Kerux: a portfolio of Calvin Theological Seminary - Volume 42.1 - 20 Sept 2007

Kerux Interview: Dave Ellens

Seven Passages: the Stories of Gay Christians

by Brian Bork, Staff Writer

Christian ethical teaching on the topic of human sexuality is a complex and contentious issue, perhaps most significantly as it pertains to homosexual Christians. Dave Ellens and Stephanie Sandberg, two members of the Calvin College community, have sought to stimulate conversation about the matter through the medium of theater. Kerux sat down with Dave Ellens to hear more about the project, which is especially relevant for seminarians seeking guidance on how to think pastorally about this issue. The project is described by the creators as:

“...a stark and vital look at one of the deepest conflicts in contemporary culture - that of homosexuality and Christianity. Over 100 gay individuals have been interviewed about the interplay of these worlds throughout their life journey. These stories, along with passages of scripture and an exhaustive bibliography of scholarly sources are structured into a theatrical script that addresses the central question:

How do we combine the tradition of the scriptures and the stories we've collected so that when they converge, they foster not oppression, but dialogue?

The goal of this piece of theater is to issue a call for reconciliation, to open the door and get the conversation rolling.”

Kerux: What's the reason behind the project? To use theological terms, what was the genesis of the project? What put things in motion?

DE: I feel like it was really providential; Stephanie Sandberg and I had really been brainstorming about these kind of things when I was at Calvin. For my senior Religion class I did a project that was about justice and homosexuality – we were supposed to do a project about a current issue and a virtue, so I chose those two – and I chose the form of a play to examine it. I interviewed a few people – 10 or 15 – and tried to structure what they said into a dramatically interesting script. That summer, Stephanie approached me and said she was interested in doing a play about homosexuality and Christianity, and said “would you be interested in helping me?” I said “of course,” because I was really interested in expanding the project that I did. Basically, we both knew gay people who are Christian who were in various stages of struggle with it, and we both felt that we hadn't really heard the stories of people who were struggling with it – at least we hadn't heard a range of the stories. So we just wanted to give voice to that; we're seeking empathy and understanding, because so often the voices of gay Christians aren't heard.

Kerux: So how did it evolve into the present piece, with its structure, etc.?

DE: We originally wrote a very abridged, ten minute play for a local play festival, and then the folks at Actors Theater downtown said that they wanted a full-length play. So we went out and started interviewing people and brainstorming. Soon we had over a hundred interviews accrued.

Kerux: What's the significance of the title?

DE: Well, once we had the raw material we began to think about it both literally and metaphorically. Obviously, there are seven texts in the Bible used to condemn same sex activity. But we also started to think about it as rites of passage, passage of understanding, passages of time. All sorts of different passages. So that's the metaphorical meaning of the title, and we kind of left it at that.

Kerux: So why did you choose theater? Is it because of your experience and Stephanie's experience, or does theater convey something that other forms of expression don't?

DE: Obviously, Stephanie and I have extensive background in theater, and that's where we feel our strongest - it's our strongest art form. But at the same time, people seem to be profoundly affected when they have a personal experience with a gay or lesbian person. So we wanted to put them on stage, to have an actual living, breathing person in right in front of the audience, even if it isn't the actual person whose story is being told. So we hope it will be a means of bridging a gap, of creating some dialogue.

Kerux: Yeah, kind of like how fiction, when it is at its most sublime, elides the differences between people and can highlight common experience, or at least create empathy. Is that something your aiming for here? A sense of empathy?

DE: Yeah, definitely. It's an empathy created through – sorry if this sounds too poetic or something – an empathy created through seeing someone breathe through these issues, from seeing someone struggle with it. To know that the stories they are seeing are the real words and stories of actual people. In fact, a good deal of the people we interviewed didn't want to attach their names to their stories. A significant portion of the script comes from people who only met with Stephanie; the other seven people who are working on the script don't know who the people are behind the stories. It's a powerful experience for us, and hopefully a powerful experience for the audience to see people breathing life into the stories of these other people. I also think it's going to be a little harder for people to dismiss the issue when people are telling these stories right in front of them.

Kerux: What kind of structure does the performance have? How does it move, so to speak?

DE: The structure is rooted in the seven scripture passages. We've extrapolated themes from each passage of scripture that relates to some part of the journey of a homosexual Christian. We've loosely structured it around that; it also has a chronological element – of the various stages in which homosexual Christians try to reconcile their Christianity and their homosexuality. It's also ethnographic theater, which means that it's in a documentary style. Essentially, it's monologues; some of the monologues remain untouched, in others have a dialogic character, with complimentary voices or voices that go against each other. We've always left each character's voice intact – we haven't put two different stories together, or anything like that. We wanted each story to be played out by one actor; we haven't tried to amalgamate more than one story or anything like that.

