RECOMMENDED
At a time when too many plays have a sitcom feel to them—brittle humor on the outside, squishy sentimentality within—Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” beautifully mounted by City Lit, shows us what live theater can be. Guirgis’ drama premiered in 2000 but plays like it was written yesterday. It’s simultaneously a sizzling dramatic experience that puts us through the emotional wringer and a high-level think piece that moves with dialectical rigor into uncomfortable territory, challenging conventional ideas about right and wrong, law and justice, faith and reason. The show’s gifted cast, under the taut and well-paced direction of Esteban Andres Cruz, gives the show memorable immediacy and intensity, pulling us almost against our will into the pain-filled present and violent past of the two protagonists, both prisoners at New York City’s Rikers Island jail.
While always gripping and at times blackly humorous, “‘A’ Train” is no mere entertainment. It’s about bringing us into dark places and shining light on what we’d rather not see. And isn’t that what theater—specifically tragedy—has always been about, going back to Aeschylus and Sophocles?
Before talking about what the play is, it’s necessary to say a little about what it isn’t. Despite Andres Fiz’s well-executed video sequences at the beginning of the play’s two acts—showing migrant labor on farms and in slaughterhouses, followed by concentration camp-like scenes of ICE incarceration—the play is not agitprop protest about immigration policies or the justice system or inhumane prison conditions, although it certainly doesn’t ignore the sadism woven into our penal institutions. Nor is it a denunciation of the way the system railroads the innocent and criminalizes the poor. Angel and Lucius, the two prisoners, have both committed reprehensible acts of violence, and in no sane society would they go unpunished.
What the play is about is grace. Lucius, the confessed serial killer who has tortured and killed at least eight victims, including children, has found God while behind bars. He treats his imprisonment with a kind of saintly detachment. For Lucius, both the bureaucratic heartlessness of the legal system and the daily harassment of Valdez, the hateful prison guard who takes Lucius’ very existence as a personal affront, are less real than his internal sense of spiritual liberation and release from his sins.
The heart of the play is the back-and-forth between Lucius, awaiting extradition from New York to Florida, a state that kills killers in the name of justice and decency, and Angel, a young Puerto Rican inmate awaiting trial for the shooting of a Reverend Moon type who has inveigled Angel’s best friend into joining his cult. Angel is understandably revolted by Lucius’ crimes and is resistant to his endless God talk, but Lucius is insistent, indefatigable and irresistibly sincere. And like the twisted, tormented philosopher Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Angel slowly moves toward self-recognition, as he begins to consider his situation in spiritual rather than legal or purely logical terms.
These jailhouse dialogues, delivered in obscenity-laced street lingo, combine cool, incisive logic with life-derived wisdom: every line rings true. The point is clearly made that if forgiveness is available to an erstwhile monster like Lucius, it is available to all. Either all sins can be atoned for, or none can.
Audience members may or may not accept the Catholic-educated playwright’s theology, but what can’t be denied is the aliveness of his characters, the sound construction of his scenes and the riveting quality of his dialogue, whether between Lucius and Angel, Lucius and the viciously self-righteous guard Valdez, or Angel and Mary Jane, his well-meaning but morally obtuse lawyer.
Director Cruz, who has collaborated extensively with Guirgis over the past few years, clearly knows this play backwards and forwards, and has cast the major parts well. Young Lenin Izquierdo, with his anxious, droopy eyes and fidgety hands, captures Angel’s deep-down terror and spiritual ambivalence, while Maria Stephens does well as his public defender who, in love with her own legal acumen, focuses more on beating the system than on serving her client. The bullying abusiveness of Manny Tamayo’s Valdez is frightening, if a bit effortful, while Michael Dailey is relaxed and believable as D’Amico, the humane guard whose kindness toward Lucius leads to trouble in the topsy-turvy world of Rikers Island, where compassion is a vice and cruelty a virtue.
What most stands out in this exceptional show is Bradford Stevens’ bravura portrayal of Lucius. Stevens’ poise, timing and aura of truthfulness and dignity amid soul-killing surroundings draw the audience into rapt, sustained attention. It’s a master class in creating character, and I hope that Stevens and this production as a whole—including Tianxuan Chen’s simple but effective set, featuring a mostly bare stage set against a backdrop of filthy sheets, and lighting designer Josiah Croegaert’s slightly sickly, unnatural palette—are on the Jeff Committee’s radar.
Earlier, I mentioned Dostoevsky as a possible influence. Another literary presence evoked here is Catholic mystic Flannery O’Connor, whose Southern Gothic tales depict religious faith not as a pretty doily delicately covering a flawed social order, but rather as a powerful inner force that emerges in moments of crisis, leading us to question and confront established arrangements and assumptions. This production is in that spirit, capturing the trauma and despair that strip people bare and open them to deeper insights.
In the dramatic universe of “‘A’ Train,” heaven may be an illusion, but hell is very real, right here on earth. It’s a place where prayer is a necessity, not a ritual. The journey there is a harrowing one, emotionally and intellectually. But it’s worth taking, if only to test the limits of our own humanity. See this play if you can.
“Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” runs through September 7 at City Lit Theater, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, at the Edgewater Presbyterian Church. Tickets are $38, with senior, student and military discounts available. Tickets are available online at citylit.org or by phone at (773)293-3682.
