Something Wicked

Staged evil in the life of the actor and spectator

We had just opened a bottle of vinho verde and bitten into honey peach bruschetta topped with toasted pine nuts and basil leaves. Licking a bit of spicy honey off her finger, my friend asked, “What if you talked about visiting the theatre as a spiritual discipline?”

“Hmm,” I answered, daunted and still chewing. How to attend a play and tap in to the theological and formative currents undulating underneath—that’s a book-length question. I liked her idea, but I chose to take a smaller bite. Rather than writing a comprehensive play-by-play of how to feel God when you’re watching a show, I instead want to highlight one of the more difficult elements of theatre, one that has gotten it into particular trouble with the church over the course of history: the portrayal of evil. For both the actor and the spectator, the formative nature of theatre demands that some of what is performed makes its way into us… so what does this mean when that which is seeping into our souls is violent or perverse?

This question is older than Christianity itself. Plato, Aristotle, and then eventually Augustine and Tertullian all have hard opinions on why theatre should or should not be performed because of its integrative power. (Spoiler: mostly against it).

Without launching into a polemic on the ways I think this is wrong and why theatre has more good than evil to offer us, I will simply say: the empathy, courage, truthfulness, and wonder required to craft and engage with a piece of theatre makes the art form a practice in incarnation. Even viewing and portraying instances of evil can be a worshipful and hallowing experience when shrewdly undertaken. To erase any depiction of wickedness from our storytelling is to turn a blind eye to the real suffering of our sisters and brothers and is to naively assume that the evil we’re abolishing does not already exist among us. In order to creatively engage with the restoration of the world in reality, we must wrestle with its brokenness in fiction.

Any numbers of methodologies already exist for determining one’s thresholds with content. We have trigger warnings, genres, cinematic ratings like PG and R, and basic justifications like, “Well the bad guy is doing the evil and they die at the end so it’s fine. They’re not glorifying it.” But what about when the good guys are doing the evil? Or when there’s not really any clear good guys or bad guys? Any sojourn into the world of literature, drama, and art—because they reflect an equally storied world—will demand more complexity from you.

There are two questions that I use to guide a thoughtful, faithful encounter with evil onstage. While both apply to actors and audience members alike, I think the first question is particularly important for actors, and the second for spectators.

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How close to my reality is this particular darkness? Have you ever wondered why people get up in arms about teenagers portraying sexuality onstage but are perfectly fine with the idea of them engaging in sword fighting and pretending to kill one another? Surely it would be better for a 16-year-old to dabble in sensuality than willfully end the life of another human being, wouldn’t it? Yet when preparing to ship their children off to rehearse an interaction for weeks before performing it for the community, I guarantee you most parents would rather have them practicing violence. And why is that? Because for whatever reason, they believe that one is far more likely to occur in real life than the other.

The more possible the sin, the formative rehearsing it becomes. Even without the dangerous practice of method acting, which has been largely discouraged by this point, an actor prepares for a role for an average of six weeks, routinely entering the headspace of a given situation and marinating in it. The actions onstage may last a moment, but you are watching someone who has memorized that moment with their body and mind. You in the audience are not immune to formation either. How easily you can empathize with a character’s decision determines the thinness of the divide between reality and imagination.

In a college acting class, my classmates and I were encouraged to consciously consider our “rules” for what we would portray, knowing that turning down some roles would cost us money and connections. Unsurprisingly, our boundaries differed somewhat.¹ One actor was willing to undertake sex scenes but refused any script with profanity. Another shied away from any portrayal of addiction but found violence acceptable. These variances did not denote a lack of morality on anyone’s part, but a sensitivity of discernment. In a way, what we were quietly announcing to ourselves and each other was, “These are the things that feel like they could become or at one point have become my reality.” The proximity to real life made the fiction that much more formative, despite our training to be able to step in and out of stories responsibly.

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How long is the half-life of this particular darkness? My threshold for visual violence and emotional turmoil is comically low, Disney princess-level low. Only as an adult have I made it through Harry Potter or Pirates of the Caribbean, and even then I still look away at certain points. While as a child and teenager this put a serious wrench in my social life, as an adult I have come to appreciate this threshold, or at least to respect it. It is simply that darkness has a very long half-life for me.

When scientists are trying to determine how old something is, like a petrified tree, they will measure the amount of carbon-14 left in the object. Because carbon-14 decays at a predictable rate, we know that half the atoms will have decomposed into something else by 5,730 years—that is carbon-14’s “half-life”. Scientists will measure how much carbon-14 remains and use that to determine how old the given sample is.²

How long does evil linger in you before it is processed and decomposed? Do you walk away from the theatre able to have a fruitful discussion of the tensions at play, and then go home and go to sleep? Or will it remain with you longer? Will you wake up every day for the rest of the week or month feeling somewhat deadened, unable to shake the darkness from your thoughts? Much like the “realness” question, determining your half-life for evil asks you to take inventory of how close and how long the darkness will remain with you. Maybe your half-life for battle or war is particularly short, but any brush with instances of abuse lives longer. Maybe alcoholism fades from you quickly, but rehearsing or viewing infidelity will live in you for weeks afterwards.

Referencing the half-life of evil gives you an excuse for why you choose not to attend or portray a given story. It is not that you are accusing others of being numb or heartless, but rather that you know that it will be washed from them more quickly. “This may be a few hours of grief for you,” you explain. “But I will be signing up for performance that lasts long after we leave.”

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Theatre is visual and visceral; the actors are undisguised by CGI and undivided from you by time and space. There in the room with you, Gatsby is shot and the crack of the gun pierces your ears and his. You watch Lady Macbeth’s hands shake as she descends into madness and those hands might be yours. Visiting the theatre as a spiritual discipline requires a hearty amount of respect for the power of embodied storytelling, and a piece of that respect is the knowledge that every good story involves some tragedy.

Innocence is not excess to be burned off, it is a blessed fragility that allows you to envision a better world. But neither should you insulate yourself from the true tangle of this world’s history in that envisioning. These two questions are meant to help thoughtfully probe whether an encounter with a particular circumstance will provoke you towards empathy, justice, and holy self-examination; or whether it will harm you. You may ask these questions and determine that the long half-life of the evil is a worthy burden for hearing a story that needs telling. Or you may decide that it is gratuitous.

Engaging with stories will require you both to look ahead a little and to accept aspects of the unknown. To quote The Princess Bride (another movie I had to skip parts of as a child)—

“Does it have any sports in it?”

“Are you kidding?! Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…?”

“Doesn’t sound too bad. I’ll try to stay awake.”

Cover Image: St. Michael and the Dragon by unknown Spanish artist

1. It’s important to note that some rules—such as one’s boundaries in intimacy scenes—do not reflect an encounter with evil but still with something formative and therefore powerful.

2. I am not remotely qualified to explain this well. Here is an article from the University of Chicago articulating it better.