Kerux: So how do the scripture passages play a role? Is there a thematic progression from scripture to scripture?

DE: Yes. We struggled with how much exegetical content to give. We didn't want it to be too didactic, or spoil dialogue because of excessive exegesis. At the same time, we didn't want it to be too focused on the merely experiential. We really wanted to find a balance between the two texts, and ultimately we did, I think, especially with a couple of the texts. But all the texts are read, throughout the piece.

We really tried to bring out the thematic elements of the texts, too. For example the story of Sodom and Gomorrah – the idea of hospitality is huge in there – so we really tried to attach that to people's stories of coming out, of figuring out how to be at home and comfortable with themselves, and the sense of hospitality that they received or didn't receive from those around them, including the church.

Basically, we read the scripture, and attach to to certain stories that have something to do with it. There is a bit of exegesis, but that comes with the understanding that we can only scratch the surface of the texts.

Kerux: So you're more interested in telling the stories of the people you interviewed, anchored in a larger narrative: the narrative of scripture.

DE: Exactly. We knew early on the focus here was going to be the narratives, but not at the sacrifice of the focus on scripture.

Kerux: I think that's theologically profound – the church has a history of turning the Bible into a collection of propositions, a series of rules and regulations. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that way, but it does make a lot of sense when read as a story, when the reader is aware of the narrative and able to include his or her own story as part of that larger narrative.

DE: Right; that's one of the biggest things we're examining in this project – the question of how you combine the weightiness of the scriptural tradition in Christian culture, with human experience, with what gay Christians go through. How do you reconcile the two? How do you make sure that when they come together they foster dialogue and not oppression? And I mean oppression on all sides; people who are gay Christians and people who have a more conservative standpoint on the matter.

Kerux: It's attentive to the anxieties of everyone.

DE: Exactly.

Kerux: We talked about this a bit earlier, but tell me about the gathering of the material for the play. Was it all interviews? Email, phone?

DE: We did it in any way that people felt comfortable. Ideally, we wanted to do it on video, so that if the interviewee was fine with their image being used by an actor, then the actor could take a little bit of their physicality and incorporate it into the performance. We never want to mimic a person; but we want to pull out the spirit of the person. But some people weren't comfortable with video, some people we interviewed over the phone, and some over email. Some are still anonymous. It turned into an amazing spiderweb of contacts, basically starting with Jim Lucas. Jim is a former minister in the CRC and runs an organization called “Gays in Faith Together,” and has all these amazing connections.

The process of turning it into a script has taken months. It was edited into a script by the seven actors and by Stephanie, and we waded through all this material. Our first script was ten hours long! We thought we really cut down a lot of material, but it was ten hours. So we did some more editing and brought it down to three hours. Then, in a couple of days we finalized the material in a shorter form. It was almost divine in the way it all came together over a couple of days. It took months to assemble everything, but in the end it was only a couple of days for everything to fall into place.

Kerux: What was the nature of the material you collected? Was it predictable, or widely divergent? Did certain patterns emerge?

DE: I think a little bit of both. How's that for a bland answer! I think one of the common patterns was the realization of pain. I think pain and struggle was the common idea that was in all the stories. That might have to do with the fact that the people who volunteer for this sort of thing are people that want to tell their story because they've had that pain, they need some sort of catharsis. But of course, everyone has a different story, everyone is unique in their experience of this.

It's interesting, some of the stories we didn't get to hear. We didn't hear the story of anyone who has been through reparative therapy and feels healed and whole from that. We would have loved to have heard that, but no one volunteered that story.

Kerux: What are the aims of your project? Do you have stated goals: theological ones, political ones, emotional goals?

DE: We definitely do. It's hard to say, because I think people automatically tune out at the cliché “we just want dialogue to happen,” but we just want dialogue to happen! We're trying a bunch of different things to get that to happen. For instance, at the end of each performance, we're having a talk-back with three panelists: a theologian, an expert in an academic discipline like sociology, and a gay Christian. They're there to serve as conduits for conversation. They're not there so much to react to what they've seen, but to moderate and field questions. We're really hoping people will stay for that - the play is only 90 minutes without an intermission – and we really want to emphasize the idea that there are no stupid questions, and allow people to be really vulnerable. I really think that a lot of Christians really just haven't thought a lot about this issue. We want to plant the seeds to help them do this.

Stephanie made a good point the other day about this. She said that if all we wanted to provoke was empathy, we could have just compiled the most wrenching stories, and performed them. The stories of people who had just a terrible time with the church. But then she went on to say that this probably wouldn't bring about empathy; instead, it would provoke pity, and that's not what we want. So we wanted to present the whole range of perspectives: people in committed homosexual relationships, people who are single and happy, people who are single and not happy, people who are celibate. We want to give the whole range to perspectives to give them validity and weight.

