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The cultured despisers are no doubt having a field day with Craig Lucas's Stranger, currently playing at The Vineyard Theater in New York City. Not only is it a fun, funky play with a Crying Game surprise twist (I'll be spilling the beans, so if you don't want the plot to be spoiled, stop reading), but even better, it serves up everyone's favorite caricature: a born–again Christian.

The play opens on an airplane. A man and a woman (strangers, of course) are flying from the East Coast to the West, and, rather than curling up with a good novel, they spill their life stories to one another. Linda (played by Kyra Sedgwick) is a nervous traveler who is on the run: a few years back, she says, she stole a cool million from her husband and vanished, spending part of the dough on reconstructive surgery and a new social security number ("I wasn't always beautiful" she confesses).

Her interlocutor, Hush (played by David Strathairn), is an ex–con, just out of prison, where he served 15 years. His crime? Kidnapping a 17–year–old girl and keeping her in a trunk for a year.

And why did he do the dastardly deed? Well, because he was schizophrenic. Since boyhood Hush heard voices, which he took to be the voices of God and angels and other supernatural beings, telling him he was special, chosen, had the Lord's work to do. Eventually the voices told him to go to a bar, pick up a chick, lure her home, and murder her: the fate of the world depended on it. But our psychotic hero wasn't sure murder was the way to go, so he kept his young victim prisoner for a year while he tried to figure out if he should follow the voices' command and knock her off.

In the end, he didn't. He went to prison, got medicine for his voices, and found the real Lord, Jesus Christ (through the somewhat odd and coercive efforts of his cell–mate, played, the night I saw the play, by an understudy who stole the show). Now, Bible in hand, Scripture verses and CBA–platitudes on his lips, Hush is on his way to start a new life and do the Lord's work.

Linda, at first, is suspicious. Jesus may be fine for him, but what can he do for her? By the end of the first act, however, she is begging her seatmate to spent one evening with her and help her learn about the blood of the Lamb. How can Hush resist?

The second act opens at Linda's cabin. Midway through the act, we learn the twist: Linda isn't really "Linda" at all. She is Hush's kidnapping victim, and she's been plotting her vengeance for 15 years. Linda ties him up, tosses his medicine (the medicine that keeps the voices at bay), and shouts something along the lines of "Now we'll see who really saved you, Jesus or Prozac."

Her kidnapper, she says, ruined her life, and he owes her. To repay the debt, he should kill her now, put her out of her misery. She wants to be killed, it seems, with a creepy urgency. And in the midst of a convoluted scene, full of not–terribly–coherent dialogue and flashbacks (the conversion, the kidnapping), Hush begins to do just that, wrapping his hands around her neck. But at the last moment, he stops and flees the cabin, declaring that he can't save Linda; only Jesus can. Linda loses it, wails, and climbs into a trunk at the foot of her bed, closing the lid over her head and calling for somebody to help her, to let her out. The curtain falls.

Jesus Saves

This is just the sort of play New York sophisticates love: the plot is unpredictable, the cast is full of beautiful people, and it features an evangelical psychopath. Talk about religion as a crutch! Hush's Jesus, these hip New Yorkers know, can't possibly be any more real than those voices that commanded him to sacrifice a virgin.

Indeed, the woman sitting in front of me said something along those very lines as she and her date made their way out of the theater. "Probably a lot of prisoners fake conversions to get out on parole, and I bet the fundamentalists in Westchester are no saner than this guy." That may even have been what Craig Lucas intended. But then again, maybe not.

The presentation of Christianity in this play is not, after all, that straightforward. Let's not kid ourselves: this is hardly an apologia for orthodox faith. The conversion scene (told, again, in flashback) is a bit indecipherable, and our kidnapper does have a long history of psychosis. He may not be the most stable guy in the pews. (But, then, when did Jesus ever go for the stable types?) The end of the play, however, shows him running free, with his very unsaved victim in chains of her own making. He, it seems, has healed—or has he been healed, by God?—whereas she is really the crazy one, unable to do anything but retreat into a trunk. The characters' last words are telling: she is crying for someone to save her, and he is insisting that only Jesus can do that.

Chesterton it's not, but Stranger is, perhaps willy–nilly, a crystal–clear testimony to the unique saving power of Jesus.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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