As a play should be experienced, this was a cathartic and destabilizing single session read through. I ordered it after reading a profile of Will Arbery in Texas Monthly. From a basic premise of a group of Christian conservatives gathering for the installation of a new president at their alma mater, the play spirals outward into a drunken clash of ideas, sacred and profane, as the characters grapple with reconciling their identities and ideals with the challenges of the Trump era. Ultimately, the play is more a dramatization of Stone Temple Pilot’s “Big Empty” than of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s “Jesus and John Wayne.” That is, it’s about people wrestling with their self-justifications and striving to be understood - and valued by others - than a specific commentary on current events. And because “conversations kill,” what starts out as lofty “big conversation” d/evolves into the personal. The further one gets into adulthood, the fewer opportunities for the sort of deep, cathartic conversations depicted here present themselves in daily life the way they did in late-night dorm living, which is a shame, because they should be enriched by having experienced more of life. However, they are both more dangerous and more necessary, and the crucible of early-mid-21st century life makes it more urgent. As Albany says to close “King Lear,” “The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”