Kerux: How many actors and actresses in the performance identify themselves as gay or lesbian? Are there heterosexual performers? How did they deal with portraying gay and lesbian people?

DE: The cast is mixed, but the majority is heterosexual. It's a very complex thing, I think. We tried to remember throughout the project that these are actually people's stories – people's stories are holy, they are representative of these individuals, who were very vulnerable and presented a very vulnerable part of themselves. From the beginning, the cast members wanted to play a human being honestly, to not trivialize them or caricature them. It wasn't necessarily a matter of sexuality, they just wanted to represent these people and their sacred stories as best as they could.

Kerux: So it was empathy, practiced very potently, in the sense that the actors are standing in the very shoes of these people, in a way.

DE: Yes. We tried throughout the project to flesh out the stories, to get inside of what these people were telling us. Obviously you're not going to learn everything about a human being in an hour or two, but we really tried to root out the essence of the person – who they are and what they're trying to say. It's been an interesting road, trying to live out these people, to walk in their shoes.

Kerux: Let's move on to the audience. What's your ideal audience? Do you want it to reach out to gays and lesbians, or is it more tailored to a heterosexual audience?

DE: From the beginning we've done our best to make it as balanced as we can. We know we're not going to please everyone. But, that said, we have really tried to make this a piece that will not brow-beat the church and we've wanted to actively invite all denominations within Christianity, particularly the CRC. I guess we don't have an ideal audience. Stereotypically speaking, a theater-going audience is going to be more liberal-minded, and that's something we've had to actively work against. We wanted churches to know that we've created a piece here that has the voices of celibate people, and single people, and also committed homosexual relationships. So the last thing we wanted to do was have more conservative people come and brow-beat them. I guess the ideal audience would be people of all denominations, people who want to open themselves up to hearing, to listening, to scratch a little deeper than just a surface understanding of all the texts. People who want to do the homework and listen to the issues. So often people think that the “call for dialogue” is code for “come to the liberal side.” That's not what we're saying; we're trying to make it much more vague and much more complex and raise questions.

Kerux: What do you hope seminarians will take away? Intellectually, spiritually, emotionally? Do you hope this will be a good step in the direction of a renewed pastoral ministry?

DE: In a lot of the stories, there's a sense of total frustration. People talked to their pastors, and the pastors were affirming, but in a secret sort of way. They didn't want the story to reach the ears of the higher-ups, the people in authority. What is a person supposed to do with that? It seems like there's an absurd middle ground – it's ok to be who you are, but don't act on it, don't get in a relationship. I would like to see seminarians struggle with this part of the play, to wrestle with these questions. There's a lot of stuff in the play about this “practice vs. don't practice” dichotomy. I hope this play can contribute to renewed discussions of that, these very practical pastoral questions. In a sense, it exposes the inconsistencies of what pastors have done with homosexual Christians. Is it pastoral to say “I affirm you, but stay quiet?” I don't know. I don't know what the answer is.

Kerux: Right. Christians are supposed to be truth-tellers, and pastors have to be truth-tellers par excellence. What does it say then when they're duplicitous?

DE: Exactly. It's been surprising to me just how many people have been in this situation. They've felt affirmed by their pastor, but been recommended to have a gag-order or sorts. Kind of like “Don't ask, don't tell,” but in the church.

Another question that I'd like for this performance to stimulate comes from something Lewis Smedes wrote. He says that the way that the church has treated homosexuals is the single greatest heresy in its history. I'd like to see seminarians ask “why is that the case?” “What's behind that?” I'd like to see more weight given to that perspective and that thought. Smedes points out that the church has rethought lots of issues, like marriage and divorce, for instance, and in light of the fact that the church has changed its position on these relational issues, sets the tone of the dialogue of what we should be doing with Christians who are gay.

One other question I hope it raises is about the complexity of sexuality in general. I'd really like to see a renewed discussion of sexuality as a whole, and homosexuality's place in that. There's lots of complicated issues in the realm of Christian thinking about sexuality. What do we do with people who lost their virginity because of rape? What about people who are born intersexed? A lot people are experiencing a lot of pain because of the silence of the church surrounding a lot of these issues. If we remove the heat from homosexuality as an isolated thing and put the scrutiny on sexuality in general, perhaps a new-found sense of perspective could come back to the discussion.

Seven Passages will be performed in the Actor's Theater @ Spectrum, September 27-29 and October 4-6. Tickets are $22. Box Office Phone: 616-234-3946.

There will be a free performance for clergy/seminarians at 10am on Thursday, September 27. It will be followed by a free lunch and discussion. Please RSVP to dellen52@calvin.edu or ssandber@calvin.edu, if you're interested in attending.