Preview
BIGGER THAN JESUS
Necessary Angel-WYRD Productions
Starring Rick Miller
Written by Rick Miller and Daniel Brooks
Directed by Daniel Brooks
Presented by One Yellow Rabbit
Runs January 21 to 25
Vertigo Studio Theatre (Tower Centre)
Imagine the story of Jesus Christ retold with imagery by Salvador Dali, the four Evangelists as the four Beatles and Judas Iscariot portrayed by a Homer Simpson Pez dispenser.
It’s just what you’d expect from Rick Miller, the man who brought Shakespeare to Springfield with the wacky international stage hit MacHomer.
Yet Miller is a much more substantial artist than that latter show suggests and his newest work, Bigger Than Jesus, is no mere send-up of Christ and Christianity.
"It deals with the Jesus story with as much reverence as irreverence," says the Toronto-based actor-playwright, who is bringing the multimedia production to the High Performance Rodeo for a five-night run. Miller, who was raised a Catholic, remains intensely interested in Christianity’s shadowy founder and he describes this as a playful attempt at tackling an often stultifyingly solemn subject.
To begin with, there’s the title, taken from John Lennon’s notorious quip at the height of Beatlemania, which here refers to the gulf between Jesus the historical man – apparently some Jewish rabbi or rabble-rouser in Roman-occupied Palestine about 2,000 years ago – and Jesus Christ, the figurehead of one of the world’s great religions.
"What he has become is much bigger than what he was," says Miller. "What we try and trace from the beginning to the end of the play is how that developed and its impact. I’ve taken what I feel is a beautiful story and broken it open from the limitations imposed by what I (experienced) in church, which was a very fixed version of Jesus, essentially nailed to a cross. To me, there was very little spirit and life in what I was experiencing, especially as a teenager."
The one-man play has a 12-part structure, referring to the 12 stages of Christ’s Passion, and Miller portrays a variety of characters, as well as using dolls and figurines (such as the Pez Homer) to tell the story. And yes, the boyishly handsome actor ultimately transforms into Jesus Himself – a role he’s certainly qualified for (theatrically, that is). "I’ve played Jesus a few times now, in Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar," he says.
A show re-examining the life of Jesus is well timed, given the current surge of interest in the Gnostic and other heretic gospels – sources of inspiration for the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code and the Matrix movies, as well as the subject of serious study.
"Those gospels are just different interpretations of a story, in the same way these (official) Gospels are," claims Miller. "And it’s important to say that it’s a story. The Gospel writers were not writing history, they were writing stories, and that’s where we start off from. The world would be a very different place had Christians read their Bible not as the literal word of God but as beautiful literature."
Miller is, needless to say, no longer a practising Catholic. "My faith is more that of a humanist than of a believer in organized religion," he says. "I’m a Christian in the sense that I think Jesus was a very inspiring figure rather than the literal Son of God." But he hasn’t entirely rejected the Church. He says he and his wife Stephanie decided to baptize their infant daughter, Vivian, to please his mother and may end up taking her to Mass when she gets older to give her the experience. "We’ll let her choose for herself."
Miller grew up in that bastion of Catholicism, Montreal, where he studied architecture and theatre at McGill University. Shortly after graduating, he began working with avant-garde maestro Robert Lepage, performing in the play Geometry of Miracles and the film Possible Worlds, but also did his time as a jobbing actor. It was while playing a bit role in a production of Macbeth that he came up with MacHomer, which started out as a joke to amuse fellow cast members and wound up a huge fringe-festival success. The solo show (which has the seal of approval from Simpsons creator Matt Groening) is now in its ninth year on tour and has become the mainstay of Miller’s WYRD Productions – a piece of pure entertainment that pays for more ambitious projects like Bigger Than Jesus.
This show marks his first collaboration with another major Canadian director (and Rodeo favourite) Daniel Brooks. "I approached Daniel because he’s got a very rigorous mind to deal with this very challenging subject," says Miller. Brooks has co-created and directed the piece as a collaboration between Miller’s WYRD and the Necessary Angel Theatre Company, where Brooks is now artistic director.
Bigger Than Jesus received its première at Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre Centre last Easter and just had a brief run at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille in preparation for this tour. So far, the show has yet to encounter the kind of controversy that re-interpretations of Jesus’s life tend to provoke (think Martin Scorsese’s film of The Last Temptation of Christ and Terrence McNally’s gay Jesus play Corpus Christi).
"The media in Winnipeg were hoping for protests – it would have made a good story," says Miller. On the contrary, response has been positive. Following the first performance in Toronto, two couples — one devout Catholics, the other, devout Jews — waited after the show to speak with Miller. "They both just wanted to say this was the most meaningful experience they’d had in a theatre in a long time," he says. |
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