Conversion Tactics In Terrence Mcnally/'s And Paul Rudnick/'s Gay ...
Conversion Tactics in Terrence McNally’s
and Paul Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
M A R T H A G R E E N E E A D S
In their 1995 essay “‘Preaching to the Converted,’” Tim Miller and David
Román respond to the charge that gay and lesbian dramatists write strictly for
insiders already sympathetic to their political and artistic positions. Focusing
in particular on queer community-based productions, Miller and Román chal-
lenge those who assume “queer artists to be didactic and queer audiences to be
static” (173). While they do not deny queer productions’ particular appeal for
insider-audiences, Miller and Román employ a provocative analogy to com-
pare the coming-out process to an ongoing religious commitment. Defining
their “converted” as the “identifiable critical mass of queers who together
compose a congregation of people converted into believing in the necessity of
queer identities and communities, culture and politics,” they assert that indi-
viduals within that group must remain “open to a series of conversions” (177,
178). Queer theatre, they argue, functions much as church services do,
enabling participants to sustain their conversions by renewing their sense of
identity and motivating them to act out of that identity (177).
While their innovative approach helps explain queer productions’ signifi-
cance for gay and gay-friendly audiences before and during the NEA funding
controversies of the 1980s and 1990s, Miller and Román had no way of antic-
ipating the “evangelistic” potential of two controversial plays still to come:
Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi and Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous
Story Ever Told (both 1998).1 Although both plays are by openly gay play-
wrights and celebrate gay themes, their playwrights’ wide mainstream appeal
equips them to win converts to queer-friendly status as well as to sustain con-
version in the manner Miller and Román describe.2 Among those susceptible
to such conversion are straight playgoers whose Christian religious conviction
makes them curious about the playwrights’ use of biblical material or sympa-
thetic to their treatment of gay rights as a social justice concern. Although, as
Heather Hendershot has aptly noted, the “queer Left and the Christian Right
Modern Drama, 48:1 (Spring 2005) 163
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often appear diametrically opposed to one another,” not all Christians are on
the Right, and Christians, whatever their sexual orientation, are no more static
than Miller and Román’s queer converted (151).
This essay assesses the “conversion” potential of both Corpus Christi and
Most Fabulous for straight Christian evangelicals, a group with growing cul-
tural influence and political power. While critics have largely ignored this
aspect of the two plays, Raymond-Jean Frontain asserts in his new concluding
chapter to the second edition of Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and
Lesbian Culture that Terrence McNally uses his play to “evangelize his audi-
ence, sending them out to preach a new gospel of tolerance; the gospel that all
men are divine” (249). Frontain’s chapter, entitled “‘All Men Are Divine’:
Religious Mystery and Homosexual Identity in Corpus Christi,” does not,
however, explore the complex theological issues that inevitably limit Mc-
Nally’s influence on evangelical Christians. This essay aims to fill that gap,
tracing the theological implications of both Corpus Christi and Most Fabulous
for traditional Christians and concluding that most evangelicals will find Rud-
nick the far more winsome missionary for the queer cause.
Right-wing religious groups’ disdain for both plays suggests that neither
playwright is likely to influence most Christians, a recent sociological study
shows that the question is worth exploring. Christian Smith points out that his
turn-of-the-century evangelical research subjects are demonstrating “more
diversity, complexity, and ambivalence than conventional wisdom would lead
us to expect” (qtd. in Tolson 38).3 In Christian America? What Evangelicals
Really Want, Smith distinguishes between fundamentalists and evangelicals,
explaining that the evangelical movement developed in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury in reaction to fundamentalism’s “more separatist, defensive, and anti-intel-
lectual tendencies” (12). Smith distinguishes further between what he calls
“evangelical political activists,” or the Religious Right, and “ordinary evangel-
icals” (48). Smith argues that ordinary evangelical Christians are remarkably
unlike their more vocal counterparts, explaining,
Although perhaps not deducible from aspects of the Christian Right agenda or from
certain Christians’ behavior, in fact the Christian scriptures and moral tradition are
full of ethical instructions which naturally lend themselves to civility and tolerance.
[…] The Christian theological and moral tradition, like all rich traditions, is multi-
vocal. It can be read in a variety of directions, including in coercive ways. But it
clearly comprises a host of ethical teachings that together can form in Christians a
posture of charity, peace, forbearance, and respect […] in a pluralistic environment.
(57, 59)
Smith’s discovery helps explain why some evangelical Christians find
McNally’s and Rudnick’s Bible-based dramas intriguing, despite their pre-
sumed outsider status to gay and lesbian culture.
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
165
Both McNally and Rudnick issue their unorthodox altar calls from overtly
religious territory, risking the wrath of Christian conservatives but also piqu-
ing the curiosity of more progressive yet nonetheless religious theatre-goers.
McNally, a lapsed Catholic, preaches a Good News of earthly, even earthy,
love, modeled by his Christ-figure Joshua. Rudnick, who grew up in a
Reformed Jewish family, sets forth a similar gospel, using comedy to argue
for human love’s necessity in a universe from which God has withdrawn.
Both playwrights urge compassion, a virtue most theatre patrons (of any faith
or none at all) would affirm.
Because McNally writes directly about Christ, however, his play almost
invariably ends up alienating traditional Christians, including evangelicals, in
a way that Rudnick’s does not. Even those who can accept Joshua’s active
homosexuality find that Corpus Christi’s underlying theology contradicts the
orthodox understanding of Christ’s salvific role in human history. Rudnick, in
contrast, limits his biblical content to the Old Testament, reducing his risk of
offending Christians in the same way. Religious viewers who can look beyond
the sexual content of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (considerably more
graphic than Corpus Christi’s) find in it a thoughtful treatment of one of the
Judeo-Christian tradition’s most haunting questions: the problem of evil.
While McNally’s play is likely to retain the interest of only unconventional
Christians (some of whom will also number among Miller and Román’s queer
“converted”), Rudnick’s invites further consideration by even the evangelical
Christian who might not immediately self-identify as queer-friendly.
McNally writes unabashedly about his play’s having a message, although
he never goes so far as to admit to sermonizing. He does, however, court mar-
tyrdom with Corpus Christi, which provoked bomb threats against the Man-
hattan Theater Club and a London-based Muslim group’s death fatwa against
the playwright himself. “If a play isn’t worth dying for,” McNally observed
shortly after Corpus Christi opened in New York, “maybe it isn’t worth writ-
ing” (“What I Know” 26). The play’s central lesson, as its preface states, is
“that we must love one another or die. Christ died for all of our sins because
He loved each and every one of us. When we do not remember His great sac-
rifice, we condemn ourselves to repeating its terrible consequences” (vii).
Corpus Christi is a call to combat the hatred that led to Matthew Shepherd’s
1998 murder in Laramie, WY. While McNally’s denunciation of violent
hatred corresponds with Christ’s own peaceful teachings, McNally’s Christ-
figure becomes problematic for many of the Christian viewers from whom the
playwright might expect curious interest and even sympathy.
