A Christmas Play: Comtemporary Christianity and A Case Study in Evangelical Depiction

Bad blogging discipline. As I have maintained, its difficult to write anything at all during holidays because its so difficult to stimulate the mind when all you ever do is play the guitar and play video games and go out and talk rubbish with friends. Eirene did manage to invite me to a Christmas play on Christmas morning though. I’ll write about that.

Eirene, and her sister, Jessica, are friends from way back in secondary school. Jessica used to be head of the Christian Fellowship back when I just moved up from primary school. Eirene is my age, and I’m closer to her. She invited me to the play that Jessica’s church was putting up on Christmas day.

Jessica goes to Acts Church, a relatively young church in Subang Jaya, founded close to 7 years ago by Pastor Kenneth Chin. He’s also the man behind the Asian Youth Ambassadors, a Christian youth organization. I’ve heard him speak before, I’ve done my share of AYA camps and talks when I was back in Malaysia. The church is also mostly attended by young working adults.

Christmas plays, if not any plays staged by any Christian organization are usually evangelical in nature, and this one was not an exception. By evangelical, I mean that the goal of the play is to spread the essential message of Christianity. That’s the sanitized way of saying ‘converting people to become Christians’ of course. Once a play becomes evangelical however, I feel that there’s very little life and soul left in the play because the thought behind the play and themes are not different from the next evangelical play. You always know how it turns out in the end.

Contrary to that generalization, “Roadworks Village” is actually a pretty decent evangelical play which uses some dramaturgical and literary techniques to modest effect, and in my personal opinion, merits some discussion. Nevertheless, in order to discuss these techniques and elements, its necessary that the storyline, scenes and the elements used in the play be made open — so you can consider this entire entry a spoiler alert. Perhaps its not really necessary, we all know how it turns out in the end.

Synopsis in 600 words.

Roadworks Village is a village of simple-minded people who build roads, but don’t know where they go. The protagonist of the play, Boy, is on his coming-of-age journey, where he will leave his parents and village for five years. He is accompanied by Frans, a fiesty young woman with a mind of her own, and a Pierce, a slow-witted simpleton for comic relief. (I wonder if they deliberately chose the name, the irony is well placed.) On his journey they see and meet different and interesting people.

Above and beyond the story of Boy, is the story of the “King” from the “Kingdom”, who sends his son, “Prince”, to warn the villagers of an impending flood and to extend an invitation to them to join him in his kingdom to escape the flood. However, the King’s nemesis, the evil magician, decides to have the village destroyed by the flood and sends his agents to distract the people from hearing the warnings of Prince.

Thus, our hero and his companions cross the paths of the businessman, the scholar, the bohemian, and the gurus, whom are delightfully portrayed. Unknown to them, they are actually the agents of the evil magician. They also come across Prince at last, but don’t know whether to believe which, if not any of the people they met. Their journey comes to an end when all four (five?) agents and Prince come together to demand their loyalty. Initally the heroes agree to stick together, but Boy eventually goes to the businessman, Frans chooses the gurus, and finally Pierce was lured to the scholar with a lollipop.

Months later they meet coincidentally, each barely able to squeeze out a few sentences before leaving. Boy arrives at the motivational seminar, when feeling insecure at his financial non-success compared to the testifying crowd, is caught stealing. He is brought before a “court” where the businessman, the scholar, the bohemian, and the gurus place him on trial. While the gurus and the bohemian sympathize for him, ultimately he still has to pay the price of death. The magician comes out in his full regalia, to execute Boy for his crime. However, Prince appears and willingly takes the place of Boy.

Just as the magician plunges his knife into Prince, the stage turns dark. On the video screen, Boy wakes up from his dream. He talks to his parents, just like he was in his dream. Then stage, Boy goes to work, and encounters his colleagues, who act stereotypical to the bohemian, the gurus, the scholar and the businessman. They do not allow him to take leave for christmas, instead his boss insists that he come to work on Christmas day itself or lose his job.

Boy leaves his job willingly. There is a musical segment, two singers come on stagewhile the lyrics of the song display on screen. Minor cast members walk across the backdrop, signalling a street, while Boy grimaces in many different ways to indicate an internal struggle. Finally the song ends, and Boy recognises a face in the passing crowd: Prince. Prince explains his dream to Boy, that it is an analogy for all the people he knows in his life: his parents, his friends, his coworkers. Similarly, he has to make a choice.

The play effectively ends here, as Pastor Kenneth Chin comes up to stage to deliver a sermon of sorts.

