Theater: Jesus Christ Superstar?

New York theatergoers rarely feel so important. Those attending last week's first performance of Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi were greeted by a couple hundred chanting demonstrators and a few berobed Franciscan friars handing out protest leaflets. Once inside the theater, the crowd had to pass through an airport-style metal detector as a security precaution. Not a single star or supermodel was there, but it made the local news.

When word leaked out last spring that off-Broadway's Manhattan Theatre Club was planning to stage a play in which Jesus and his apostles are portrayed as modern-day gay men, Catholic groups raised a fuss. The theater's management, fearful because of some anonymous death threats, abruptly canceled the production--and then, after First Amendment advocates and a prominent chunk of the theater community protested, reversed itself, hiring a private security firm to supplement New York City cops to guard against violence. Is this any way to get people to come to your play?

No, especially not with the work in question. Reviewers won't be allowed to pass judgment until the official opening in two weeks (McNally, author of Master Class and Love! Valour! Compassion!, is still tinkering). But a first look reveals a play far less incendiary than charged.

"We are going to tell you an old and familiar story," a character announces at the outset. "No tricks up our sleeve." Well, maybe a few tricks: the play transposes the Gospel to 1950s and '60s Texas, where the Jesus figure (called Joshua) is a misfit at Pontius Pilate High and has his first gay experience when Judas accosts him in the bathroom during the senior prom. Yet the play has no explicit sex (and very little implicit) and no cheap lampooning of the Greatest Story Ever Told. Indeed, Corpus Christi is a serious, even reverent retelling of the Christ story in a modern idiom--quite close, in its way, to the original. Jesus heals a truck driver of leprosy, raises Lazarus from the dead and predicts his own betrayal at the Last Supper. ("He's drunk, guys," says an Apostle. "It's the wine talking.") If the point is to make Jesus' teachings live for a contemporary audience, activist Christians should be hailing this play, not trying to suppress it.

But the battle lines are drawn. William Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the play's most vocal critic, disavows violence but denounces the play (which he hasn't seen or read) as anti-Catholic and a "contribution to hate-speech." The League and several free-speech groups plan to demonstrate on opening night. Meanwhile, those who excoriated the theater for its timidity are now praising it. "I think it's a brave thing they're doing," says Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss). Braver still would be for everyone to cool off and just watch the play.

--By Richard Zoglin. With reporting by William Tynan/New York