Christians can commend one aspect of McNally’s treatment of Jesus in the
character of Joshua: the play’s emphasis on Joshua’s embodiment corresponds
with the orthodox emphasis on Christ’s full humanity. In Theater and Incar-
nation, Max Harris affirms dramatic depictions of such Christian concepts,
despite religious orthodoxy’s historical suspicion of the theatre. Alluding to
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the Gospel of John, Harris notes, “That the Word became flesh, moving
through human space and time, and not word, yielding his sense to the reader
one cluster of letters at a time, is inherent to the doctrine of the Incarnation. A
theatrical imagination […] may help to retrieve something of the sensual char-
acter of such an event” (19). Paul Baumann, a reviewer for the Roman Catho-
lic Commonweal, identified the MTC’s Corpus Christi production’s ability to
do just that. While he found much of the play deeply offensive, he neverthe-
less marveled at the power of its lifelike crucifixion scene, writing,
Despite Corpus Christi’s trivialization of the gospel, I left the theater struck by how
resilient the Incarnation story remains as drama. Even twisted almost beyond
recognition, the uncanny nature of Jesus’ actions speak to us in Corpus Christi. […]
There is a physicality to the theater that ups the ante, and Joshua’s crucifixion is one
of the play’s more affecting moments. Corpus Christi’s uncompromising focus on
Jesus’ maleness, the play’s insistence on eroticizing Joshua/Jesus’ body, somehow
made the crucifixion and the suffering more real. So I came out of Corpus Christi
thinking oddly orthodox thoughts, thanks to a patently blasphemous play. (14)
Despite his acknowledgement that McNally gets Christ’s physicality right,
Baumann nevertheless insists that Corpus Christi is blasphemous.
McNally’s supporters might assume that Baumann’s condemnation comes
in response to Corpus Christi’s assault on the Roman Catholic Church. The
playwright’s memories of his own Catholic school experience, for example,
figure prominently in his retelling of the New Testament story.4 As a teenager,
Joshua suffers the cruel taunts of his high school’s football coach, a profane
priest. When Joshua is later stripped and scourged before being crucified for
being gay, his disciple Bartholomew adopts the role of a nun, pretending to
punish an imaginary student for chewing gum during Mass. In the same scene,
another disciple, James, takes on the role of a Catholic schoolboy and recounts
the nun’s sensationalistic description of Christ’s crucifixion. Such a caricature
of parochial education reveals McNally’s deep dissatisfaction with the church.
Roman Catholics are not the only Christians who object to Corpus Christi,
however, and the play’s theological affront runs far deeper than a merely
superficial send-up of priests and nuns would. Orthodox Christians of all
denominations are likely to complain that McNally’s strategy for emphasizing
Christ’s humanity undermines his divinity. Traditional Christianity maintains
that Jesus was, paradoxically, both fully human and fully divine. McNally
anthropomorphizes his deity, making his case most clearly in the Corpus
Christi’s preface by declaring,
If a divinity does not belong to all people, if He is not created in our image as much
as we are created in His, then He is less a true divinity for all men to believe in than
He is a particular religion’s secular definition of what a divinity should be for the
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
167
needs of its followers. Such a God is no God at all because He is exclusive to His
members. He is a Roman Catholic at best and a very narrow-minded one at that.
Jesus Christ belongs to all of us because He is all of us. Unfortunately, not everyone
believes that. (v)5
To be created in McNally’s image apparently requires being sexually
active, and the “god” he creates, Joshua, has sexual relations with at least two
of his disciples, Judas and Simon.
Noting that “[v]ery few Christians are willing to consider that their Lord
and Savior was a real man with real appetites, especially sexual ones,”
McNally complains that to such Christians, “[t]o imagine that He was not only
sexually active but a homosexual as well is gross blasphemy. And they would
deny others the right to conceive of Him as such. They do not understand that
a good part of our humanity is expressed through our sexuality and is not
exclusive of it. Such a concept is as alien to them as their notion of ‘sin’ and
‘evil’ is to me” (v). McNally suggests that in order to have been fully human,
Jesus must have had sex.
Although his denunciation of repression may sound revolutionary, Mc-
Nally’s approach fails to acknowledge orthodox Christianity’s nuanced treat-
ment of Christ’s embodiment. While it has long affirmed Christ’s celibacy,
the church and creative artists within it have called attention to his sexual
potential. Granted, the medieval biblical dramatists whose tradition McNally
adapts in Corpus Christi were silent about Jesus’ sexuality, but Christian
visual artists have long emphasized Jesus’ male physicality.6 In The Sexuality
of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Leo Steinberg traces
this theme in Western religious art. He asserts that artistic renderings of the
naked Christ Child, some of which actually accentuate the infant’s genitals,
reflect a theological commitment to emphasizing the full humanity of the
incarnate God. Jesus’ nakedness on the cross, Steinberg explains, suggests his
exemption from the postlapsarian curse: “Delivered from sin and shame, the
freedom of Christ’s sexual member bespeaks that aboriginal innocence which
in Adam was lost. We may say that Michelangelo’s naked Christs – on the
cross, dead or risen – are, like the naked Christ Child, not shameful, but liter-
ally and profoundly ‘shame-less’” (Steinberg 24). Such depictions combat the
Gnostic heresy of docetism, in which a fully divine Jesus only seems to be a
fleshly human.
John Dominic Crossan offers a careful study of conflicting understandings
of Christ’s being both fully human and fully divine in The Birth of Christian-
ity, providing background that illuminates the unorthodoxy of McNally’s
position. Crossan explains that many of the earliest Christian converts came
from traditions in which gods regularly appeared to have donned flesh and
thus struggled to believe in Jesus’ full humanity. Moderns, in contrast, have
more trouble believing in his divinity:
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The irrelevance of human flesh, on the one hand, and the unreality of divine flesh,
on the other, presented earliest Christianity with a serious and profound problem
concerning Jesus. Those believers were poised on that fault line in the ancient world,
a fault line that involved the whole material world and all humans in it but was now
focused on Jesus. We might think to ourselves, Of course Jesus was human, but was
he divine? They had the opposite problem. If they believed that Jesus was divine, the
question became, How could he be human? How could his body be real rather than
apparitional and illusional? […]
If Jesus was divine, was his body real and incarnational in the sense of fully and
validly enfleshed, or was his body unreal and apparitional, only seemingly en-
fleshed, a docetic body (from Greek dokein, “to seem”)? One way of describing
that clash of interpretation is to speak of incarnational as against docetic
Christianity. (37)
McNally, as one of the moderns whose position Crossan describes, has no
difficulty regarding Jesus’ body as real. He is immune to the temptation of
docetism. His Joshua, however, is not God incarnate but is instead an adopted
child of God, as (his play teaches) any human can become.
