Man of God Is a Riveting Return to Live Performance from Theater Mu

Man of God is Theater Mu’s first live, in-person production in more than two years. I know each of us is still negotiating our relationship with gathering in public spaces, but I have missed live theater so much, and this tremendous play reminded me why. (For the record, the venue requires masks at all times and proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test from the previous 72 hours.)

Louisa Darr, Janet Scanlon, Suzie Juul, and Dexieng Yang as Jen, Kyng-Hwa, Samantha, and Mimi. Photo by Rich Ryan

As pure document, there’s a lot to love about Anna Ouyang Moench’s script. All four teenage protagonists are well drawn—sheltered, devout Samantha (Suzie Juul); strong-willed, rebellious Mimi (Dexieng “Dae” Yang); insecure, soft-spoken Kyung-Hwa (Janet Scanlon); and perfectionist Jen (Louisa Darr) are all classic teenage archetypes, but script and performer find the surprising and human in each of them. Both Moench and director Katie Bradley understand why the girls behave how they do. Each in their own way is responding to an unfair environment that tells them to be paragons of purity while also violently manipulating them without their permission. It’s an impossible balance, and while they might resent each other for the ways each of them cope, ultimate unity will come from realizing a shared enemy.

The four girls are stuck in a hotel room in Thailand on what’s supposedly a church mission trip, their sole chaperone being their pastor (Rich Remedios), who stays in another room. When the girls try to remember which room he’s in, however, they discover one of many disconcerting background details of their trip: he apparently told them all different numbers.

The curtain rises (metaphorically) on a tableau of the girls hunched over a camera they’ve found in their bathroom. The audience knows the source right away, through inference and through the play’s synopsis, promotional material, and title. The characters come around to the truth at varying speeds. Once that happens, they are left with a pretty unnerving realization—the only adult they know for a thousand miles is probably selling a pornographic livestream featuring them. And because the camera is live, he also knows they know.

Despite the subject matter, the play is also very funny. A lot of the comedy comes from the girls’ varying dispositions toward religion in general and the pastor specifically. As someone raised in a strict religious setting, I noted many echoes of conversations I had with onetime friends on similar trips. It’s not so much that the comedy balances the intensity and drama as that they are both drawn from the same source, two halves of the same awkward whole.

Photo by Rich Ryan

I would hope most people reading this accept that the patriarchy has real human consequences, but there’s a difference between knowing that and sitting in those consequences and feeling them alongside those they most hurt. These girls are so alone; they don’t really even have each other. And yet they all reach down inside themselves and find a way to keep going in a world that’s not fair, that doesn’t allow them to fight on equal footing, that asks far too much far too soon. And in the long silences, as they all retreat from their shared spaces into their minds—one world wholly in their control—the audience occasionally is invited to join them. But mostly we’re left in the quiet, feeling with them the way you only can with a flesh-and-blood person occupying the same room.

The play can be very ambitious. The hotel-room set is meticulous and realistic, but with a quick shift in lighting it transforms into a neon dream space where the girls imagine their most empowered selves seeking vengeance on the man who has wronged them. These vignettes range in effectiveness; the best is an absolutely brutal torture scene, which mirrors the violence Mimi feels at being cornered and helpless.

However, what makes the play—what lingered with me for days after the performance—was silence. The production is rife with it. Sometimes we are invited into the characters’ minds to see how they cope with their victimization. Other times we just sit alongside them. And what’s incredible, a sign of truly great theater, is that those emotions carry even more powerfully with silence. It shows every part of the production is working. The actors so perfectly embody the tension of the moment that I felt drawn in as a co-conspirator. There’s a part near the end where nobody speaks for almost five minutes, and it’s as riveting as anything I’ve seen in ages.

Man of God runs through March 6, 2022, at Mixed Blood Theatre. Tickets are available on the Theater Mu website.