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Stage

Religious hypocrisy gets a rest

What happens when the gods lose all their true believers? They go to rest homes in the play Many Mansions.

By ROBERT HICKS
Published August 11, 2005

Brooke McEldowney's play Many Mansions is a comedy of ideas. The writer and musician, known for his syndicated comic strips 9 Chickweed Lane and Pibgorn, first envisioned his satire of religious hypocrisy after seeing Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufmann's The Royal Family in New York.

"I was thinking of this idea of a rest home for aged gods who really no longer had anybody believing in them," McEldowney, who grew up in Tampa, said by phone from his home in Maine. "I had this idea going around in my head about what if God had only one true believer on earth and once that one true believer is gone, so is he."

The Fresh! Live! Theatre Company will premiere Many Mansions, directed by Steve Mountain, from Friday through Aug. 28 at the Galaxy Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg.

At the start of the play, Violinist Cecily Gosling (Joanna Sycz) speaks to Father Naill (Harry Richards) about her dream of Many Mansions, a fantasy world populated by fairies, forest nymphs, naiads and a God-like figure named Max Odd (Ron Sommer). She wants to know whether her experiences are fantasy or reality, blasphemous or sinful. But Father Naill, despite his own faith in the intangible, expects her to provide tangible proof of her dreams.

James Unser (Jimmy Chang) is a young man who cannot embrace priesthood due to the church's sanctions against romantic love. J.J. Aubrey (Alvin Jenkins) is a Christ-like figure who, like others at Many Mansions, concludes that his and others' existence depends on one true believer, Cecily. It is through her faith in her dream world that they find confirmation for their existence and meaning in life.

Through the characters, McEldowney explores faith, fantasy and reality, and how consensus opinion can define faith in contemporary society.

"It's always struck me that where faith was an issue there was something you could respect, but when hypocrisy was used to manipulate faith, that was something that could not be overlooked. I thought that bringing them side by side could be amusing," he said.

Parts of Many Mansions, particularly a play-within-a-play about developing characters, action and themes, and the character of Prospero Fishbein, are loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"I like the Shakespearean intonation more than anything else," McEldowney said. "Midsummer Night's Dream has always been a particular favorite of mine. Pibgorn is very much an outgrowth of A Midsummer Night's Dream."

After studying music at Juilliard, McEldowney began writing his play in the mid 1980s, then abandoned it to work as a chamber musician and freelance journalist writing about classical music for Opus and Keynote.

He later made improvements and cuts and abandoned his play again. Eventually, he met people working in theater in Sarasota and Tampa. One of the people who read Many Mansions was Steve Mountain. The first reading of the play took place after McEldowney had done a set design for a production of Thurber Carnival in Tampa in 2001.

"I don't think I've ever completed writing it," he said. "Every time we do a reading, Steve comes back with notes and we start doing revisions. The thing about doing the syndicated comic strips is you finish them and abandon them. You could sit around and keep drawing, but there is a deadline. With a play, it's always about getting extra work done, changing a line here and hacking out a bit here. I'm never really certain it will ever be completed. That's what I love about writing for theater."

PREVIEW: Many Mansions, Friday through Aug. 28, Galaxy Center for the Arts, 8045 46th Ave. N, St. Petersburg. Show times are 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday. Pay what you can; seats are limited. To RSVP, call (727) 643-9504.

[Last modified August 10, 2005, 13:50:09]