Although Corpus Christi’s anti-doceticism may initially satisfy orthodox
Christians, the adoptionist element does not. Only by being God incarnate,
Christian tradition teaches, was Jesus free from sin and thus able to save fallen
humanity. Such a perspective holds that while Christ was capable of sexual
experience and even drawn to it as a healthy adult, he remained celibate. His
full humanity required that he experience sexual desire but not that he act
upon it. Without vulnerability to all forms of temptation, including sexual
desire, his resistance would have been unremarkable. That resistance is not an
indictment of sexual expression’s sinfulness for its own sake but a sign of his
refusal to engage in sex in its fallen state.
The art Steinberg analyzes illustrates this understanding. Renaissance paint-
ers and sculptors painted the Christ Child’s and the crucified Christ’s naked-
ness with surprising frequency, but they refrained from showing the genitals
of the mature, living Jesus. When depicting “Christ’s adult ministry,” Stein-
berg asserts, “sexuality matters in its abeyance. Jesus as exemplar and teacher
prevails over concupiscence to consecrate the Christian ideal of chastity” (24).
Ultimately, however, Christ’s resistance to temptation is one of his most dis-
tinctive characteristics. Steinberg concludes that theological interpretations of
the Fall explain the necessity of Christ’s celibacy despite his potential for sex-
ual expression:
Blameless sexuality can be realized only in partnership. But while the present
postlapsarian interlude lasts, no eligible partner can be sexually engaged without
activating concupiscence. Thus a sexual stimulus from the Incarnate would
necessarily introduce sin in another, which is, theologically speaking, impossible.
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
169
[…] But, say the Renaissance painters, the blessed original capability must be
put back in evidence, since it co-defines human nature in its pristine condition.
(297)
Sex became sinful only with the Fall, and only after Christ’s crucifixion and
resurrection can it – within the realm of all Creation – be restored to its prelap-
sarian state. For Jesus to have been sexually active during his earthly ministry
would have only contributed to the brokenness of the fallen world. McNally,
however, unlike the religious visual artists whose work Steinberg describes,
depicts not only his Christ-figure’s capacity for sexual expression but also his
sexual practice.7
In discussing Corpus Christi, Frontain fails similarly to differentiate
between capacity and practice and compares sexual orientation to racial iden-
tity. Noting that playgoers are likely to bring to Corpus Christi associations
with religious visual art, Frontain suggests that gays need an image of a gay
Jesus, in much the same way that “Africans and African Americans are
allowed a black Jesus with whom they can identify, as opposed to the blond-
haired, blue-eyed Jesus popularized in Italian Renaissance art” (237).8 Fron-
tain glosses over, however, the argument most traditional Christians would
make about the difference between racial identity and sexual behavior: that
the former has no moral implication, while the latter does.
More deeply offensive to Christians than Joshua’s active sexuality, how-
ever, is the way in which it calls into question Jesus’ unique divinity. The New
Testament is, after all, silent about Jesus’ sexual behavior; orthodox theology
on the matter has emerged in the centuries since his death. The New Testa-
ment does, however, emphasize both his being the unique fulfillment of Old
Testament messianic prophecies and his crucifixion’s and resurrection’s
salvific functions. McNally’s challenge to these two positions is far more
problematic than his imaginative rendering of Joshua/Jesus’ romantic history.
McNally distinguishes his Joshua from the New Testament’s uniquely mes-
sianic Jesus most clearly in a scene in which Joshua blesses a gay union.
Although Bartholomew calls him “Messiah,” Joshua distances himself from
the Old Testament and thus from the messianic tradition by dismissing the
levitical proscription against male intercourse as “a terrible passage” (61).
Here, McNally veers sharply from the New Testament accounts of the Jesus
who came to fulfill every “jot and tittle” of Old Testament law (Matthew
5:17–19). He also insists that this messiah is anything but unique. In contrast
to Jesus, who pronounces himself “the way, the truth, and the life” and asserts
that “no one comes to the Father except by me” (John 14:6), Joshua declares
that he is no different from anyone else. Early in the play, God tells Joshua,
“All men are divine. […] That is the secret You will teach them” (20). When
Peter declares that he and his fellow-disciples would have followed Joshua
anywhere, Joshua protests,
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God is our leader. I’m just this guy like you. No better, no worse. I can’t gut a fish,
Peter, and I don’t think I ever want to. I couldn’t begin to cut someone’s hair,
Thaddeus. God knows, I can’t sing. You’ve all heard Me. But when you do, Simon,
you’re singing for Me, saying things I can’t. John writes down everything I say,
which is good, because I don’t remember half the time. We’re each special. We’re
each ordinary. We’re each divine. (50)
McNally’s prefatory claim that “Jesus Christ belongs to all of us because He
is all of us” serves to reinforce the play’s argument that Joshua (and Jesus) are
exemplary rather than unique and thus merit emulation rather than worship (v).
Again, the playwright’s position is not entirely original; Christian ortho-
doxy has long battled teachings that Jesus was fully and merely human but
adopted by God at his baptism. Proponents of adoptionism generally con-
clude, as Corpus Christi suggests, that any human is capable of divinity to the
degree that Jesus was. Adoptionist Christology almost always yields an unor-
thodox soteriology, or theology of salvation. If any human can follow Christ’s
lead to the point of becoming “divine,” the Crucifixion and Resurrection are
unnecessary. McNally’s play teaches that the disciples’ allegiance to Joshua
and modern-day playgoers’ allegiance to Jesus should be sufficient to inspire
kind and loving behavior. Watching Corpus Christi should prompt us,
McNally hopes, to “begin again the familiar dialogue with ourselves: Do I
love my neighbor? Am I contributing good to the society in which I operate or
nil? Do I, in fact, matter? Nothing more, nothing less” (vi–vii). For the play-
wright, Joshua/Jesus models living passionately, compassionately, and toler-
antly. He asserts that Jesus’ life and teachings alone are enough to make him a
hero.
That modeling extends, of course, to the realm of sexual behavior. Ray-
mond-Jean Frontain suggests that Joshua’s sexual practices and teachings
serve as the heart of Corpus Christi’s gospel: that Joshua/Jesus “offers his
body and blood for the salvation of humankind” to teach “‘another way’ of
sex, ‘the way of love and generosity and self-peace’ (Corpus Christi 19), not
of lust, exploitation of others, and resulting self-disgust” (236). Comparing
McNally’s play to the medieval biblical dramas celebrating Holy Communion
during the Feast of Corpus Christi, Frontain believes Corpus Christi similarly
celebrates queer sex: “Corpus Christi suggests a redemptive sharing of one’s
body with those whom one loves; it points to a religious mystery by which the
sharing of one’s flesh and bodily fluid provide others with a transcendent hap-
piness that they will share with others and, thus, extend peace and harmony
into the world” (235). McNally, he asserts, depicts “the redemptive potential
of sexuality,” proclaiming “fellatio as salvation, as it were” (237).9 Whatever
their judgments about that particular sexual practice, traditional Christians
assert that Jesus’ sacrificial death and the eucharistic rites memorializing it are
uniquely salvific.
