Broadway Review: Hand to God

Me and the author, Robert Askins, at the Booth Theater


I have to confess straight up that Hand to God is not a show that I would choose to see in ordinary circumstances. The basic premise is: good church-going Texas boy involved in puppetry ministry finds his puppet has turned EEEEEEVILLL. Oh, and there’s significant amounts of violence, gore, and sex. Also: puppet sex. As I say, not my usual thing. But it’s playing at the Booth, which is the theater where Lauri is house manager, and I never miss an opportunity to see whatever they're showing when I'm in town. I also confess, it’s a total kick to do the whole “going in through the stage door and being welcomed by all the staff and hanging out afterwards to discuss the show” thing. In this case, that included a chance to meet the play’s author, Robert Askins, who was a total sweetheart about me having an entirely different conclusion about what his play Is Really About.

Lauri shorthands the play’s genre as “tragic farce”, which works for a very high-level summary. It opens and closes with a monologue from the puppet about the invention of good and evil and a critique of religion. Seen within that framing, the story’s various scenes of hypocrisy, lust, repression, and both inarticulate and willful failures of communication fall more on the farce side. Jason, the teenage protagonist, has recently lost his father to a heart attack, is being pressured to participate in his mother’s religious puppetry project, and is fumbling towards an adolescent desire for Jessica (another of the puppetry students) while clashing with bad-boy Timothy. The other character is Pastor Greg, who has his own fumbling, unrequited desire for the newly-widowed Margery, the puppet lady (Jason’s mother). Within all this swirling angst, Jason’s puppet Tyrone appears to develop a consciousness and desires all its own, including a refusal to be removed from Jason's hand, resulting in most of Jason's interactions with the other characters to have a dual character.

It would be easy enough to see Jason’s relationship to the foul-mouthed, violent, sacrilegious, sex-obsessed puppet Tyrone as a displacement of the id onto an external agent. Tyrone stands up to the bullying Timothy. Tyrone expresses Jason’s budding sexual desire for Jessica. Tyrone is witty and articulate. Tyrone makes demands on others. And after Jason tries to suppress Tyrone’s inappropriate public behavior by ripping the puppet’s head off, Tyrone reappears on Jason’s hand in the middle of the night, mended and now with teeth. After that, things start going downhill fast and getting very dark. This is definitely not a children’s puppet show.

Only after a disturbingly violent climax where Jason/Tyrone has succeeded in harming everyone around him, both emotionally and physically, is the puppet (apparently) defeated and destroyed (while still on Jason’s hand--significant quantities of stage blood are involved) and his mother breaks through her own pain and confusion to recognize and try to help her son through his own. The ego regains control over the id (maybe) and there is hope of reintegration.

Or maybe the house of cards built on the hypocrisy of religious ideals practiced by flawed and repressed human beings simply crumbles under its own weight and the mutual victims crawl together out of the wreckage to stagger off together to find their own salvation. Or maybe...

But this is where my interpretation went off on a completely sideways tangent. Because I’m watching a story of a mother trapped in her own guilt and mourning, distracted both by fending off the unwanted advances of an authority figure (Pastor Greg) and failing her saving throw against the less complicated but taboo lust of teenaged Timothy, and in all this unable to recognize that her son (Jason) is gradually slipping off the cliff of sanity. In Jason’s anti-social outbursts (expressed via Tyrone), the unpredictable mood and personality swings (personified by the ongoing conversation between Jason and Tyrone), and ultimately the violence that Jason inflicts on those around him, on himself (in the guise of attempting to “kill” Tyrone), and on his mother when she tries to interfere with his self-mutilation, I saw the helpless despair of a parent trying to cope with the mental illness of a beloved child. A parent who would have been out of her depth even without her own emotional problems. And all this in a context where Jason’s mental illness is viewed as a behavioral problem, or as a religious crisis (the acting-out includes using the trappings of Satanism and provokes Pastor Greg to explore the question of how a Lutheran would perform an exorcism), rather than as a medical issue.

Whether one views the final epilogue, where Tyrone returns in even more demonic form to have the last word, as the author’s final commentary on organized religion, as the persistence of the id, or as the looming specter of a psychological condition that has no easy or immediate treatment, the resolution is ambiguous and open-ended. Nobody in this play is living happily ever after. Good art should be open to multiple and even conflicting interpretations, and although I have my doubts about classifying Hand to God as “entertainment”, I have no trouble classifying it as a significant work of art.

I was uncomfortable about the handling--or rather the non-handling--of one aspect of the plot. There is a nod to the inappropriateness of the sexual relationship between Jason’s mother and his peer Timothy. (It’s never stated what age the younger characters are meant to be, but there’s an implication of high school.) There even seems to be an indication that Pastor Greg feels the need to report it to the police (although this is mixed in with questions about reporting Jason’s violent behavior to the authorities), but in the end it’s clear that the two adults conspire to sweep the matter under the rug and Timothy’s “injury” is treated simply as sexual frustration. In the larger real-world context of church-related sex crimes involving minors, the fact that this reaction seemed to be treated as normal, expected, and not to be given any special condemnation struck a sour note. Perhaps it was meant to be part of the background hypocrisy, but I wasn’t laughing.

After the first act, I had a brief conversation with Lauri about whether the play could be considered to take a feminist view or whether the female characters were all about the male gaze, or what. After the conclusion, it seems to me that these questions don’t really come into play. The point of view is filtered so strongly through the protagonist, that we aren’t so much talking about a “male gaze” as a “Jason gaze”. Although the mother is certainly treated as a complex character with her own concerns, I would find it hard to consider the treatment feminist. There is a definite edge of mocking her for her sexual desires. The character of Jessica, as well, exists almost solely as a foil for Jason’s sexual impulses. She may be a sexually liberated figure, but it’s a liberation for the purpose of being available (though consummated only by proxy through the puppets) and so that she can do the emotional work that Jason is unable to perform for himself.

Steven Boyer carries off the show as Jason/Tyrone, essentially playing a dual role that includes a great deal of physical slapstick. Even in the most serious scenes, there is a constant comedic presence in the broad reaction-expressions of the actors, playing a silent counterpoint to the focal action. In fact, in the early scenes it’s easy to believe one has been set up for a comedy--one with a decidedly adolescent sense of humor. The continuing humor provides leavening as the mood turns darker, delivering a complex emotional punch. The sets were perfectly atmospheric and involved very clever mechanics that seemed to fold space sideways to recombine and shift the walls to switch scenes dynamically.

My overall take: if a disturbing psychological story of repression, desire, and hot puppet sex is your thing, you’ll probably enjoy Hand to God.