Review: 'Church & State' @ Berkshire Theatre Group, 6/18/18

Stockbridge, Mass.

Jason Odell Williams sets himself a formidable challenge in "Church & State," a tightly written play with live-wire contemporary relevance that's getting its regional premiere at Berkshire Theatre Group this month. Williams' central character, the junior U.S. senator from North Carolina, has had a crisis of faith following a school shooting that took dozens of young lives, including friends of his own kids. At a rally the following week, he wants to abandon his well-worn but effective stump speech and discuss his feelings with extemporaneous, from-the-heart remarks, much to the horror of his Bible-thumping wife and his campaign manager, a woman who's a liberal New York Jew.

As the play is constructed, we learn of the results of that speech before we actually hear it. The senator, Charles (Graham Rowat, superb), threads an impossible needle with the speech, managing to appeal both to religious conservatives, who appreciate his honesty and want to bring him back to the fold, and Democrats, for whom his message of even modest gun control is better than anything else on the subject that they've been getting from the right.

When we finally hear the speech, toward the end of Williams' powerful 70-minute play, directed with deftness and balance by Charlotte Cohn, it feels like a dream fulfilled in these divided times: an earnest and true message about two of our knottiest issues, religion and gun control, delivered – and received – with honesty and openness.

And then Williams slams us in the head with the theatrical equivalent of a baseball bat. In hindsight, the walloping end of the play seems obvious and probably inevitable, but the engrossing build-up doesn't telegraph what's coming, and so it stuns us, leaving  leaden hearts and anguished certainty that true change still may not be possible.

In an author's note included in the program and reproduced on the lobby wall of BTG's small Unicorn Stage, Williams says the play grew from the 2007 shooting massacre at Virginia Tech, when he was a student at the rival University of Virginia. His note cites seven other mass shootings by name, plus "countless others," calling them "the new normal." The characterization seems dismayingly apt: By one online accounting, there have been more than 230 instances of gun violence in U.S. schools since 2000, including five last month alone that totaled 10 fatalities and another two dozen injured. In one month.

Faced with what is now the everyday American reality of mass shootings, more than 10,000 nonsuicide gun deaths annually and political intransigence to even try to change things, Williams turned to his art. "Church & State" does not presume to be societally prescriptive. It's about one man and the two people who care most about whether and how he's going to continue his public service. For his wife, Sara (the very funny Judy Jerome), being a senator's spouse is a role she'd very much like to continue, and all this nonsense about doubting God feels like a fundamental betrayal; an affair would've been easier to accept than this. But she's no blindered zealot, and she begins to see how the campaign manager, Alex (the smashingly good Keira Naughton), can become her ally to get Charles through his crisis.

"Church & State" reminded me of the NBC series "The West Wing," with Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet as the president many of us wished we had, and "The God Game," a smart, equally button-pushing political drama that had its world premiere four years ago at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany and explored a similar faith crisis in a white, male, Southern politician. Sometimes we want our theater to provide an escape, to an Athenian wood or a flower seller's corner in Victorian London. And sometimes, for the strut of an hour or two on a stage, we want it to show us who we are, to hold up that mirror and all of its ugly reflections.

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