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
171
Christians are likely to object further that Corpus Christi is a sort of Good
Friday sermon with no promise of an Easter Sunday resurrection. In the play’s
final scene, Joshua’s death prompts one of his followers to declare, “He loved
every one of us. That’s all He was about” (81). All but one of the actors exit,
leaving him kneeling by the crucified Joshua, who will not rise from the dead.
Such a depiction presents the historical crucifixion not as a salvific event but
as a horrible mistake. Christ’s bodily resurrection may not have – and cer-
tainly need not have – happened at all. Such a position threatens orthodoxy
more seriously than speculations about Jesus’ sex life do and ultimately makes
the play untenable to the Christian viewers who might otherwise be sympa-
thetic to McNally’s pleas for compassion.
Further undermining Christianity’s claims about Christ’s uniqueness is
McNally’s conflation of Joshua/Jesus and Matthew Shepard. The playwright
goes so far as to suggest in Corpus Christi’s preface that Shepard’s death
might be as meaningful as Christ’s. After all, from McNally’s perspective,
“all [Joshua] was about” was loving humankind, not redeeming it (81). Any
human, including the unfortunate Matthew Shepard, can do the same. Refer-
ring to the controversy surrounding Corpus Christi’s New York staging,
McNally notes that Shepard was murdered during the play’s opening week
and subsequently identifies the slaying with protests against the play:
[A]t the same time we were all feeling so good about overcoming these forces of
ignorance and prejudice, a young man in Laramie, Wyoming, by the name of
Matthew Shepard was losing his life to them. Beaten senseless and tied to a split-rail
fence in near-zero weather, arms akimbo in a grotesque crucifixion, he died as
agonizing a death as another young man who had been tortured and nailed to a
wooden cross at a desolate spot outside Jerusalem known as Golgotha some 1,998
years earlier. (vi)
McNally goes on to explain that Corpus Christi’s purpose is simply to ask
audiences to “look what they did to Him. Look what they did to Him” – both
Jesus and Matthew Shepard. “Jesus Christ died again when Matthew Shepard
did,” he claims (vii). The playwright goes on to suggest that those who reject
his play reject Christ’s example of loving tolerance. The next step for such
individuals, he implies, is committing hate crimes. His line of reasoning not
only unfairly makes criminals of those who protested Corpus Christi but also
minimizes what orthodox Christians believe to be the unique power of
Christ’s sacrificial death. Such moves result from what New Criterion critic
Mark Steyn suggests is Corpus Christi’s being “the logical reductio of a pro-
cess that has been gathering steam in the American theater during the long
march of the AIDS epidemic – the need to find a spiritual validation of homo-
sexuality” (50).
McNally’s play is, for the most part, a demand for such validation. Such a
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particularized focus largely limits his play’s appeal to queer-friendly insiders,
while his treatment of Christ further antagonizes outsiders who subscribe to
traditional Christian views. In Still Acting Gay, even queer theatre scholar
John Clum dismisses Corpus Christi for being exclusionary:
I have no doubt McNally is aiming for a personal statement here, but the play raises
serious questions about the youth worship, narcissism, and single issue politics that
are rife in the gay community. After a matinee of Corpus Christi, I overheard two
elderly Jewish women in the ladies’ room line complaining that the play did not
speak to them. But who does Corpus Christi speak to beyond beautiful young gay
men and their older admirers? (280)
Certainly, the play speaks to few if any evangelical Christians. Clum under-
stands this situation, writing,
[E]ven I, a secular humanist, was bothered by the notion that Christ was crucified
primarily because he was gay and that the most revolutionary thing he did was
perform a gay marriage ceremony. This is an extreme example of the self-
righteousness and self-congratulation that is leading gay critics to turn their sights on
gay culture. There are no social, economic, or political issues here beyond gayness.
(282)
Rather than illuminate the Christian Gospel’s expansiveness, McNally has
co-opted it in a way that alienates those who feel most connected to it.
Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, on the other hand, is a
biblical drama that largely manages to avoid alienating traditional Christians
in the same way that Corpus Christi does. Although its explicit sexual content
and use of biblical material created some controversy, Most Fabulous pro-
voked protest on a much smaller scale than McNally’s play did. Catholic
League president William Donohue dismissed Most Fabulous as “a routine
homosexual play: full-frontal male nudity, filthy language, discussions of
body parts, butch lesbians, effeminate gay men, ranting against nature, damn-
ing God for AIDS, etc.,” but he and the League refrained from launching a
formal protest against it. The League’s 16 December 1998 press release
explains that they “protested Corpus Christi because it was the work of a
three-time Tony award winner and had a realistic chance of going to Broad-
way. But Rudnick is no McNally and his work has zero chance of being
shown on Broadway” (“The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told Reveals A Lot”).
Although Donohue attributed the Catholic League’s relative lack of interest
in The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told to its playwright’s lower profile, Paul
Rudnick’s oeuvre is actually more accessible than McNally’s to most Ameri-
cans. Rudnick’s screenwriting for such films as Sister Act, Addams Family
Values, Jeffrey, In & Out, Isn’t She Great, and The Stepford Wives have made
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
173
him a significant contributor to American popular culture. In reality, religious
watchdogs found his play less offensive than McNally’s because it focuses on
the Hebrew scriptures, or the Christian Old Testament, rather than on the New
Testament, and does not deal specifically with Christ. Donohue says his
group’s view, for example, is that “if there’s something that’s absolutely
immoral, outrageous and obscene in the Museum of Modern Art this after-
noon – and it doesn’t touch Christianity – sayonara. That’s for somebody else
to deal with. Know your turf” (Mcshane). Rudnick’s Most Fabulous con-
cludes with the December 24 birth of a baby girl rather than a male Christ
Child and thus not only ducks full-scale fire from Christian protesters but also
skirts the Christological and soteriological issues Corpus Christi raises.
Undermining viewers’ expectations by making the baby born on Christmas
Eve female also seems appropriate for a Jewish comic playwright. Rudnick
often downplays his Judaism, however, wisecracking to me in an October
2000 interview that he “always thought [his] bar mitzvah would be conducted
in Latin – it was so non-devout.” He told New York Daily News interviewer
Howard Kissel in 1999 that “we were too religious to have a Christmas tree”
but “not religious enough to celebrate all eight nights of Chanukah.” Wryly,
he added, “We did have a real sense of worship for gift wrap and ribbon and
whatever came from Hasbro and Mattel.” Calling himself “a New Jersey Joan
of Arc,” Rudnick boasted of having been “the first child in [his] synagogue to
be bar mitzvahed in a rust-colored double-breasted blazer and coordinated
slacks” (47).
Despite his cavalier attitude toward his family’s faith, Rudnick acknowl-
edges having been aware of his religious identity from an early age. He
observed in our October 2000 interview, “I think I grew up – as a lot of Jewish
kids do – in the shadow of the Holocaust. There was always that sense that you
had better deal with Judaism, with your Jewish heritage, because other people
will be.” He confessed in the same interview to being fascinated by religious
questions: “You are ultimately confronted with all those big, ultimate, endless
areas of life: with death, and the afterlife, with suffering, with the death of loved
ones. What do you do with that?” He explains elsewhere that writing The Most
Fabulous Story Ever Told showed him that even though such questions haunt
many people, few Americans are willing to talk openly about faith:
I had been writing other plays that dealt with sex, a topic that has become as
ordinary as singing lion cubs and the destruction of Earth by malevolent asteroids.