Analogy, Overall Coherence and Thought

Just a recap: An analogy, is “a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart and a pump”. On the other hand, an allegory, , is a “symbolical narrative” or a “representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form”. Therefore, the dream is both a very direct allegory to the contemporary Christian concept of salvation and an analogy to the second part of the play.

It seems to me that the difference between analogy and allegory is that analogies explain the workings of a complicated matter (the heart, or the human condition in reality) by giving an example of something simplier that works in a similar manner (such as a pump, or roadworks village). While allegories are allowed their own creative license to retell stories and use them liberally, analogies can fail and always have their shortcomings. While the heart is essentially a pump, there are many more considerations to it than that of a pump.

Therefore, there are several dimensions, for lack of a better term, that we have to look at, as well as their relationships with each other. There is (1) the dream-fable, (2) the depiction of reality, (3) the Christian doctrine and (4) actual reality – the reality that you and me live in. The dream-fable is an analogy for the depiction of reality. The Christian doctrine is a normative description of the nature of actual reality. The dream-fable is an allegory of the contemporary interpretation of the Christian doctrine, while there ought to be no discrepancy between the depiction of reality and actual reality otherwise the writer would render the message of Christian salvation useless. Here’s a chart for easy referencing.

The mechanism of using an allegory and then an analogy of the allegory in the depiction of reality to apply to actual reality concerns me the most. It is essentially the type D-A-B mechanism, as referring to the provided diagram, to replace the C relationship between the Christian doctrine and actual reality. The allegory-analogy-application has its shortcomings where the creative license oversimplifies both the human condition and the understanding of Christ’s salvation. One of the shortcomings is the treatment of Pierce and Frans which puts forward a highly individualistic, almost existential, persuasion about salvation. Another shortcoming is the nature of the magicians agents. Both will be discussed below in detail in the following section, “Characters”.

Obviously in Roadworks Village per se, the village is supposed to be the world, and the kingdom, the King and Prince are heaven, God and Jesus respectively. The magician is Satan, and the flood is supposed to be apocalypse and/or damnation in hell. The substitution of Jesus for Boy’s crime is Christ’s redemption of humanity, and the aimlessness of the road building would be the folly of all human effort in life, i.e. “vanity of vanities”, and the almost mechanical things that we do in life. Supposedly, once invited to the Kingdom the villagers don’t build roads aimlessly anymore — we are no longer bound by unfulfilling, mindless jobs.

Therefore, the dream-fable is suppose to convey that God in heaven sent Jesus to warn us of eternal damnation, but Satan is trying to persuade us from heeding the warning by distracting us. While you have sinned, Jesus substituted himself for you and paid the punishment, apparently, death. In (the depiction of) reality, you will see the same forms of distraction Satan throws at us.

The genius of the play is that it makes you think that the premises of Christianity is true because the parallel premises are true in the dream-fable, and therefore succeeds, to a degree, to convince of the objective truth of the Christian message in actual reality. The premises of the King sending the Prince to warn of the flood is by default, objectively true because it is part of the dream-fable, and therefore falls into the creative license of a storyteller – after all, it is a fable and a dream. On the other hand, the truth of the Christian message in depicted reality remains true and applicable because of the “magic” appearance of Prince to Boy and his awareness of his status in the dream and because the audience is aware of the premises of the king sending his prince as a parallel to Christian salvation. The viewer see that depicted reality is accurately reality, there is little difference between the two, and therefore, some measure of Christianity is objectively true in actual reality.

(The part I say that the audience is aware of the Christian message in the dream is made assuming Boy experiences the dream in the eyes of dream-fable Boy, and not as though he were part of the audience. Dream-fable Boy does not know the objective reality of the King and the flood, only that Prince substituted himself, which does not say anything about the flood, only perhaps that Prince is good and therefore his word can be trusted)

I feel that the play does very little justice to the one issue that does not have a shortcoming translating between fable, depiction and actual reality: how does one decide? The issue of choosing masters with incomplete knowledge is a legitimate topic. In the fable, the villagers, including Boy and his companions, do not know who to believe: the Prince, or any of the agents character archetypes. The audience and all of humanity, grapples with the same decision at a higher level of consciousness: how do I live my life? What do I know as true?

The appearance of Prince in the depiction of reality could be very well attributed to the creative license of the storyteller. But it also very well could be a metaphor for miracles and visions in Christianity. It also shows the phenomenal nature of the Christian faith: its more important to feel and know than to understand. Thus would it take a miracle to logically demonstrate that phenomenally Christian premises are true. Otherwise, we are taking them to be true as is.

