Heal thyself
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping want you to forsake chain stores and think outside the big box.

By Lynn Rapoport

"Drama saves us, didacticism kills."

stage instructions for an "in-store play" at Starbucks, www.revbilly.com

THE MERVYN'S COMMERCIAL that came on a couple weeks ago during One Tree Hill said it pretty well. Alerted to news of a gigantic spring sale, we're taken on a whirlwind tour of a household somewhere in America to which Mom has just returned after an invigorating day of shopping. Cupboards are obscenely stuffed to bursting with hundreds of pairs of jeans, kitchen cabinets are packed with pots and pans enough to stock a Williams-Sonoma, closets overflow with handbags to hold all the credit cards in San Francisco. Although some viewers may wonder who in hell would need that many pairs of Levi's, the cheerful but not very funny subtext is that when the price is right and you have the storage space, it's hard to think of reasons to exercise restraint.

That commercial kept creeping across my field of vision during a recent pair of phone interviews with Bill Talen, the onetime Bay Area performance artist and playwright who, as cofounder and art director of the Life on the Water theater space and the Solo Mio Festival, wrote, acted, and produced work at Fort Mason Center in the '80s and early '90s before moving to New York City. Talen's Life on the Water roles ranged from crooked politicians to yuppie power brokers going through what he calls "a crisis of values." But in recent years he has, in a sense, moved past those crises, taking on the persona of one Reverend Billy, a peace-loving, gloriously raving anticonsumerist cloaked in the garb and mannerisms of a Pentecostal preacher – complete with sky-high hair and a white dinner jacket from Talen's catering days. At Life on the Water, Talen was already "trying to get offstage, trying to find theater out in life where it's not called theater anymore." As Reverend Billy, he's succeeded.

Have you ever found yourself on a run to Wal-Mart and noticed a group of unsatisfied shoppers roaming the aisles with nothing in their carts, store manager in hot pursuit urging them to buy something before he calls the cops? Or, while looking for a nice, plush, googly-eyed stuffed animal at the Disney Store, found yourself witness to a strange critical mass of high-decibel cell phone conversations concerning anything from the watering down of folktales to the fact that there are sweatshops in Bangladesh where young girls manufacture movie tie-ins instead of getting a high school education? It's possible you were witnessing a random moment of consumer awakening, a psychotic break from the realities of the shopping list. But chances are it was the work of Reverend Billy and his fellow pranksters in the Church of Stop Shopping.

Billy and his church – which comes with a choir, a band, and a theatrical director named Savitri Durkee who's also Talen's wife – can be seen as part of a network of anticonsumerist culture jammers that includes Kalle Lasn and the Adbusters gang, Reclaim the Streets, the Billboard Liberation Front, and any number of anonymous souls who decorate their towns with Starfucked stickers, sidewalk stencils, and other random pieces of uncommissioned street art.

Some have chosen to focus on jamming the urban landscape of signage with their own signals. Reverend Billy's aim is the buildings themselves – and the transformation of our neighborhoods into healthier places, where small businesses making their month-to-month way in the world aren't constantly prey to the transnational corps, with their massive profit margins and eyes fixed intently on the bottom line. Just as the billboard liberationists do, Reverend Billy fights the T.N.s on their own turf, mixing playful performance with a deeply politicized comedic rage.

Outrage against the chains stems from a multitude of places, but the reasons weave together in a nauseating pattern if you examine them long enough. There's the homogenization of a neighborhood, of a city block, of an entire hometown that happens when no one has a big enough problem with the same stores dotting the landscape from coast to coast. There's the side effect that Lasn refers to in his book Culture Jam as "dreaming the same dream" – a condition in which a nation of consumers is trained by advertising agencies to fall in love with the same goods and services. There's the fact that, aside from city taxes, the big boxes and chains generally flow most of their proceeds out of town, paying pathetically low wages, offering no benefits, and doing everything in their power to keep unions out. There's the environmental devastation that's irrevocably linked to a culture that mechanically buys and mechanically throws away. And then there's the cost to humans we'll never meet.

"The fact is," Talen says, "that all issues – and there's so many – that we talk about in resisting consumerism, it all comes down to peace, from trying to save the Bachman's warbler to trying to save the children in Fallujah. That's the final issue, that's all issues."

Seen in the light of Reverend Billy's fire, the Mervyn's ad seems like a sign of sorts – probably of the apocalypse. But as Talen knows, once you start scanning the world for such messages, the floodgates get blown off the hinges. Meaning there's work to be done. Using grants from institutions like the Ecologist and Burning Man founder Larry Harvey's Black Rock Arts Foundation, Billy and the church have brought word of a life beyond products, a life beyond shopping at transnational corporations, to the residents of places as far-flung as the hard-times Pennsylvania town of Altoona and the birthplace of the Robin Hood legend, Nottingham, England. Talen's been to Barcelona, where he and other members of the congregation performed a tongue bath on the interior of a Starbucks, espresso machine nozzles and all. He's been to the playa to illuminate the joys of healthy neighborhoods, small business, and the barter economy for the playful freaks of Black Rock City. And in a few days he's coming back to San Francisco, alongside some 25 members of the Stop Big Boxes Gospel Choir, as part of a Neighborhood and Town Revival Tour hitting stops up and down the length of sunny California.

