clarity


So, one interesting thing that happens when you produce a show is that you find out just how clearly you communicate ideas. When you are writing a musical, you have three writers (sometimes more, sometimes less) and so even from the first moment, you have a combination of ideas.

Coming clean, somewhat, and speaking for only me, I felt that we were writing a Dadaist musical, and anti-musical. It’s tough for me to try to follow up on it, because I thought the basic point of this musical is that musicals are completely absurd. In order for that to have been the clear message, we would have needed to be a lot more aggressive in how we produced the play.

In some ways, the problems are systemic, because we don’t ever have one person on stage who is deriding the ridiculousness of the circumstances. We’ve asked the audience to be the person calling bullshit on the show, and for a lot of people, they just dismissed it as “silly” instead of reading our minds and realizing that we consider the entire genre somewhat silly.

But the truth is, we didn’t make that show. Our show had a sweetness and a purpose that snuck it’s way in. It happens with every one of our shows, somehow we can’t help but add a second layer of something completely seperate. Sometimes it’s like adding vinegar to oil and putting it on the salad, but this time it was more like adding a second dressing to an already dressed salad.

How can we claim that the show was meaningless when it so clearly has a political point that we were trying to make? How can we claim that we were mocking musicals when we so clearly worked so hard on crafting the songs? We ran into a problem early on because I hate parodies that aren’t as good as the thing they are parodying. “Wet Hot American Summer” is amazing because the thing it’s choosing to make fun of, retarded 70s camp movies, is actually dumb to begin with. I didn’t like “Urinetown” as much as I might have because I actually really love the musicals they were mocking.

Anyway, one can’t complain when one’s writing is not taken in the tone that it’s given, it means there is a flaw in the writing, not in the audience.

So, let me clarify what I was saying in my post about Christianity.

I believe that the love the Christ child received is what made him the messiah. I believe in the parable. I have made my own Christianity, and I feel allowed to do that because everyone else does it too, and in my mind Jesus isn’t a real man, he is a story. His lessons are all told in parables, and I’ve chosen to believe that the story of his life is a giant parable.

A child is born in desperate circumstances, in abject poverty. His mother never had sex with his father, but his father doesn’t ask any questions, he loves her and he loves the boy without question. Out of nowhere, shepherds came and stood watch over the sleeping baby, giving him love. Three men, in their wisdom, brought gifts to a baby they didn’t know, out of love.

When this boy because a man, one by one people turned to him and said, “I will give you my devotion, my love” and because he received their love, he became more and more divine. He was able to turn the love he was given into a source of magic, he was given so much love that he could heal the sick and feed the hungry, always claiming that the power came from a source beyond him, the source that created him. He said “God is love”.

His father was love, that which made him divine was the basic human element of love.

He said things like “what good is it to love only those who love you? Anyone can do that. Love those that don’t deserve it.” And he said that because he knew that, as a baby, as a boy, he was given love for no reason. I don’t believe in a corporeal Christ, I don’t believe that these words mean what Christians think they mean. I’m just saying what the story means to me.

I have been remade because of the love I’ve received, love that I didn’t deserve. My brothers and my sister love me despite my years of not giving a shit about them. My parents love me despite the years I spent disregarding them. My wife loves me despite the fact that I have never treated women well, despite the fact that I never deserved it. I’ve been remade because of the love I’ve received, and that is the story of Christ to me. It’s why the story means so much to me.

So when Jesus says “the path to my father’s kingdom is through me” what he means is, in order to become a holy man, you have to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, to be forgiven for one’s trespasses, one has to forgive those who’ve tresspassed against one. I’ve decided that my love for the story, and my belief in its truth, makes me more a Christian than any other religion. It’s one man’s decision, and it isn’t that important.