Slaying the Drug-Dealing Dragon

Since 1983, the cast of the Saltworks Theater Company has averaged 300 performances a year of their youth-oriented antidrug plays. While the company ranges well beyond its Pittsburgh base, the effects on that city alone have been substantial. According to Michael Flaherty, director of the chemical dependency program at Pittsburgh’s Saint Francis Medical Center, which has helped to underwrite the plays, the city’s drug-abuse problem declined measurably with the emergence of the plays.

The explanation for this success parallels the group’s philosophy of art: a play can move people in ways the most rational lecture by the best-prepared physician cannot. Youth know drugs are dangerous. But in the theater, they feel the power of drugs to shred a healthy family.

Saltworks’s artistic director, Kate McConnell, believes the arts occupy a unique place in God’s creation. After all, says McConnell, the first person in the Bible said to be filled “with the Spirit of God,” was Bezalel, one of the artists God chose to build the ark of the covenant.

She also believes that drawing closer to God through aesthetic experience has been forced to the back seat in an age when rationalism reigns supreme. “Just because something cannot be explained rationally,” she protests, “does not mean it is invalid.”

The perceived primacy of rationalism, she says, has produced a narrow view of Christian theater. To many, true Christian theater forthrightly presents a clear biblical message. But to McConnell, Christian theater is “Christians working out what it means to be faithful in the area of the arts.”

Three Plays, One Message

“Faithfulness in the arts” undergirds Saltworks’s attempt to address the problem of chemical dependency. The company began in 1983 as the brain child of Reid Carpenter, president of the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation and the city’s best-known “networker.” Carpenter linked Saltworks with the Saint Francis Medical Center, a pioneer in the treatment of chemical dependency. (Saint Francis was the first hospital to submit a diagnosis of “alcoholism” on an insurance bill. The bill, however, has never been paid.)

Pittsburgh playwright Gillette Elvgren immersed himself in the medical literature on substance abuse. For an intense month, he observed young patients at Saint Francis struggling with their families to overcome their addiction. He then produced three plays with essentially the same message for different age groups.

Say No, Max, a participation play for elementary students, is the story of 10-year-old Max’s struggle to find acceptance in a new neighborhood without drugs. He is mysteriously transported to a mystical land where he confronts a drug-dealing dragon. The young audience willingly reveals to Max the magic word that slays the deadly beast: No.

Finally Fourteen was written for junior-high students and I Am the Brother of Dragons was written for high-school young people. Each tells the story of a teenager who has succumbed to chemical abuse. Though the plays offer hope, their reality is brutal, as illustrated by Maxine’s soliloquy in Finally Fourteen:

“Mom says she doesn’t want to come home from work anymore because she’s scared of me. Of me! She used to call me her best friend. We used to tell each other secrets.… I’m scared … I thought that using would make me smarter or prettier or more fun. I thought using would make them like me. And now I don’t know if I can stop.”

The five-member cast that performs the three plays samples this reality during a required week of observation at Saint Francis, where young patients wear signs such as “I will self-disclose” and where street clothes, as opposed to pajamas, denote progress.

Is This Christian Theater?

Still, the question remains: Is this Christian theater? The performers are free to share their faith in response to questions after the show. But nowhere in the plays is Christ proclaimed, and this has limited the theater company’s support from the local church community.

Says McConnell, “I don’t like the term ‘Christian theater.’ I think in terms of faithful or unfaithful art. Art either loves and serves the truth, the light who is Christ, or it does not.”

In McConnell’s view, faithful art inevitably moves people closer to God. “Jesus healed people first,” McConnell says, “then he forgave their sins. We hope that through our plays, people see where they are. We hope they can identify the pit and realize there is hope.”

By Randall Frame.

The Mystery Of Grace

Hector Babenco’s film Ironweed is, like Christopher Marlowe’s play Faustus, a tale of pride and rejected forgiveness.

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus made a Satanic pact to receive power and wisdom. When the Devil came to call, friends urged Faustus to repent. But his pride was so great he considered his sins beyond God’s reach. Faustus rejected grace and went to hell.

