Play on culture and belief is part of Humana Festival

By Rich Copley - rcopley@herald-leader.com

LOUISVILLE — The Civilians didn't go to Colorado Springs, Colo., looking for a controversy.

The New York-based theater troupe specializes in creating shows based on interviews with people in specific locations or connected to specific issues.

With its latest project, the group aimed to explore the evangelical movement in America.

”The story of Colorado Springs pretty much mirrors the story of Evangelical Christianity over the last 25 years,“ says director Steven Cosson. ”In that time, it went from being a pretty non-religious community to the de facto capital of evangelical Christianity in America.“

Singer and songwriter Michael Friedman adds, ”Colorado Springs is pretty much to evangelical Christian ministers what Nashville is to country singers.“

The results of their work have become This Beautiful City, one of six full-length works at this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays. The festival, based at Actors Theatre of Louisville, is essentially the Sundance Film Festival of theater, attracting theater directors, administrators and critics from around the world.

The Sundance Institute was in fact one of several entities, including Colorado College and the National Endowment for the Arts, that helped fund This Beautiful City, the Civilians' biggest undertaking since its inception in 2001. Going to Colorado Springs and working on the show, the troupe hoped to explore a community with which it was unfamiliar but that had exerted a tremendous influence on American life, particularly the past two elections. The Civilians wanted to look at ideas such as freedom, and how those ideas meant different things to different communities. The group wasn't expecting to have one of the biggest evangelical scandals of the 21st century drop into its lap. But that was what happed when Ted Haggard, founder and pastor of the town's leading megachurch and leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, admitted to buying drugs from and having a three-year relationship with a male prostitute.

”We didn't go there seeking a dramatic story,“ writer Jim Lewis says.

Friedman adds, ”Whenever we start one of these, we don't know what we're going to get.“

While the Haggard issue is addressed in a dramatic passage toward the end of the play, it is not the focus of the show. The Civilians were looking at the dynamics of a city that had a very defined Christian community that exerted tremendous influence but also was home to an academic community at Colorado College and the Air Force Academy.

When they got to Colorado Springs, Cosson says they found it to be ”incredibly welcoming.“

”It was great for us to be able to ask questions because people were willing to talk openly,“ Cosson said.

Friedman adds, ”We made it clear we were there to listen, and that translated into their eagerness to be heard.“

The musician admits that from both sides they were crossing a cultural divide. The theater folks primarily lived and worked in New York City, and the evangelical community of Colorado Springs, in many ways, kept to itself, the playwrights said. But there also were subcultures in the city, including an active gay and lesbian community that definitely had views on the church's influence on the city.

”We found there wasn't a lot of public contact between these cultures, and everyone just worked off of their ideas of who someone else was,“ Cosson says.

One of the things they loved about the premiere performance of the play in Colorado Springs was a chance to bring some of the disparate communities together.

”Everyone who was in the show came to see the show,“ Friedman says. ”So you had the professor from the college over here and a minister from New Life over there and a gay rights activist all in the same room.“

One of the major themes the play ended up exploring was how different cultures can view some of the basic tenets of society, such as freedom, differently.

One person might view freedom as the ability to do whatever he or she wants with accountability to no one, while others might see freedom in obedience to God, which they believe frees them from societal expectations.

And that's just two interpretations, Lewis says. And the city became a metaphor for exploring, ”How do we all live in this city together, with these different ideas, in peace?“