God suddenly struck me as a final taboo. What could make an audience, or friends at
a cocktail party, more embarrassed than an intimate discussion of their most
personal religious beliefs? Wouldn’t matters have been far more titillating if Bill and
Monica had been praying together? Chronic depression, infertility and incest are
now talk show staples; God is relegated to the far reaches of cable, as a form of
evangelical home shopping. (“If Sex” 7)
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Rudnick asserts that despite its controversial sexual content, Most Fabulous
has more to do with religion than with sex.
Before beginning Most Fabulous, however, Rudnick had written about reli-
gion only for comic purposes. He penned the original script and collaborated
on the screenplay for Sister Act (attributed to the pseudonymous Joseph
Howard), the hit film about a nightclub entertainer who hides from the mob in
a convent. His play The Naked Truth features a nun whose Tourette’s syn-
drome leaves her with a salty vocabulary, and Jeffrey shows a young gay man
encountering Mother Teresa and fending off a lecherous priest. In the film In
& Out, a priest advises a confused high school teacher to explore his sexual
identity by sampling sex with his fiancée. While such characterizations open
Rudnick to charges of anti-clericalism, at the very least, the playwright
insisted in our 2000 interview that his treatment of the priest in Jeffrey is
“deeply affectionate.” Unlike McNally, he expresses no animosity toward the
Catholic Church. Instead, he explained to me that he depends on religious
characters to write good comedy:
I think the reason why Roman Catholics, like Jews, are very useful in terms of
theater, is because for comedy, especially if it’s a comedy of manners, you need
manners. You need structure. You need commandments. […] If you don’t have
rules, coming either from a government or a religion, it’s very tricky to have comedy
in any kind of behavioral vacuum.
Ironically, Rudnick credits religious fervor with inspiring him to write his
gay biblical drama. He launches his introduction to the play by tipping his hat,
if not to Catholics, to the religious Right, for claiming that “God made Adam
and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Reflecting first on the statement’s comic pos-
sibilities, Rudnick soon “realized that that mere Bible satire was not particu-
larly satisfying, and would grow wearisome for a full-length play; what I
wanted to do was explore larger matters of faith through a frame of biblical
events” (Most Fabulous 6). His ensuing exploration of faith, passionate if
unconventional, yielded a work that takes the divine seriously, even as it
offends. He mused in our interview about the timeless questions that intrigue
him:
The most basic questions […] are the questions religion actually tackles. And for
many people, actually answers. And that’s what’s so exciting about any discussion
of religion. That’s also why religion endures and continues to be invented, or
discovered. Because we’re not just talking about fine points of theology; we’re
talking about basic belief. Is there a God? Which God might you choose? Which
God chooses you? Why has religion been historically such a critical part of human
development? Why have they been so necessary, so tragic, so beloved, so
everything?
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175
In Most Fabulous, the playwright considers all these questions – questions
that go far beyond contemporary debates about homosexuality or responses to
a particular hate crime.
Rudnick grounds his questioning in territory religious seekers have struggled
to chart for centuries: the problem of evil. In Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God,
Jesus, and the Bible, Nancy Wilson notes that “in theological circles, this prob-
lem is called theodicy: understanding how evil and oppression can exist in a
world created by a good God” (7). While Christian thinkers since at least the
second century have attempted to resolve this problem, the Jewish quest for
wisdom on the subject is, of course, even older. Genesis and Job are the fore-
most classic ancient Hebrew texts that address the problem of evil. More
recently, Jewish theologians have struggled to develop post-Holocaust theodi-
cies. That Rudnick, a creative artist well aware of his Jewish antecedents,
would find suffering a compelling subject should come as no surprise. As a gay
man, Rudnick may also share the particular theodical concerns Wilson
attributes to gays and lesbians. She notes that “as a lesbian pastor in the gay and
lesbian community, I have had hundreds of conversations with people agoniz-
ing about whether God truly created us as we are. And if so, could God love us;
and if so, why was there so much suffering, pain, and homophobia?” (7).
Although his play is anything but a systematic theology, Rudnick does use
it to pose many of the same questions Jewish theologian David Birnbaum con-
siders in his 1989 God and Evil: A Unified Theodicy/Theology/Philosophy.
“Century after century,” Birnbaum explains, “most theodicies have either lim-
ited aspects of God’s power, limited man’s claim to virtue, or limited man’s
ability to comprehend God’s true virtue. None of these options is truly satisfy-
ing to religious man of reason – who wishes to maintain God’s power, man’s
virtue, and man’s ability to comprehend” (10). In the centuries-old and now
Holocaust-heightened tradition of religious questioning, Birnbaum asks, What
are God’s purpose and origins? What is humankind’s purpose? How does the
human potential for freedom reflect divine potential? How does the pursuit of
freedom necessitate banishment from Eden and, subsequently, vulnerability to
moral and natural evil? And finally, might human freedom require God’s
retreat from the world? The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told offers a dramatic
depiction of those very questions.
The play’s first move is to postulate God as a creative Being: a female
Stage Manager, “confident, aloof and slightly swaggering” (13). The Creation
itself becomes the opening of a play; the Stage Manager first cues the house
lights and then moves on to light itself: “Monday, go. Light, go. I love this …
First sunset, go …Tuesday, go. Oceans, go” (13). Rudnick considers human
purposes through the character of the jockstrap-wearing Adam, who asks
shortly after meeting the similarly scantily clad Steve:
Where did we come from? How did we get here? Who made us, who made this
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garden, and why? Are we the only ones here, are we meant to be together, are there
things we’re supposed to do, how will we know, will our relationship be good for the
both of us, will we be together forever, what’s forever, and is this all part of some
plan, or did it just happen? (15)
Masking the seriousness of his play’s questions by putting them on the lips
of a giddy, nearly naked man, Rudnick then explores them throughout the play.
Although Adam and Steve subsequently and graphically invent oral and
anal sex, Adam is just as interested in theological enlightenment as he is sex-
ual adventure. His spiritual sensitivity enables him to converse with characters
Rudnick has placed in the audience: a disapproving Catholic priest, an out-
spoken Jewish woman, and a naïve Mormon girl. “Why can’t I see every-
thing?” Adam asks them. “I want to know who made me! And why!” (21). The
priest, warning him about human betrayal beyond the Garden, and the Jewish
woman, extolling his unspoiled natural setting, advise him not to leave, but the
Stage Manager gives Adam the freedom to call the cue to strike the set. He
does so, only to find his new surroundings outside Eden strange and frighten-
ing. Within the first few minutes of his play, Rudnick has illustrated David
Birnbaum’s assertion that humans, like God, seek to fulfill their potential for
creative growth but that their pursuit of autonomy opens them to hostile envi-
ronmental forces, or natural evil, and human wrongdoing, or moral evil.
