Demons in America
The dozen years between and Soul of a Whore have reordered heaven, the United States, and Texas in a world in which the fundamentalist things apply.

By Robert Avila

Angels in America

History is about to crack wide open. Millennium approaches.

Angels in America

'AND DOESN'T TEXAS sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia," Martin Amis asks in a recent edition of the British Guardian, "with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?" It's of course more than the details themselves that make the comparison so seductive. The Bush dynasty, growing like a weed in the oily Lone Star soil, has recentered American political culture in Texas and staked an exclusive claim to the nation's soul. There was once space on the plain of Yankee history for competing versions of the past, present, and future. But things have changed.

As a portrait of American fundamentalism ascendant, Denis Johnson's Texas tale Soul of a Whore is startlingly of our Bible-thumping, bomb-dropping, cutthroat moment, mixing religion, politics, lust, and demonology into an irreducible cocktail. In its bleakly comic landscape, God remains aloof but demons have become a more or less familiar presence. Hell is nearby, in the molten streams of violence running just below life's surface, heating the earth, stirring up thoughts of the apocalypse and divine retribution.

Enjoying its world premiere at Intersection for the Arts in an inspired and muscular production, the play crackles with energy and humor, giddy poetry, an invigorating swirl of ideas, and richly complex characters that make it a taut, gripping three-hour ride. Soul of a Whore completes the trilogy that began with Hellhound on My Trail (2000). Though the hell-bent Cassandra brothers provide a loose through-line, the title of the second play, Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames (2001) – a dizzyingly suggestive image that found its way into each work – sums up the core preoccupations that give an epochal sweep to the playwright's bold caricature of American life.

Johnson's demonically divine comedy irresistibly suggests the distance traveled since another epic of spiritual renewal in dark times, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, first materialized on a San Francisco stage. Both plays are deeply concerned with religious and political fundamentalism. Moreover, the geographical shift from New York (the setting of Angels) to Texas mimics the real-life shift of U.S. politics southward, a process that's been called the "Texanisation" of the country. The road ran from Reagan to George W. between the premieres of these two plays – 12 years that have taken an incalculable toll on the leftist tradition at the heart of Angels. Accordingly, where Kushner's vision of a spiritual renewal from the depths of the Reagan years remained fully invested in a political struggle, the search for salvation in Soul of a Whore is far more ambivalent.

Soul focuses on the career of Bill Jenks (Brian Keith Russell), hero-whore of the title, a TV evangelist and ex-con. Jenks has finished 14 months in Huntsville State Penitentiary. There's an assortment of oddball characters that inhabit the stage, but the two closest to Jenks are a quick-witted stripper named Masha (Delia MacDougall) and fellow ex-convict John Cassandra (Michael Torres), bent on getting Jenks to save Cassandra's mother (Catherine Castellanos), who is on death row.

Jenks, a self-described "shaman with a scheme," leaves prison a disillusioned church of one. But we read him as a set of contradictions from the start: a shameless flirt who professes celibacy, a nonbeliever with a direct line to Jesus, a crooked businessman with a profound sense of faith. Masha teasingly calls him "BJ" in an attempt to cut him down to size, but his full name is William Jennings Bryan Jenks, the mark of a natural-born Christian orator. His character accordingly yo-yos between the gutter and the pulpit. Cassandra (another name with prophetic overtones) identifies him as "the healer." Later a demon making the rounds of Huntsville's population identifies Jenks in the same way, offering him a prophecy in exchange for being left alone. (Demons are everywhere in Huntsville, and nobody, including Jenks, is in a hurry to cast them out.) The next two acts take place over the next two years, moving from a hospital room to the penitentiary's execution chamber, and make good the demon's predictions.

The story line revolves, in a shrinking orbit, around the mundanely Texan issue of capital punishment, in which politics and religion team up to mete out justice and retribution. In Texas, the state has replaced God as the all-powerful arm of vengeance, while colloquially, at least, maintaining Old Testament overtones – a tangled mess of God and government in which an "eye for an eye" becomes "try 'em and fry 'em." This so-called justice, the play suggests, imposes a black-and-white order on the infinite shades of gray in the human heart. Justice devoid of mercy, of human values, merely masks the logic of supreme power. Soul's Huntsville has internalized the mission, loud and proud, occasionally leavening the blood lust with rich, blue-collar nuggets like "the crucifiers never ride the Greyhound." Still, there's no way out – at the end of the day what separates death row from downtown is that the inhabitants of the former know the date they're going out. "It's Satan's world," Masha says. "You buck the tide, you get all waterlogged and wrinkled-up. And drowned."