But again, the genius of the play is that it distracts us from this realizing this existential dilemma, and instead presents the audience with the knowing the truth of the dream-fable as the same as knowing the truth of actual reality. The audience knows that the the King wants to save the villagers from the flood but they don’t know. So, in parallel, the audience knows that God wants to save humanity from impending doom but collectively we don’t know, as with contemporary Bible interpretations. Although, this act of knowing is not supported or corroborated by any other pieces of information. One just knows that this knowledge of salvation to be true via the play.

On another track, I wonder of the effectiveness of the “depiction of reality” part. At this point, the play has already jumped the shark. The magician has made his dramatic entry in full regalia and faces off with prince with all the agents standing behind him. Reality is always bland and colourless compared to fiction and fable. Its not surprising that some people found the second part draggy. The colourful exaggerations of the character archetypes of the agents of the magicians already made it obvious that these are the kinds of people we encounter daily, whom we are tempted to emulate. Therefore, one must think that this second part must either be to make it as painfully obvious as possible the parallels of the allegory and the depiction of reality to actual reality, at least in the parts where it doesn’t fall short.

Dramaturgically speaking, I do not like the introduction of the flood because the flood never came to pass as the dream-fable ended as Prince was sacrificed. It does not make any mention of the final fate of the villagers. Therefore, it begs questioning whether the audience were meant to speculate the fate of the village as though it was an open ending. Perhaps those who followed Making the allegory into a dream is the ultimate convenience and the ultimate cliché. But the avoidance of clichés are not important in Christianity: all that matters is that you get the message across. In that sense, its not really a cliché if it hasn’t lost the impact yet, despite overuse by other parties.

(I wonder if “dramaturgically” is a word at all. I’m really afraid to use it or say much about it at all because I don’t know much about dramaturgy as a discipline in itself.)

On a passing note, another small thing I am irritated with is the transition between scenes. I don’t like when the director uses too many “dim the lights and move things around”. Personally I think they’re horribly disruptive.

Characters

Now, I would say that there are no three dimensional characters at all. Ironically, perhaps one could say the deepest character in the entire play would be not be Boy but Pierce instead. He chose to follow the scholar because he knew he was none too bright to get by on his own abilities, that was what his parents wanted him to do, and probably due to his personal inadequacies with himself.

The agents of the magician only function as exaggerated archetypes of personalities. While they speak and move about on stage, they hardly affect the plot. Sometimes they even feel like caricatures of personalities at their worse. They are simplified as such because its convenient to villify worldly pursuits as merely distractions from the true calling of Christianity. In this they reject that certain people gravitate to certain religions or worldviews because of their nature. Therefore, these archetypes cannot be characters at all: their personality and choices are not sums of their nature and nurture, they are merely examples of what not to be.

In the end, it took Pastor Kenneth Chin in his spoken message to directly say that while these things are good in themselves, we need to focus on the flood and the message rather than be distracted by these things. This is bad scripting and sloppy dramaturgy because the play is implying something that you don’t wish to be implied. A tightly crafted story should have tied up this loose end.

How would it work if instead of playing an antagonistic, sickly sweet nature, they come across as persuasive, intelligent and seductive instead? If they never used the plot device of dropping a little bit about the flood every once and then? They could lead . Perhaps that would portray a Christianity too unappealing, exactly the opposite of what the Acts Church is doing – appealing to a demography.

Still, it could also portray how deceitful the devil can be, but its not something to do in the church because of the fear of leading the flock astray, so to speak. We do not need to copy the deceptions of the devil in church. I cannot speculate on the audience reaction to either, but personally if I were to write it that way, it would be to end the division between the status of the person and the non-personhood of other people. The agents need to be real characters with their own internal struggles, rather than just evil for evil’s sake.

Taken into consideration that Prince sacrificed himself for Boy rather than the village and the extreme exaggerations of the magician agents, it shows the church’s fundamental existential attitude to be the world, evil, versus me, good. I argue it is an existential attitude because it comes from the personal standpoint existing in contrast with the environment: the self knowing that Jesus Christ dying for the singular you, not the plural humanity, and that basically the environment, the world, is corrupt and evil without regard that “the world” is also included in humanity, and the singular you is part of that environment as well.

Thus the play hopes to connect with the audience by having individuals categorize the people they know around them to the archetypes: paper-chaser, manipulator, hedonist, altruist. It also helps in the process of vicarious living: the audience transposing their individual self onto Boy. Because the portrayal of the archetypes highly exaggerated, associate these lifestyles to be wrong – or at least misguided from the truth earlier told. More on vicarious living in the following paragraphs.