God’s grace is a mystery: All receive the offer, but only some accept the divine gift. The Father’s chosen ones inevitably come, though sometimes reluctantly.

As in Faustus, pride and grace are key elements in Ironweed, William Kennedy’s adaptation of his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel. Francis Phelan, a bum on the streets of Albany, New York, in 1938, does not make a pact with the Devil, but he has made some fatal errors—fatal to other people. As a boy caught up in the emotions of a teamsters’ strike, he had mortally wounded a scab. As a young father, he had dropped his infant son, who died of a broken neck. Unable to forgive himself, Francis left his family and took to the streets. Now he is haunted by visions of those he has killed.

We join Francis (Jack Nicholson) one cold morning as he sets off to find food, work, and Helen (Meryl Streep), his lover. Helen, a professional singer, has fallen on hard times. We follow them through two pivotal days.

Ironweed is promoted as a love story, and certainly Helen might not have remained alive so long without Francis’s love. They cling to each other as the only remaining bits of meaning in their wasted lives. But love is insufficient to overcome their despair or their enslaving addictions to alcohol.

Francis’s inability to forgive himself drove him from his family. Now he spends much of his time at the local mission where he refuses to respond to the altar call. Like the other bums, he is there for the soup, not the sermon.

Beyond Forgiveness

Francis places himself beyond tangible aspects of grace. On a visit to his family, his wife offers him his old home. But he tells his daughter he is “beyond forgiveness,” and he refuses to consider what a sober family life might mean.

Unlike Francis, Helen is open to grace. She enters a Catholic church and prays before the statue of Saint Joseph. Her confessions is laced with self-justification. “You call them sins. I call them decisions,” she says. Yet somehow, without really understanding grace, Helen receives it. God does not suddenly turn Helen’s life around. But he lays $10 by her knee—money she uses to rent a room where she spends her last hours clean, warm, and listening to the music she loves.

Ironweed is too powerful for casual family viewing. You won’t leave uplifted. This is first-rate American drama, somewhat on the order of Death of a Salesman or The Glass Menagerie. It is more entertaining and palatable than either of those plays, but it is equally incisive.

As Francis rides alone in a boxcar, clutching his bottle of whiskey, a vision appears to him. Sitting on a crate, pouring tea, his wife asks, “What do you need, Francis?” He needs grace—but he asks for a turkev sandwich.

By David Beard, a writer and Christian education director at Trinity Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Bothell, Washington.

Subversive Communication

“IPredict 1990,” the latest album from iconoclastic Christian rocker Steve Taylor, was controversial as soon as it was released. The cover design was mistaken for a tarot card, and the lead song was not understood as satire. Taylor had to telephone 160 Christian bookstores to set the record straight, ct talked to Taylor and asked how he copes with a market that doesn’t understand him.

I grew up in a very conservative church, so I understand the mindset. The problem is that people take things literally. They forget the satirical things Jesus said—like “Take the log out of your own eye before you remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.”

Os Guinness gave a brilliant talk on subversive communication, on how Jesus and the prophets would lead someone one way and then introduce a twist taking another direction—like Nathan telling David a story and then saying, “You are the man.” I hope to carry on that tradition with my music.

Taylor’s lyrics are full of content.

He credits his rational approach to reading Francis Schaeffer and Josh McDowell while a freshman at Biola. At the radical Boulder campus of Colorado University, he put what he had learned to the test.

People in the U.S. no longer have a basic regard for the Bible and what it says. When you’re dealing with people who have contempt for the church, the art forms you use have to be subversive.

Taylor is a conscience for his listeners.

Music is the language of our generation. We listen to musicians where we have stopped listening to politicians and sports figures. Since that’s how it is, music that has something to say can affect the way people think.

Despite his youthful image, Taylor is maturing. We asked the unaskable.

I just turned 30, and I think I should be getting a “real job” sometime. When you look at recording as a career, I believe it will affect the types of things you write; you’re always wondering about commercial acceptance.

I don’t have a contract beyond this record. In six months I can decide if I want to do another record or if it’s time to be a janitor again. I did that while I was a youth pastor and going to school. I actually made more money. So, there is a financial security aspect to falling back on that job. I’m darn good at it.

By David Neff.

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