• • •

"The most powerful church in the world," Talen writes in his 2003 book What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Is in My Store? (the title references a memo sent to store managers from Starbucks H.Q.), "is the Church of the Stupefied Consumer. This is a fundamentalist church run by famous televangelists. Recent leaders include Jerry Falwell, Michael Eisner, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Saddam Hussein, and [Philip] Knight from Nike. Children, we're in this church, and we don't even know it! That's how fundamentalist it is." Proselytizing on sidewalks and in parking lots as well as actual churches, creating stages out of big-box superstores like Wal-Mart and megachain coffee shops like Starbucks, alone or keeping company with his fellow pranksters in the Church of Stop Shopping, Reverend Billy is there to bring the good news to consumers that they have other choices when it comes to latte providers, that it feels good to "back away from the product," that they can stop shopping.

"The products now have more free expression than people do," Talen says. "Just go to the Disney Store, you've got hundreds of products that are famous in their own right ... and they're all sitting on the shelves expressing themselves. You go to the Times Square Disney Store, and you look at the people there, and they are expressionless." You could say that's where the Disney Store "Cell Phone Opera" – and the Church of Stop Shopping – comes in. It's hard to stay expressionless in the face of such hilariously disruptive, inappropriate behavior.

And inappropriateness is exactly the point. As Durkee says, "We all have to stretch beyond what we know how to do, what we like to do, and do things that are uncomfortable." She's talking about her conviction that now is not an acceptable time to simply be an artist; about the necessity of moving beyond the act of painting in a studio; about participating in activities likely to get you forcefully removed from the "stage." But the logic extends to other uncomfortable acts, like excising to-go containers from your life, or leaving the $5 Starbucks espresso drink you shouldn't have ordered at the counter and explaining why you're having second thoughts.

"Consumerism ain't no joke," Talen points out. "It's just that you kinda got to use a joke to get people's attention." And that's pretty much what happened when I sat down to watch the Church of Stop Shopping's Peace Revival, taped last spring in a church near ground zero. The scene reads like an episode of The 700 Club that's been hijacked by Situationist pranksters. The robes on the choir are right, but the words coming out of their mouths – renunciations of Mickey Mouse and the Nike swoosh – are not the same old song. And as for the reverend making his way up the aisle, pressing flesh and shining his love light on the parishioners, well, I found myself giggling violently for the first five minutes, admiring Talen's embodiment of the unctuous preacher man, before a switch got thrown and the urgency of the text – which ranged from deconstructing the automobile's innate sex appeal to visualizing the coffee bean fields of Guatemala, where people are right now being paid a few dollars a day so we can get wired on our way to work – took over the show.

"We are radically depoliticized in this culture," Talen tells me. "We don't think the things on the shelves come from anywhere. We don't have a labor history, a resources history." I close my eyes and try to think about what that really means, about walking into a store in San Francisco Center and picking up a pretty spaghetti-strap tank top or a scented candle. All most people think about are the stories that will be created after they walk out with their purchase. "I want the vision of sweatshops to broadcast from the products so they do back away," he says. "Hopefully some kind of vivid comic marking takes place like some kind of retinal scar, and maybe that will connect with something they read in the newspaper."

• • •

It may not be a good time to try to be an artist, but it's an excellent time to hate a corporation. We walk or drive from one logo-filled landscape to the next, but we're also in a long and lengthening moment of distrust and distaste for the modus operandi – and by extension the products – of companies ranging from Philip Morris to the company Talen refers to as "the mermaid with no nipples" (in reference to Starbucks' early-'90s decision to G-rate its logo). Communities are coming to recognize a bad deal when they see one. And, through boycotts, ballot initiatives, city ordinances, and other strategies (exhaustively cataloged on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's excellent and inspiring New Rules Project Web site, www.newrules.org), fights against the chain stores have been breaking out all over.

Durkee says the church has been kicking around the idea of a Neighborhood and Town Revival Tour for a number of years, and Talen credits Burning Man founder Harvey with helping get the show on the road in California (they're traveling via a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant). But with the SoCal city of Inglewood's recent triumph at the ballot over Wal-Mart, recent pitched battles in Hayes Valley, the Sunset District, and Haight Street, and the Home Depot fight heating up again in Bernal Heights and the Bayview, the timing feels good. The tour will be visiting some of those battlegrounds – and perhaps discovering emerging sites along the way.

Tour info

Reverend Billy and the Stop Big Boxes Gospel Choir are making stops at college campuses, theaters, and several undisclosed locations throughout California. The tour hits Sebastopol Wed/21 and Cotati Thurs/22. Local stops: Thurs/22, 7 p.m., North Berkeley Safeway, Shattuck and Rose, Berk.; Fri/23, sunset, Bernal Heights Community Center, 515 Cortland, S.F.; Sat/24, 10 a.m., West Coast Live radio performance, 2565 Mission, S.F. The tour concludes Sat/24 with a performance featuring special guests the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, cabaret artist Kitty Ultra Sound, and gospel diva Charlene Moore, 8 p.m., Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F. (415) 621-6120.

For complete tour details, more on the Church of Stop Shopping, and a wealth of resources for antichain activism, go to www.revbilly.com.