On a side note, I have a personal bone to pick with the depiction of the scholar. The scholar is arrogant and displays a better-than-you attitude because he has a achieved a masters certificate and therefore he is certified to be a better expert than most anybody: he even claims that to be anybody at all in life, you have to have at least a masters. What he is more archtypical of is the paper-chaser rather than the scholar. A scholar is an “educated, erudite person” who is “concerned with academic learning and research” with “specialised knowledge in a field”.

Personally, I like to place the scholar archetype to Socrates (even the Scholar character is dressed in a toga): always questioning and using incisive reasoning, thus unwittingly berating people for exposing their internal contradictions. This of course, may come off as arrogant and too much of a know-it-all. Yet, the questioning and reasoning stems from the love of knowledge and wisdom, and the quest for it demand that we be more precise than required in ordinary living. The exaggeration could very well be true though, but it is something the academic community would not be proud of.

Then it stands to reason that the other “agents” may be just as misrepresented and villified as the scholar, even though they seem quite accurate to me. I personally abhor the manipulative nature of businessmen, the hedonistic abandon of responsibility by bohemian and the doubtful pseudoscience of astrology and new age ideologies, but these are the feelings the play wishes to incite. In this, the acting quality of these characters are extremely effective in delivering these feelings.

Are then the agents part of humanity or not? Are these people that we see in daily life we categorize as bohemian or businessman humans like just and me, or are they devils masquerading as humans in order to deceive them? The agents, after all are not part of the village in the beginning and if the village is representative humanity it must stand to reason that they are not part of humanity. It remains inconclusive however, whether the church would support the notion that demons masquerade as humans in actual reality.

Moving on to the protagonists, I think that Boy is only marginally a character. He has no defining characteristic, no distinct personality of his own, no unique personal struggle. Of course he struggles thrice, first with the choice of masters, then with the decision to steal at the motivational seminar, and then with quitting the job. The choice of masters was dictated by necessity, the choice to steal, by the pressure to be successful, and the choice to resign his job, out of Christian principles. A real character, when faced with a decision, should have a predictable consistency defined by their characters, their histories, or their political wants. If a character makes decisions without aim or purpose, then it becomes an illogical play, comical in nature.

In my opinion, Boy has to have as little character as possible but maintain it such that he remains a person. Boy has to be written such that he can never be a real character because he is supposed to represent the particular individual viewer vicariously. Once he is given any trait that defines him as a person, he becomes a person, no longer able to represent the individual viewer because such traits alienate the viewer from relating to Boy and becomes a character outside of themselves. The scriptwriter is afraid that the viewer may think that he or she does not deal with those issues, or have such elements in his personality that the viewer cannot place himself or herself vicariously in Boy’s shoes, and therefore, is given the alibi to brush himself away from the issue of Christian salvation: that’s not me. With a non-descript Boy, he is replaceable with everybody, and nobody in particular. After all, Boy is not a real name, it is a generic placeholder title for any young male.

Even Frans has a more distinct personality than Boy. She is hard-headed, fiery and opinionated. Sometimes she can be quite practical, asking Boy which masters should they believe. In comparison with Boy, Pierce does not need to be emphatized with or vicariously substituted. Everybody understands him as a character: he is unwittingly funny, he has extraordinary simple ways, and is not very bright. This puts both of them as characters that can only be vicarious to a small segment of society then, less with Pierce than with Frans because nobody wittingly becomes the unwitting comic relief in life. If not, then it becomes a story of them, Frans and Pierce, and not of the individual audience seeing himself/herself receiving salvation as Boy.

Continuing on Pierce, one could argue that he is justified in choosing the scholar to at least a small degree. After all, it seems the best compensation for his simple-mindedness. On a practical note, if one was conscious of one’s defects, one correctly would endeavour to improve oneself. On one level it is a conflict between self and ambition and Christian duties, and it would seem that here it would not be convergent: since we can only serve one master at a time. (Luke 16:13: “…Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”) One must place self subservient to Christianity, which is fully one of the themes in Christianity in context, “I die and Jesus Christ lives in me”. But of course, this conflict was never explored fully because Pierce served the role of comic relief, a role meant to be not taken seriously.

