverend Earl Miller, senior pastor of the 1,500-member Pilgrim Baptist Church in St. Paul—Minnesota’s oldest and largest black congregation. Miller, who holds a doctor of ministry degree from Union Theological Seminary, is both a scholar and a practitioner of black preaching. And it was to him that members of the original cast turned when they needed a model for the style, rhythm, and vocal inflections of the black preacher. When two of the actors left the play, Breuer urged Miller to take their parts.

Alternating between the parts of the messenger and Theseus, Miller has performed in Paris, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis. During the play’s eight-week run at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis this spring, Miller performed eight times a week in addition to maintaining his full pastoral load. And a visit to Miller at his church office, on the second floor of an aging and surprisingly small red-brick building, provides ample evidence that his schedule allows little discretionary time.

The phones ring nonstop; two secretaries make frequent, urgent interruptions. “Everything’s got to be a crisis,” a tired-looking Miller grumbles as he excuses himself to take a third telephone call. Although he is determined not to slight the congregation because of his acting, he feels the stress. It is already two o’clock in the afternoon and he still has a meeting, a Bible study, and a performance before his work day will be over.

And ever the pastor, Miller has found that Colonus has opened up new avenues for ministry. Two nights a week during the play’s run in Minneapolis he led an introductory Bible study for about ten members of the cast. “It’s been like taking on another congregation,” he says. “We’ve grown together as a family, and I’ve become like the spiritual head of the family.”

In Miller’s assessment, the Bible study helped set the tone for the production in general. “It kept people in the right frame of mind. With artists you’ve got a lot of personality dynamics; there are always potential conflicts. The study kept people on track. It spilled over to the others by providing a good spiritual and moral foundation.”

Miller plans to continue the Bible study this summer as the cast of Colonus tours Spain, Italy, and France. “Even though they are artists,” he said, “they have a tendency to forget from whence they are based, what this production has grown out of. A Bible study helps everyone keep that source in mind.”

Uplifting

To Miller, his part in Colonus is “not just a performance. I don’t like to play church, and I wouldn’t do it if I felt it was just a performance. But it’s more than that; it’s an experience, it’s uplifting. I can even see how it uplifts the audience, and that uplifts me. I won’t be tired when I finish.”

“Colonus is not a Christian story,” says Miller, “it is pre-Christian. But the central message is one of redemption and liberation, and that is a Christian message. And it is what the black church has been about. The message of the preacher in a traditional black sermon has always ended in celebration, hope, and freedom in Jesus. The way the play ends is the way our worship ends.”

Furthermore, he continues, the play is particularly relevant to the black experience through its exploration of fate and destiny. “The Old Testament talks about the casting of lots, which determined a person’s destiny. Oedipus’s lot was already cast; he had no choice. As slaves, black people in this country were oppressed … like Oedipus. Our lots were cast. But the play tells us that whatever your lot, there is ultimately redemption.”

Master Storyteller

A high-school music teacher and church musician before going into the ministry, Miller acknowledges that performing is in his blood. Nonetheless, he did not seek out acting, nor does he plan to continue pursuing it as an avocation. He does, however, find the merger of his dual roles as pastor and actor to be natural.

In a lecture on black preaching, delivered at the Yale School of Drama in 1986, Miller noted that “the black preacher must be a master storyteller. Black preaching, like black religion, is wholistic. It engages the whole person. The black preacher has to get outside of himself, or, in church language, let the spirit take control. In order for the people to judge the preacher’s calling to the ministry authentic, at some point in the sermon he has to lose his cool, because he isn’t supposed to be in charge anyway.”

Miller contends that while white preaching has emerged as formal, logical, and organized, black preaching has broken “all the rules of form and organization. The black religious experience is not just a meeting of the mind. It is a meeting of the whole being. It is not just an intellectual meeting. It is an encounter with the living God.”

By Phyllis Alsdurf, former editor of Family Life Today, and coauthor with her husband, Jim, a court psychologist, of a forthcoming book on wife abuse in Christian homes.

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