Ana Brun, Saul Williams and more from the Gay Theatre Festival.
Gay Theatre Festival: Corpus Christi
Smock Alley Studio
It may seem deliberately provocative to recast Jesus Christ as a gay man, but not because of sexual orientation: anyone likely to take offence at The Greatest Story Ever Toldretold will bridle at the idea of Jesus sexualised at all. As Martin Scorsese and Dan Brown well know, those predisposed towards outrage will reject the idea of a Christ prey to human desires.
That's a shame, because although Terrence McNally's 1998 play is certainly not without its faults, its biggest achievement is to present a vulnerable, human Christ, subject to the wills and weaknesses of the flesh.
If anything, though, this staging by Los Angeles company 108 Productions goes out of its way to avoid giving offence.
With our 13 smiling, barefoot performers kitted out in uniform Khakis and white shirts, promising "no tricks up our sleeves, no malice in our hearts", before being "baptised" into character, Nic Arnzen's sparing production is about as confrontational as an evangelical Gap ad.
Those who have few qualms watching a gay messiah growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the 1950s, may actually be more suspicious of the play's unrelenting Sunday school positivity. Coyly named Joshua, and played with beatific tenderness by James Brandon, Christ's story is largely left intact, each miracle drawing such beaming approval from the apostles - "It seemed like there was nothing he couldn't do!" - that they seem like cult members. Which, indeed, they were.
A rather passive Joshua may be seduced by a swarthy Judas (Chris Payne), whose betrayal is made more sinister and jealous; Josuha may preside over a gay marriage between Bartholomew and James; and he may even reconsider that turn-the-other- cheek rule ("I must have been in a very good mood"), but for all the variations on the story, it is the love and sacrifice of the original that still seems the most audacious.
The uncomplicated inclusivity of this production may lessen the impact of McNally's intentions - to test the teachings and tolerance of Christianity - and the company's palpable goodwill wins out over thorny issues. Ironically, though, it doesn't seem controversial enough, forsaking critical engagement with its subject for a simple glowing faith in humanity.
PETER CRAWLEY
Until Saturday
Saul Williams
The Button Factory, Dublin
Even in a genre as elastic and capacious as hip-hop, Saul Williams often seems out of place. For a start, he is a slam poet first and an emcee second, talking up the power of vulnerability over the impervious pose of the gangster.
His business model, too, is poles apart from mainstream hip- hop, having made his last record, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!, [whose title alone reeks of conceptual overstretch] available online for either $5 [€3.20] or for free. Sadly, most people chose the latter.
And, as Williams emerges onto the stage of a packed Button Factory, even his cyber-dandy costume flies in the face of baggy braggadocio, multi-coloured feathers erupting from his hair like a rainbow mohican, the rest of his wardrobe inherited, it seems, from Adam and the Ants.
That may suggest a mischievous sense of humour, but the music and the message is unblinkingly serious.
"Muthafuckas better realise, now is the time to self-actualise," begins Coded Language, its streaming verses equating hip-hop with heightened consciousness, then name checking everyone from Ginsberg to Coltrane to Cosby [Who? Bill?].
It's forceful, certainly, but the pummelling accompaniment makes much of Williams's rhymes indecipherable or indigestible.
Blame Trent Reznor. The Nine Inch Nails miserabilist, who produced Williams's new album, amplified his aggression excitingly, but it soon becomes wearing.
In performance, beatmaster CX Kidtonik inherits that role, his fearsome breaks and queasy bass making an arresting racket that can barely be reined in for older numbers Surrenderand Black Stacey. Race, Williams tells us after the much better, deliberately old skool Tr[n]igger, is a social construct. That's all well and good, but it's telling that the concept needs explaining.
For all his intelligence, protest and passion, Williams's eloquence can be gagged by the bombast.
That's why a fuzzy but faithful rendition of U2's Sunday Bloody Sundaymay go down well, but the venue hushes to rapt silence twice when Williams returns to the unaccompanied slam poetry that first made his name. He may be unorthodox, but one of hip-hop's rules serves Williams well: let the words do the work.
PETER CRAWLEY
Ana Brun
Crawdaddy
You could hear a pin drop in Crawdaddy on Tuesday night. The sight of a riveting Norwegian singer/songwriter in full flight is a rarity, even in a world shrinking by the nanosecond.
Ane Brun is the keeper of a cavernous voice and an architecturally minimalist guitar style, both of which might be sufficient to set her apart, were it not for the searing originality of her perspective: surely, the most essential ingredient in any artist's knapsack of whirligigs and trickeries.
Brun sings of the stuff that fuels all our beating hearts. There's that life-changing moment when you catch wind of a singer who stops you dead in your tracks, documented with crystalline clarity in Gillian, an ode to the sublime Gillian Welch.
Then there's Lullaby For Grown Ups, a jagged, awkward, gangly thing of beauty, with an acoustic guitar that somehow mutates into the sound of a slide guitar. A perfect soundtrack to an Annie Proulx short story perhaps?
With her third album, Changing Of The Seasons, due out any day now, Brun knows a thing or two about spare, dry-boned writing. The title track recounts the sheer pleasures of returning to the cold, windswept Atlantic island of her childhood, while elsewhere she mined the depths of thwarted love and the intricacies of her own fantasy world Don't Leaveand Balloon Ranger], each a three-minute wonder of sharp-edged originality crossed with a melodic sensibility that somehow straddles the disparate worlds of Björk and Dolly Parton.
At times there was an odd disconnect between Brun's effortless fluency in song, and her occasionally idiosyncratic spoken English, which only added further to her intrigue.
Maybe it's that heady mix of Norwegian and Swedish influences , crossed with an unshakeable sense of herself that allows her to swing from pastoral waltzes to a magnificent cover of PJ Harvey's The Dancer, all the while holding her audience's attention with a laser-like focus.
Perspectives on life don't some much more deliciously skewed than this.
SIOBHÁN LONG
