Baptism by Theater

In the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, 250 worshipers filed into St. Clement's Episcopal Church last week for what was billed as an environmental theater baptism service. Inside, they were led into a dark room. Fixed to the walls were the haunting images of the '60s: photos of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, front pages with dread black headlines. Further on, in an open bathroom, a young man in a towel was shaving, singing We Shall Overcome. Hippiesque youngsters extended open hands with greetings of "love." The worshipers got a surprise along with the handshake: a palmful of mud.

In the sanctuary upstairs, the show went on. At one end, three nude young people splashed happily in a kiddies' plastic wading pool. At the other end, Actor Kevin O'Connor (Tom Paine) performed the bathtub scene from Sam Shepard's play Chicago, a scene of despair and rebirth. At a sink, two housewives talked about which detergent was purest.

Rebirth Theme. Then the action subsided, the bathers put on modest white gowns and the central event came into focus: the baptism of three new members of the congregation--a Jewish student in his 20s, a young woman dancer and a three-year-old black-and-Puerto Rican boy adopted by a white family. As incense billowed up toward the rafters, the Rev. Eugene Monick, 42, intoned: "Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world . . . and the sinful desires of the flesh . . . ?" Then he cupped water onto the forehead of each of the baptismal candidates and daubed them with Magic Marker in the sign of the cross. Afterward the congregation hoisted the newly baptized onto their shoulders and paraded around the room.

For Vicar Monick, baptism is a sacrament of rebirth that profits not only the newly baptized, but those "on the far side of Christ" who have seen their hopes crushed--as in the upheavals and violence of the '60s--and need their faith reaffirmed. To express all this symbolically through environmental theater, Monick worked for two months with the event's directors, Kevin O'Connor, a Roman Catholic, and Gordon Stewart, a Presbyterian. One nice touch they devised to dramatize the rebirth theme: during the baptism, members of the cast circulated among the worshipers washing the mud from their hands. Monick also devoted five Sunday services to explanations that would prepare his congregation for the event.

Juicy Imagery. Not that such provocative liturgies are new at St. Clement's. Once a poorly attended High Church bastion, it took on new life in the 1960s under a priest named Sidney Lanier, who suggested turning it into an actors' church and using the sanctuary for weekday performances of the off-Broadway American Place Theater. The American Place troupe now has new quarters, but Monick, Lanier's successor, has continued St. Clement's involvement with the theater. In a 1969 experiment, Monick and Playwright Tom LaBar prepared an environmental Eucharist, a daylong service in which parishioners were taken one by one through rooms depicting each episode of the Mass.

Tradition still has its place at St. Clement's too. Although the U.S. Episcopal Church recently issued a book of "trial" services for testing in parishes, Monick rejected the trial baptism text in favor of the standard one in the Book of Common Prayer, with its rolling Elizabethan phrases. The new service, says Monick, "is too flat. It doesn't have all that juicy imagery about forswearing the devil."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.