Banished from the Garden, Rudnick’s characters experience both cold
weather and cold shoulders from their fellow humans. Steve is furious about
Adam’s having taken them out of the Garden, and the lesbian couple they
meet, Jane and Mabel, also blame Adam for the Fall. The characters repeat-
edly hurt one another and reconcile as they pass through early Hebrew history.
Steve and Jane both betray their partners in bestial flings on the Ark, and
Adam and Steve keep coming up against their spiritual differences. Near the
end of the first act, after meeting Pharaoh, Moses, and hordes of Egyptian
slaves, Steve finally challenges Adam: “Adam! I am right here, in front of
you! Where I have been since the beginning! Why do you need a book or a
god, to tell you to love me? Are you that pathetic? Are you that weak?” Reply-
ing that, on the contrary, he is “[s]trong enough to believe,” Adam prepares to
leave Steve. Addressing Pharaoh’s slaves, Adam asks,
Who wants to find a righteous way to live, in a world filled with deception? …
Who wants to discover the true nature of God, and the purpose of the universe? …
Who wants to prove that love does not endure? Not once you leave the garden.
In the world, you will be hurt. And betrayed. And you will be better off – alone.
(53)
Here, Rudnick makes explicit the source of his play’s greatest conflict: the
struggles among human beings. As he questions God’s existence and purpose
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
177
and considers the inevitability of suffering, however, he never abandons the
hope that human love might surpass misunderstanding and even betrayal.
Rudnick shifts from the first act on a hopeful, comic note: Adam and Steve
reconcile again, this time as Mabel prepares to deliver a child. Dressed as
magi, the two men enter a kitschy Nativity scene. Before the baby is born,
however, Adam’s cell phone rings, signaling the end of the act and the move
to modern-day Manhattan. The second act takes place in Adam and Steve’s
loft apartment, where they entertain a very pregnant Jane, Mabel, and other
friends at a cocktail party. Although the quips continue to fly, the characters
grapple with the effects of homophobia, their frustrations with one another,
the memory of Mabel’s baby’s death a year ago, and the specter of HIV. Steve
is undergoing AIDS treatment, and he and Adam continue to argue about the
existence of God. Their conflict comes to a head when a disabled lesbian
cable television rabbi arrives to perform Jane and Mabel’s commitment cere-
mony. Sensing Steve’s hostility toward religion, Rabbi Sharon pursues him:
“You I respect … Because I’ve heard you’re stubborn. You say show me. You
say no … Because God did you wrong. AIDS. The homeless. The Holocaust”
(78). Accusing him of indulging in self-pity, Sharon asserts that she, too, has
suffered and raged at God. She describes the epiphany she had while recover-
ing from a nearly fatal accident:
And I come to, three weeks later, paralyzed, half-blind, and I think, what the fuck is
going on? … And some nurse gives me this book, called Why Do Bad Things
Happen to Good People? And all I’m thinking is, I don’t care! What I want to know
is, why do good things happen to bad people? I’m in a wheelchair, and Saddam
Hussein’s in a Mercedes. I can’t walk, and O.J.’s on the ninth hole …
And then – it hits me. What doesn’t? Why it happened. And what I’m supposed to
do, with my useless legs and my messed-up life … So I buy me some airtime and I
say, listen up, New York! Take a look! [She gestures to herself in her wheelchair.]
This is your nightmare! This is the ice on the sidewalk, the maniac in the hallway,
this is God when she’s drunk! So if I can still believe, if I can still thank someone or
something for each new day, if I can pee into a bag and still praise heaven for the
pleasure, then so the fuck can all of you, mazel tov, praise Allah and amen! (79)
Rabbi Sharon’s honesty about her own religious questions, as well as her
respect for Steve, are compatible with what Birnbaum calls a “Jewish tradition
[that] gives wide berth to aggressive inquiry” (6). He notes that “occasionally
God reveals His approval of those who contend with Him directly, as He did
in the case of Job” (6). While Steve has shied away from direct contention,
however, Rabbi Sharon has not. Having come to terms with God and with suf-
fering, she points out that “[s]ometimes God delivers” (79). Steve’s AIDS
medications, she suggests, are a kind of miracle. Adam concurs, pointing out
that Steve had nearly died and that Mabel’s two-day-old baby had died the
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previous Christmas. “And tonight,” he says, “look at Jane. Look at you” (80).
Soon afterward, Jane goes into labor, and the cast comes together to deliver
her daughter.
After their guests leave, Adam and Steve tidy their apartment. Pressed by
Adam, Steve admits that his AIDS drug cocktail has stopped working. Again,
they argue about spiritual issues, but Steve placates Adam by giving him a
cashmere Armani sweater and asking, “So – do you feel better now? About
my dying? And losing your faith?” (89). Adam laughs helplessly at the ridicu-
lousness of the question, but curses God. Steve affirms the curse, but Adam
admits that he cannot stop looking for meaning: “I need … a story … I can’t
believe in the Virgin Mary, not anymore. But I can believe – in Jane and
Mabel. And I can’t believe in the baby Jesus. But I can believe in our baby …
And I won’t tell her about the Garden of Eden. But I will tell her about Central
Park … And the day we met” (89). Their reverie yields to the Stage Man-
ager’s calling, “Central Park, go” (89), and the re-enactment of the pair’s first
meeting in an edenic Central Park. As the Stage Manager calls for the curtain,
Adam sees her and calls out:
adam. Wait! Hold on! Hold everything! … You! That voice! The Stage Manager!
Are you God?
stage manager. [After a beat.] Well, I think I am.
adam. [With overwhelming yearning.] But are you really God? I still need to know!
Have you really made everything happen? You have to tell me!
stage manager. No I don’t. I don’t have to tell you anything. What do you want
from me? I’ve been doing my job, and now I’m into overtime … No! I’m done!
That’s it! I’m outta here!
She exits, calling for a taxi, leaving Adam and Steve to embrace. With “a
mixture of sexual anticipation and great good humor,” Adam calls, “Curtain,
go!” and the play ends (91).
Haunting questions about God’s origins and purpose remain unanswered,
but they have, at least, found expression. The human characters have found
their own purpose: to pursue self-actualization through love in the face of suf-
fering. As they take on their tremendous responsibility, God withdraws. Birn-
baum has posited that divine withdrawal in terms of “contraction,” arguing
that God must back off, in a sense, “for the purpose of granting man the neces-
sary freedom to achieve his potential” (103). Post-Holocaust humanity, then,
is “not alone in the cosmos” but “currently essentially on [its] own” (159).
Humanity should not despair over this reality, Birnbaum charges; instead,
“man’s spirit should be exhilarated. He should be uplifted by the awesome
potential he has been given in trust; by the confidence placed in him by his
Deity; by the magnitude of his personal freedom” (159). Although Most Fab-
ulous gives no evidence of having been directly influenced by Birnbaum’s
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
179
work, the parallels are striking. Adam and Steve are alone without a Stage
Manager, but they will find fulfillment in loving one another and their friends,
come what may. Rudnick has thus used the play to work through the very
issues Birnbaum explores in his theological text.