Soul's landscape is dotted with bus stations, strip clubs, and penitentiaries – a long way from the world of power and privilege, unless you count Masha's marriage to the prison executioner and position as president of the pro-death penalty Texas Citizens for Victims' Rights. Still, Dubya is an unspoken yet powerful presence: he puts the death in death row, unleashing ghosts that haunt the stage as they do his empire. If Soul's Huntsville is a hyperreal charnel house, Houston is not a place on the map as much as it is furtive shorthand invoking a dark Lone Star Langley. "Sooner or later Houston gets us all," Jenks says.

Politically speaking, Soul of a Whore is infused with resignation as surely as Angels in America, grounded in the history of the political left, is energized by an uplifting messianic fervor in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Another sign of the times perhaps. Angels posed a direct challenge to the Reagan era's Christian-clothed bid for ideological supremacy, as well as its cadres' active and passive support of the forces destroying the planet. "Children of the new morning criminal minds," Louis called them in Angels. "Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan's children." Underneath Kushner's glorious, elevated language and sophisticated politics was the simple prayer begging inclusion and shelter for all of God's children. In hindsight Angels' quietly hopeful denouement marks an all too brief respite, opened up by Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall, from Reagan's perpetual morning (to which most people had added a silent u).

Capitalizing on the end of the cold war, the guardians of American empire pushed forward on all fronts. In the mainstream of U.S. political life, the 1990s led away from the regenerative humanist politics informing Kushner's epic invention. Instead of spiritually grounded praxis, we have Bush and old-time religion.

Yet while more guarded and individualist in its hope for the future, Soul of a Whore contains a powerful social critique whose radical implications outstrip its doubts about earthly salvation. Shoppers' full title best captures the intertwining of religion and modernity; there's a laugh-line quality to the image of people riding escalators into the infernal flames of a burning mall, but the payoff is nervous and silent, blanketing the stage like a bad dream, exposing a world sleepwalking across precarious ground. It implies nothing less than the self-destructive logic of modernity; a profoundly alienated consumerist culture, the "open for business" façade of a capitalist system founded on instrumentalist reason but fulfilling the darkest biblical prophecy. The picture of machine-enabled death raises the specter of the Holocaust while marking and mocking the problematic nature of freedom defined as consumer choice. It's an image that breaks apart the myth of individualism to reveal shopping, a freedom exercised only in the act of consumption. Far from freedom, it's the manipulation of a nameless herd, ultimately led to the slaughter, both now and in the proverbial hereafter, since the materialism represented is spiritually empty; the Hollywood-style escalator to heaven arrives only at a flaming perdition – Armageddon, in other words, without any perks, a social and psychical death foretold in imagery at once quintessentially modern and biblical.

Angels left open the door to redemption right here and now, but 12 years later, with the prospect of earthly rewards fading from view, the planetary gaze has moved skyward. Still, giving the lie to fundamentalism is an intrinsically hopeful, and even a defiantly political, act. Soul's profoundly humanist heart is bursting with exhuberant, gritty humor and a knowing street poetry peppered with Texas totems and Southern savvy. It's enough to elevate and carry the play into the head-on collision with a raging, self-righteous Masha. Her blood-chilling testimony for state-sponsored vengeance is more than unsettling, but we've glimpsed something beyond the black-and-white world of "try 'em and fry 'em." And in the instant before the executioner's killing blow, a ray of hope flickers in the glint of his blade.

Apocalypse, the moment of truth, seems to be moving in from the horizon. Giant wings, hardly angelic and too real, cast shadows over New York, over Kabul, and over Baghdad. In the anonymously authored 12th-century Play of Anti-Christ, the title character, aided by his coterie of Hypocrites, manages to convince the leaders of the world of his divinity through a combination of threats, cajoling, and hocus-pocus. The end of the world is nigh when two prophets appear and expose the imposter, who is subsequently dispatched with a divine bolt of lightning.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Angels in America and Soul of a Whore were brought to life by the rich, collaborative processes at two small but artistically daring San Francisco theater companies. In dark times, art sometimes offers us a distance and perspective that can feel almost oracular. Some things don't change.

'Soul of a Whore' runs Thurs/13-Mon/17, 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15. (415) 626-3311.