Issues in the Play

Friendship is an issue that also seems to transcend the dream-fable into reality, and was realistically portrayed in the dream-fable (it could have been more superficial). One very poignant moment was when the three friends had to finally choose their masters and they decided to stick together by choosing the same master, but in the end Boy went ahead with the businessman without Frans’ and Pierce’s consensus. The fate of Pierce and Frans escaping the flood or not is not told in the story, and speculation remains the rule. Since they have not heeded Prince’s warning by choosing masters, we can only assume that they were wiped out in the end.

In the duality of self vs. the world, friends lie in between. While they are not the self, they are not part of the world either but yet we care for them more than for the world. The play, focusing on that personal, existential duality, does not deal with the place of friends in Christianity. Contextually in contemporary Christianity the argument often goes that if you want to see your friends in heaven or don’t want them to go to hell, you would tell them the message of Christianity. A similar self vs. world mentality is embodied in the Bible in Jesus commandment for evangelism, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…” (Matthew 28:18-20). “All nations” are removed from the self and the immediate surrounding to be part of “the world”. Furthermore, it is a figurative reading of Acts 1:8 “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” that Jerusalem represents the vincinity and therefore, the people closest unto a person.

Frans and Pierce as an issue of friends apparently did not survive the translation between dream-fable and depiction of reality. There is only one scene in which they appear, similar to the one in the dream-fable in which they coincidentally meet in passing. Perhaps because they had their own reasons for choosing what they did prevented the possibility of evangelism to them in the play, or because Boy had his own internal conflict in choosing. Perhaps there could no longer be saved, they had already cast their lot with another besides Christianity/Prince.

The nature of Sin is an issue not dealt with sufficiently in the play. The instance of sin, while present in the dream-fable as Boy steals to keep up appearance, is not present in the depiction of reality. Otherwise, there is no connection between sinning and falling victim to the flood. Contextually, in Christian belief, sin is man’s nature after the fall of Adam. There can be two possibilities in reading the nature of sin from the play. One, it is the result of choosing to serve masters other than Prince/Jesus. If Boy chose Prince and Jesus, he could not have stealed and wold not have been sentenced to death. The other is that man in the world will sin. After all, Boy did steal to keep up appearances. Furthermore, the Bohemian did pity Boy for doing what he did: it was for survival.

One interesting thing is that the judgement and execution of punishment was done by the agents of the magician and the magician himself, respectively. In contemporary Christianity, God is the judge and not Satan, and Satan no longer has the power over death: “behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” Revelation 1:18. Perhaps again its a point of theology that God condemns us to hell, having that we consciously chosen to ignore the gospel.

Conclusion

I came out of the play both amazed at the spectacle they have put on, and yet inside I was disappointed for the potential for depth that was never realised. Indeed, the depth cannot be realised: the message of Christ must be simple. Complications would render the message human.

The Acts church seems to pride itself on being empowered to do things other churches wouldn’t. It has a production team with its own vests and their bearers wear them with pride. Pastor Kenneth Chin advocates Christianity as a faith full of life, which in turn also appeals to the young working adults who have been empowered by their education to do the things they want in life.

Therefore its not surprising such a play was produced: full of vigour and energy, packed with music and inspired acting, and most importantly representative of this particular interpretation of Christianity. Perhaps sometimes it is more important we read and study popular theatre, practised without the trappings of the discpline because truly its these plays that are representative of a culture.

Afterword: Okay, I never meant for it to be this long. I thought I would be done in 2000 words, but ideas just kept flowing and it hit the 4000 mark. I hope its been an engaging read because I’ve tried to keep the language light (at least in the beginning) and where concepts became heavy, I tried to keep it simple. As a result, three or four paragraphs have been deliberately rewritten because I didn’t like how they went. Pardon me if the issues section is not as tightly written as the rest of the essay because its like the dumping ground for the rest of the ideas floating around, and I’m desperate to publish it already. I am hoping that a lot of you don’t hate it because not an once of this is deliberate bullshit. Bullshit is for when you’re writing an essay to be submitted and you’ve got nothing to say. I hope that none of you are reading this as bullshit, but if you are that means I have to salute you, I have to labour and think hard and long to produce bullshit you can pull off in seconds. I’m sorry, the play is just inspiring to me. I have plans to rewrite the play. Its always easier innovating than to come up from scratch. Well, 4000 words later, I hope that its more than made up for a month of silence on this blog. As usual for long serious entries, props go out to Kayjal for literary consultation (even though she’s in the party mood due to the holidays), Jessica and Eirene for taking me to the play, and for Grace and Fong Yee who remind me that I haven’t been updating the blog. Total: 4692 words excluding the afterword and title, including it hits 5000 words. RECORD LENGTH!

January 2, 2007.