Rudnick anticipated that Most Fabulous would prompt questions about his
own religious convictions and confesses in the play’s introduction:
When I wrote MOST FABULOUS, I knew that people would ask me if I believed
in God. The play is my answer, but that’s a little easy. I think I believe in the
transcendence of art, in that perishable moment when an audience and a performer
and a play work together, when laughter and technique and emotion create a
conspiracy of pleasure. I believe in theater and style and [director] Chris Ashley; I
believe in what human beings can do when you give them fifty bucks to buy some
cheap red polyester velvet. Some people need more, something with vengeance and
commandments and jihads; all I need to keep going, to stay spiritual, is [actor] Peter
Bartlett in a Santa suit. (11)
Elsewhere, he has asserted that “[i]n groping for spiritual exaltation” the
only god he can worship unquestioningly is comedy (“If Sex” 7).
The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told is, however, more than a bawdy sex
comedy. Like Corpus Christi, Most Fabulous affirms human love as the
primary source of spiritual sustenance. Unlike McNally, however, Rudnick
acknowledges the range of problems associated with love: humans fight with
one another, and they are unfaithful to one another. Rudnick’s questioning
about natural evil, too, appearing in his play in the forms of Rabbi Sharon’s
paralysis, Mabel’s miscarriage, and Steve’s AIDS, makes his a classic Jewish
dramatic treatment of theodicy. As in Birnbaum’s model, Rudnick’s play sug-
gests that if God exists, She or He must withdraw for humankind to reach its
full potential for autonomy and creativity.
If Christians object to an aspect of the play other than its sexual content,
that aspect would likely be Rudnick’s assertion that God has withdrawn from
Creation. More significant than the play’s often-gratuitous nudity and staged
sex acts is its presentation of divine abandonment.10 For traditional Christians,
who believe that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ and subsequently
remains on earth in the form of the Holy Spirit, such an assertion demands a
theological response. Instead of protesting his play’s productions, Christians
might rightly see them as occasions for dialogue about universal suffering,
human purposes and potential, and the possible fulfillment of messianic
prophecies in Jesus Christ. Christians, however, ought also to ask how their
God can accommodate sin and suffering, and Rudnick has raised the questions
their Gospel attempts to answer.
While its serious treatment of theodicy provides Christians with one obvi-
ous point of entry into Most Fabulous, the play’s comic, life-affirming ele-
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ment should also seem welcoming to them. Despite their often-dour public
image, Christians claim to hope in an ultimate comic resolution to fallen exist-
ence. (Dante’s Divine Comedy, after all, is about the progression from hell’s
brokenness to heaven’s bliss.) In Theatre and Incarnation, Max Harris
observes that Christians should feel a kinship with comedians “due to the
affirmation of humanity that lies at the heart of the Christian faith” (144).11
Looking to Julian of Norwich, Harris asserts that faith in Christ as the cruci-
fied and resurrected incarnate God should equip individuals to respond to the
world’s fallenness “not as heroes but as human beings, mudstained and capa-
ble of laughter, trusting in the great comic anthem, ‘All shall be well, and all
shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ (145).12 Writing about
drama, he argues that “the comic resolution is one in which ‘all shall be well,’
not simply because lovers are reunited or heirs properly identified, but
because there is no fundamental dichotomy, with respect to our humanness,
between what we are and what we ought to be. Such a resolution in the theatre
need not be grounded in a Christian faith” (144). Although Adam and Steve’s
final embrace in Most Fabulous hardly signifies the kind of romantic union
most evangelical Christians would endorse, the characters’ devotion to one
another and Adam’s taking over when the Stage Manager exits show that they
have become what they “should be,” in the play’s own terms.
Indeed, some religious viewers have expressed admiration for The Most Fab-
ulous Story Ever Told. Paul Rudnick asserted in our October 2000 interview
that people of faith have been among the play’s most appreciative viewers:
Interestingly, often the most religious audiences were absolutely the best crowds.
It’s something that Chris Durang once told me. He wrote a play called Sister Mary
Ignatius Explains It All for You, which many people think of as a scathingly
outrageous anti-Catholic diatribe. But, as he said, priests and nuns were the best
audiences you could imagine because they know what you’re talking about. And
even if they don’t share your entire perspective on religious matters, they’re in the
trenches with you. And that’s great. So with The Most Fabulous Story, there were a
lot of people who came expecting the play to be merely an attack on organized
religion, or to be targeting one specific faith, and they were shockingly and
sometimes quite pleasantly surprised that the play was something else entirely.
Rudnick’s discovery of Christian viewers’ being “in the trenches” with him
indicates that he has succeeded in making not only queers but also some tradi-
tional Christians feel like “insiders” when they watch The Most Fabulous
Story Ever Told.
Rudnick has made the most of his wide popular appeal, writing a gay play
that offers much to straights – even evangelical Christian straights many
might expect to be hostile to the queer cause. First, in contrast to McNally, he
avoids offending Christians at the deepest level by stopping his biblical treat-
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
181
ment at the Nativity. Next, he uses contemporary issues not to take a political
stand on a particular topic but to explore broad, even universal questions
about human nature, suffering, and religious experience. Finally, while Cor-
pus Christi’s tone is preachy, disapproving, and even shrill, Most Fabulous
conveys an attitude of openness, exploration, and celebration. Even though, as
a theodicy, it takes on such potentially depressing topics as betrayal, miscar-
riage, and AIDS, the play offers laughter as both a balm and a bridge.13 Many
who have lost lovers and friends to AIDS will find that Most Fabulous gives
them an occasion to laugh through their grief, while others without direct con-
nection to queer experience lower their defenses in laughter as they reflect on
the play’s underlying themes. In so doing, they open themselves to caring
about queer characters and even to the possibility of coming to believe “in the
necessity of queer identities and communities, culture and politics” (Miller
and Román 177). In his gay gospel, then, Paul Rudnick not only offers suste-
nance to the queer “converted” but creates a dramatic climate in which even
evangelical Christians may well find their sympathies converted, too.
n o t e s
1 Corpus Christi premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club (after a protest-prompted
production hiatus) on 13 Oct. 1998, and Most Fabulous opened at the New York
Theater Workshop on 14 Dec. 1998 and moved to the Minetta Lane Theatre the
following February.
Although the Manhattan Theatre Club operates on a larger scale than the com-
munity-based queer venues at the center of Miller and Román’s study, Ben Cam-
eron discusses the MTC’s suspension of Corpus Christi as creating conflict among
insiders, asking, “Was our attention diverted from the external attack by our feel-
ings of internal betrayal? After all, we expect attacks from the outside, but if this
could happen within our ‘family’ …” (6).
2 Neither McNally nor Rudnick writes from the fringes; McNally has won a Pulitzer
Prize and four Tony Awards, while Rudnick’s accolades include an Obie, an Outer
Critics Circle Award, and the John Gassner Playwriting Award.
