The gospel music fades and a man in shabby street clothing holding a harmonica states: “I will be your Jesus for the evening.” This is one of Rick Miller’s opening lines, and it’s safe to say that it contains not only the purpose but also the essence of his play Bigger than Jesus.
Co-written by Rick Miller and director Daniel Brooks, this one-man show attempts to capture the myriad faces of Jesus-the historical, religious, political, and commercial figure-and to amalgamate them into a singing, dancing, human puppet. What Miller promises will be “a universal multidimensional mass” is essentially a one-man comedy show, spliced with sobering scenes of Catholic liturgy, which walks a moral line so narrow that it plunges the audience into guilty joy one moment, and horror and shame in the next.
Miller, who also wrote the worldwide hit MacHomer (in which the characters of The Simpsons stomp through Shakespeare’s dramatic tragedy) follows a similar formula in Bigger than Jesus. He inflames an inaccessible, scholarly subject with the hysteria and triviality of pop culture-in a sense, creating a theatrical mock-heroic.
To say that Miller’s play is a satirical attack on Christianity would be to place it on the already-overflowing shelf of anti-fundamentalist works. What Miller attacks is not Christianity itself, but rather, the ways the myths of the Bible (for that’s all he believes they are) have been twisted, tortured, and abused to act as precedent for numerous events in the last two thousand years of human history. Admittedly, this argument, too, has been beaten to death.
What makes Bigger than Jesus truly original, however, is Miller’s ability to transform his commonplace complaint from a philosophically sterile argument to a living, breathing creature, thrusting it in the audience’s lap. It is through an unabating sense of humour that Miller becomes omnipotent and omniscient-becomes our “Jesus for this evening.” Miller says that “in a secular context such as theatre, people of different faiths all share the same space, yet bring with them entirely subjective responses to the Jesus story.” Despite this, Bigger than Jesus succeeds in being a “universal mass,” for what unifies a cynical crowd better than their own spasmodic shrieks of laughter?
Miller is most convincing in his portrayal of what I perceived to be a commercialized 21st-century Jesus. The bold anachronisms that Miller weaves into his Jesus story highlight the effect of commercial technology on the perpetuation of the Jesus figure. A semi-clothed Jesus reads the Lord’s Prayer from an Apple laptop. The Last Supper is reduced to a puppet show with miniature plastic action figures; Bart Simpson and John Lennon are among Miller’s disciples. But through this childish absurdity, Miller conveys his disillusionment with the fact that in today’s world, “Jesus is on boxer shorts and key chains.”
The sudden meaninglessness of sin, guilt, and the Word of God can hardly be questioned, so well-buffered is it by the power of Miller’s mockery: “A thousand years ago, some guy bit into an apple that some naked chick gave him, and the old man in the penalty box called it original sin. What the fuck is that?”
Miller’s Jesus proceeds to update the Commandments with some modern wisdom: “Always lift with your legs… Get along with your co-workers.” At the end of his common-sense sermon, Miller’s Jesus asks, “Any questions? We still have some time…” An appropriate note to end on, as in Miller’s own words, “Those who claim to have answers are both unwise and dangerous.”
