Cherry Lane Theater
The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord
"From Scott Carter, Executive Producer of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” this timely New York Premiere finds three of history’s most famous men, all of whom wrote their own version of the gospels, debating everything from religion to literature to marriage in this “hugely entertaining, rapid-fire” (Chicago Sun-Times) new play. Thomas Jefferson (author of the Declaration of Independence), Charles Dickens (the man who brought us A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist) and Count Leo Tolstoy (the epic Russian novelist of War & Peace fame) are trapped in a limbo where each believes their path to salvation depends on convincing the other two that they are wrong. Kimberly Senior, the acclaimed director of Chris Gethard’s Career Suicide and the Tony-nominated Disgraced, will helm this profound and exciting battle of truly biblical proportions."
Did you know Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy all wrote their own versions of the Bible? Ah! The ego of the refined mind! Hello, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Thomas, Charles and Leo!
In Jefferson's version, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," aka the Jefferson Bible, the great man cut-and-pasted bits of the New Testament so that the story of Jesus Christ better resembled a rationalist code for life, shorn of the miraculous and supernatural. The founding father was not hitting Control-C, of course. His cutting and pasting involved scissors and glue.
Dickens, the great English novelist, wrote "The Life of Our Lord" in 1849, although it was the last of his works to be published. Written for his children, this biblical retelling in the Dickensian style also cut most of the miraculous stuff and emphasized the so-called Social Gospel. And Tolstoy? His 1883 work, "The Gospel in Brief," emphasized Christ's teachings, not historical events, and aimed to offer up the greatest pedagogical hits of all four Gospels in a single volume from the voluminous Tolstoy's mind.
That hubristic coincidence — these men lived in different eras — is the inspiration behind "The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord," a heady snoozer of a title that's tough to fit on a marquee, so it's just as well the Northlight Theatre does not have one at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.
This 2014 play was penned by Scott Carter, the longtime writer and executive producer for "Real Time With Bill Maher," which indicates both the pedigree and the wonkish bona fides of the scribe. But Carter actually has written an amusing little play, cheerfully anachronistic and irreverent, that imagines Jefferson (Nathan Hosner in Kimberly Senior's production), Dickens (Jeff Parker) and Tolstoy (Mark Montgomery) all stuck together in purgatory, here aptly defined as three towering egos obliged to argue with one another for eternity.
Carter is riffing, for sure, on that signature bit of dramatic existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit," wherein hell was famously defined as "other people."
"Discord" won't shake you to your boots with emotion nor send you into giddy raptures of amusement — Senior's sometimes removed production, seriously designed by Jack Magaw, does not fully exploit every comedic possibility, and this isn't the ideal physical space for this small show. And although the audience Friday night remained quieter than is ideal for a comedy, this remains an entertaining and intellectually stimulating 90 minutes, featuring three skilled Chicago actors working with a smart director and a clever script.
If you like some catnip for the noggin, this is your show. I'd give it a week to find its groove before you go.
The most interesting section (and the only time the work gets really emotional) is when Carter really gets into how much the lives of these men diverged from their philosophical pronouncements, such as Jefferson's relationship with his slaves or Dickens' own troubled personal life (which involved Chicago, but that's another story). The characterizations of the men tend to fall into established stereotypes — Montgomery's Tolstoy is gruff in that famous "nyet" kind of way, Parker's Dickens is snippy and sanctimonious, and Hosner's Jefferson is, well, tortured in his all-American pursuit of nationalistic exceptionalism. Then again, history suggests some truth to all of that, and it's part of the fun.
It is indeed quite jolly to watch these towering egos argue with one another with such force — especially since Carter makes it very clear that you are also watching three different historical eras in vigorous debate about matters political and philosophical. None of the men has any spiritual certainty about them — I mean, who does? — but they're all bold-faced advice columnists when it comes to prescribing the path to redemption for anyone other than themselves.
How much will that count in the final analysis? Well, that's pretty much what this play wants to know. And it's well worth 90 minutes of thought.
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