3 Most recently, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and
Property has targeted the Madison, WI, production of Corpus Christi scheduled to
open at the Bartell Theatre in March 2004 (“Trends and Events” 10).
4 Born in Florida but reared in Corpus Christi, TX (where the play is set), McNally
has almost certainly included his own coming of age – and coming out – in his pal-
impsestic biblical drama. Robert Brustein asserts in his New Republic review that
Joshua is at least as much McNally as he is Jesus and complains about the drama-
tist’s “theatrical marketing of gay self-glorification. Corpus Christi is hardly the
first time that Jesus has been ‘outed.’ […] But it is undoubtedly the first play in
which the playwright seems to have confused the story of Jesus with the story of
his own life” (34).
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Disagreement exists, however, about the extent to which McNally means to equate
Joshua with Jesus. The Manhattan Theatre Club press release billed the play as
focusing on a “young gay man named Joshua on his spiritual journey” (qtd. in “Oh,
Jesus!”), and Texas Monthly’s Keith Kachtick described Joshua similarly as “a gay
Christ-like character from Texas who undergoes a spiritual journey” (28). National
Catholic Reporter’s Joseph Cunneen, on the other hand, called the play a “retelling
of the life of Joshua (clearly intended to be Jesus),” and U.S. News and World
Report’s John Leo warned readers about “a play about a homosexual Jesus charac-
ter named Joshua who has sex with his disciples and is crucified as ‘king of the
queers’” (17).
5 Frontain cites this passage from McNally’s preface approvingly (231), yet he com-
plains in his own preface “that Jesus is too often remade in the image and likeness
of each believer” (xiv).
6 Although several critics have noted the wordplay at work in the title, acknowledg-
ing that Corpus Christi is the Texas town in which McNally grew up, the Latin
term for “body of Christ,” and the feast day in its honor, they were slow to
acknowledge the medieval cycle plays’ having been called “Corpus Christi plays”
because of their frequent performances on the feast day. When I asked him by
e-mail about this connection, McNally replied, “Yes, I had the medieval drama
very much in mind when I wrote CC. Not a single NYC critic seems to have been
aware of that” (18 June 2000).
The play’s preface, however, explicitly acknowledges Corpus Christi’s roots in the
medieval dramatic tradition, stating, “Corpus Christi is a passion play. The life of
Joshua, a young man from south Texas, is told in the theatrical tradition of medi-
eval morality plays. Men play all the roles. There is no suspense. There is no scen-
ery” (vi). McNally indicates that Corpus Christi is “more a religious ritual than a
play. A play teaches us new insight into the human condition. A ritual is an action
we perform over and over because we have to. Otherwise, we are in danger of
forgetting the meaning of that ritual, in this case that we must love one another or
die” (vii). Raymond-Jean Frontain explores this issue in some detail in “All Men
Are Divine.”
7 Another art critic whose work sheds light on McNally’s and Rudnick’s is Eleanor
Heartney, who has analyzed controversial photography, sculpture, and painting
from the 1980s and 1990. In “Postmodern Heretics,” published two years after
Miller and Román’s essay and a year before Corpus Christi and The Most Fabu-
lous Story Ever Told opened, Heartney concludes that a Roman Catholic back-
ground has provided visual artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres
Serrano with a “corporeal” and “transgressive” perspective (33). Heartney believes
that Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs and Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” so vili-
fied by political and religious conservatives during the NEA funding flap, are the
products of a “sensual and complex Roman Catholic–based culture” (33). Heartney
asserts that Catholicism “encourages a multilayered view of the world, a view that
tends to persist even if an individual has discarded the Church’s orthodox doctrine”
Conversion Tactics in McNally’s and Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
183
(37). Such a view, she explains, prompts artists to explore issues of embodiment
and desire and to use religious symbols in ways that artists from more literal
Protestant or non-Christian backgrounds might not. McNally’s fascination with
Christ’s embodiment, demonstrated by his emphasis on Joshua’s sexual activity,
reflects a quasi-Catholic sensibility not unlike that of Mapplethorpe and Serrano.
Heartney also considers the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin, whose father was
Jewish. Witkin, whose artistic subjects include corpses, fetuses, and the deformed,
has said that his work reveals his “love-hate” for God (qtd. in Heartney 35).
Heartney explains that “by reveling in the monstrous and repulsive, Witkin mocks
God’s supposed mercy and challenges the promise of universal redemption” (35).
She asserts that “the black humor which runs through Witkin’s work is an expres-
sion of the artist’s rage at God, who not only refuses to show himself but dispenses
death and deformity among mankind” (35). Rudnick, whose humor is generally
more playful than dark, nevertheless shares Witkin’s deep concern with the prob-
lem of evil. Such a preoccupation with suffering has characterized Jewish creative
art at least since the book of Job.
8 John Clum also acknowledges a link between Corpus Christi and religious art,
writing, “Martyrdom can also be sexy. One has only to look at the Renaissance
paintings of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian […] to see that depictions of torture
can be erotically charged. A semi-nude, beautiful young man is being penetrated by
arrows. He is standing, but passive. The picture is one of pleasure, not pain. Corpus
Christi’s picture of Christ as a beautiful young man, crucified in his white jockey
briefs (the image adorns the cover of the published text of the play), is similarly
erotically charged” (280).
9 Frontain divides gay treatments of biblical texts into two categories: the “transgres-
sive” and the “appropriative.” While I find his terminology useful, I disagree with
his reading of Corpus Christi as appropriative (2, 237–38).
10 Most Fabulous also stereotypes Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Mormon characters
and pokes fun at issues of race, class, and physical disability. Rudnick is, however,
an equal-opportunity offender: his politically incorrect depictions of homosexual
characters are unflattering enough to prompt Variety critic Charles Isherwood to
label Most Fabulous “the gay equivalent of the productions that tour the black
‘chitlin’ circuit’” (85).
11 Harris credits Nathan Scott with identifying the Christian’s sympathy for the come-
dian in The Broken Center.
12 Nancy Wilson also insists on the importance of Christian laughter, writing,
“Church ought to be a place where people are loved, comforted, and uplifted, but
also a place where we are shocked, shaken and turned around. Also, a place where
we can laugh. I’m not talking about giggling or chuckling but deep, roll-in-the-
aisles laughing. Not every Sunday perhaps, but frequently. In the Middle Ages, it
was the custom to begin every Easter Sunday morning sermon with a joke. It was
the day above all days when we were to laugh in church, to laugh at the devil who
had been utterly defeated and outsmarted” (60).
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martha greene eads
13 In his discussion of theatre critics’ objections to Rudnick’s use of humor in Jeffrey,
Daniel Mufson points out that the play “veers away from engaging the issue of
AIDS and instead focuses on the issue of engaging AIDS. One step back from the
abyss, and yet, because we are separated from the time of AIDS by nothing, it is as
close as we can get to confronting a problem while still preserving one of the few
things that makes us worth saving: a sense of humor” (119).
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