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Paths to disaster By Robert Avila IT BEGINS AND ends in song, with voices raised in sweet and effortless harmony. That may sound surprising for a play about Jonestown and Peoples Temple. But as the distinguishing apostrophe in the title suggests, The People's Temple is first the story of a community and only second, if also necessarily, the story of one Jim Jones. And the community sang a lot – by all accounts beautifully. It's one of the accomplishments of this remarkable world premiere, coproduced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Z Space Studio, that we can't reduce the history it presents to the usual pathologies or excuses, holding it at arm's length like a foreign object. While an aura of the unfamiliar and bizarre will always cling to the mass murder-suicides of more 900 people in the far away jungle of Guyana Nov. 18, 1978, the stories of the people involved – most not rich, many African American, and all wanting "a better way of life" – demand our recognition. But then Jonestown was an American colony, as much a product of the society it was fleeing as Disneyland, the KKK, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. The stories come to us verbatim from documents and interviews with survivors and relatives gathered by director-writer Leigh Fondakowski, cowriter Greg Pierotti, and collaborators Stephen Wangh and Margo Hall. Fondakowski, Pierotti, and Wangh all worked on The Laramie Project (Berkeley Rep, 2001), the innovative docudrama on the Matthew Shepherd murder that was the model Z Space's David Dower had in mind when he commissioned The People's Temple from Laramie head writer Fondakowski. The action unfolds amid Sarah Lambert's elegantly fluid scenic design, whose principal feature is a number of tall rolling shelves filled with white cardboard boxes, each containing the personal effects of a Jonestown casualty. (The majority of documentary evidence comes from the Peoples Temple Collection at the California Historical Society.) At the outset, the exceptional 12-member ensemble (which includes Hall and Pierotti among a mix of local talent and Laramie veterans) assembles onstage, gradually opening boxes and assuming identities in a graceful image of theater bringing history to life. One by one, characters introduce themselves. Among them, Phil Tracy (Robert Ernst), one of the reporters who in 1977 investigated alarming allegations coming from former members and relatives about the authoritarian control and physical and mental abuse engaged in by Jones and his staff, instigates a flashback to 1955 and the origins of Peoples Temple in a small Indianapolis Pentecostal church. Founding member Jack Beam (John McAdams) confesses his initial amazement at Jones, the flamboyant white Indiana preacher and self-described socialist who insisted on welcoming and actively recruiting African Americans into his congregation despite the vehement prejudice of the times. "I was still a racist back then," Beam admits. Hyacinth Thrash (Miche Braden), an African American woman and Jonestown survivor, describes her divine healing at Jones's hands, as other members sing a gospel hymn behind her. Jones's biological son (McAdams, who also plays Jones in a few choice scenes) remembers his mixed feelings when his father told him they came from a distant star; Jones's adopted son (Coleman Domingo) recalls his wonder at being informed by his father that he is an African American. As in The Laramie Project, this seeding of the story through myriad perspectives unfolds smoothly, with confident ease, humor, and song as well, each set of anecdotes intriguing in itself. At the same time, the meandering pattern is sharpened by our knowledge that somewhere ahead lie murder and an as yet inexplicable horror. The second act's build to that inevitable moment – interweaving the narratives of several survivors, including Tim Carter, a bereft father and husband wrenchingly played by James Carpenter – is both masterfully done and genuinely chilling. Beautifully staged and performed under Fondakowski's impeccable direction, The People's Temple stimulates and unsettles us most through its contradictions. For all his flimflam and growing megalomania, Jones spoke forcefully against what few could gainsay – the racism, exploitation, violence, and spiritual poverty of American capitalism – while the promise of a truly integrated community activated for justice in this world drew many into the fold who found there a longed-for sense of meaning and fulfillment. At its height in the 1970s, Peoples Temple embraced more than 2,500 members and was deeply enmeshed in San Francisco's social and political life, feeding the poor, demonstrating on behalf of social justice causes, and accruing real political power to Jones. In 1976, Mayor George Moscone appointed Jones to the San Francisco Housing Authority, while the Los Angeles Times declared him "Humanitarian of the Year." By 1977, negative government and media scrutiny provoked a mass exodus to the developing agricultural project at Jonestown, Guyana, where ill-fated congressman Leo Ryan (Ernst) and members of the press inadvertently help trigger further desperation and ultimate disaster. Ultimately, it's history's mixture of the familiar and the uncanny that most disturbs – the humble amity of the church social measured against the stifling enormity of mass graves. Not only does The People's Temple make it impossible to cram that contradiction into the will of one culpable and deranged man, it implicitly opens it out into the enormous contradictions in society at large, not excepting the singular one of a country that doesn't seem to know it's waging war on millions of ordinary people abroad. The enforced conformity dictated by Jones and reinforced by the group echoes ominously far beyond Guyana, just as surely as the promise of a people's temple – that compassionate community where individuals can also be whole unto themselves – didn't end there. 'The People's Temple' runs through May 29, Berkeley Rep's Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk. $10-$55. (510) 647-2949. Call for show times. |
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