Notes from the Cast: Frank Moorman

A response to the play from cast member Frank Moorman who is making his Forum Theatre premiere playing Butch Honeywell.

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For most of my life, when asked about my religious inclinations, I identified myself as an indifferent. I had never had much interest in the question of the existence of god, and I do not recall any time when I wondered where we came from, what we meant, or where we went after death. There were a few times when I made some appeals to a vague deity, but they were usually frivolous and didn’t stand up under examination. Very occasionally, no more than once a year or two, we went to church, usually the chapel at the army post where my father was stationed, and I saw these more as unusual social gatherings than anything else. I once went to Sunday school, but wound up in the advanced class rather than the beginners’, and I never returned.

In recent years, though, with the atmosphere of intolerance generated by fundamentalist religious groups and fanatics, I have decided that indifference was a cop-out, and I have been more assertive in identifying myself as an atheist. I suppose we could get into intricate debates about whether I’m really an atheist or an agnostic, but they don’t really interest me. I don’t believe in a sky-daddy, or as some atheists put it, I believe in one less god than believers do.

There’s a wonderful book called Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht. The subtitle is “The great doubters and their legacy of innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson.” In her introduction, she has a scale of doubt quiz, which can be useful in helping to decide what to call youself, if that’s important to you.

I look on religion as a form of myth. Robert Graves defines mythology as “the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true.” For me, this is as true of the Jesus story as it is of the Oedipus, Ulysses, or other creation and heroic myths.

I believe that these stories grew out of oral traditions, possibly with some relation to actual people and events, and that they serve to answer the mysteries of creation and existence, as perceived by particular people in a particular time and location, and to provide guidelines and justification for social organization and human behavior. The structural similarity of such stories across different cultures suggests to me that they fulfill deep needs that humans share, with variations based on differences in time, place, and circumstance. The same goes for folk tales, or what we often call fairy tales.

While my reading of mythology over time has been episodic and eclectic, I have not come across other instances in which a betrayer has been so enshrined in the core of a mythology as is the case with Judas. There are traitors and villains, and some of these have lied and turned against the hero, but they serve a narrative purpose as obstacles that the hero must overcome in the completion of his journey and the fulfillment of his destiny. But none of them achieve the prominence in their hero’s story that Judas has in the Jesus story.

Yet Judas plays an important role in Jesus’s fulfillment as a hero. The kiss leads to Jesus’s capture, death (or descent into the underworld), and eventual return, a common path for the mythological hero. It’s an essential moment in the journey, yet the betrayal has been extracted from the story and given enormous meaning through the condemnation. The intense hatred for Judas in Christian mythology is captured in the vivid imagery at the end of Dante’s Inferno, in which Judas is stuck head-first into the middle of Satan’s three mouths, where he is chewed and ground by Satan’s teeth for eternity. On either side of him, in two other mouths, are two other legendary betrayers, Cassius and Brutus, though they are in leg-first.

As a curious non-believer, I wonder why this is such an important or at least highly emphasized part of the story. It’s as though it’s not enough to tout the message and deity of Jesus. Somewhere along the way in the development, expansion, and institutionalization of Christianity, there developed a need or urge to emphasize the villainy of the betrayal. I assume that the evolving power structure of the church made some decision to use this part of the story to strengthen its dominance and scare believers into further submission.

There are some interesting takes on this question in the Wikipedia article on Judas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot), along with some of the variations through which the story has played out over the centuries.

When talked about being in this play, a couple people have asked how, as a non-believer, I felt about being in a play on such a religious topic. Ultimately, my answer is that it’s a good story, well told. I love the language and the immediacy of the characters. I love the variation on a familiar story. And I love that it raises questions and offers multiple, sometimes contradictory answers, leaving people to think for themselves rather than lecture them about one point or another.

In somewhat the same way that Jesse, as an agnostic, appreciates playing a non-believer and a doubter, I feel a kinship with Butch, who, if he’s not indifferent to the world-shaking story being played out before him, at least does not seem wrapped up in it or consumed by it, and instead is more concerned about his own life and future. That, for him, is the gold that he threw away, more precious to him than the silver that Judas cashed in.

Or, as captured by W.H. Auden in Musee des Beaux-Arts:

“…even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”