Frances, the protagonist of “Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God,” left the evangelical church when she reached adulthood. As with most breakups, no single factor was to blame. But the overriding reason had to do with trauma related to her parents’ rejection of her being gay.
Yet, as she tells a CNN reporter during an interview about her memoir, she can’t quite shake the religion of her youth, and doesn’t even want to. “The singing,” she says. “I loved the singing. I mean, I go to sound baths, et cetera, now, I guess that’s worship. I guess that’s the same thing. But.”
That “but” contains multitudes that hang over Frances, and by the end of the play she’s singing the “creepy-ass hymn” that she told the interviewer about. “The Lord bless you and keep you,” she sings on the edge of the stage, looking a little frightened, a little relieved. It’s a biblical blessing, the hymnal version of Peter Lutkin’s choral setting. Maybe you know it too. Maybe you caught yourself humming it with her, as I did. She sings “Amen,” and the lights go down.
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There’s an inherent theatricality to church, and a furtive spirituality to theater. In form, they’re similar: Everybody crowds into a room, usually sits facing the same direction, and focuses on a central action — at least for a while. Many contemporary theatermakers trace their love of the art to a childhood spent in pews or choir robes. Just this season, “Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God” was joined by shows like “Oh Happy Day!,” “Saturday Church,” “Flaming September,” “Heaux Church” and “Oratorio for Living Things,” all of which draw on, and wrestle with, deep knowledge of church settings and music for their emotional core.
People have been trying to define what’s sacred for most of human history, and to draw lines between the sacred and the secular — to say that you stand on one side or the other. But for me, and I suspect these theatermakers, that line tends to blur when you’re singing, or when you’re in a theater, with chills running up your spine. No wonder the artists who have spent their lives contending with this are the ones prodding audiences to grapple with it, too.
In the years before the pandemic, shows touching on matters of religion — particularly Christianity — were sometimes literal, like Lucas Hnath’s “The Christians,” from 2015, which played on the spatial similarities between theaters and churches for his story of a pastor who stops believing in hell. In 2019, Will Arbery’s play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” dived into the supernatural while plumbing the places of friction between devotion and political fanaticism. And Michael R. Jackson’s audacious musical “A Strange Loop,” which also premiered Off Broadway in 2019, mimicked the form of a gospel play to tell the story of a gay 20-something being ostracized by his religious family — and then verged gleefully on the blasphemous with songs like “Precious Little Dream/AIDS Is God’s Punishment.”
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This fall, another batch of church shows arrived, but they engage with music in a way that creates a distinct twist. It’s a point that is made in “Nobody Can Take You From the Hand of God,” Jen Tullock’s semi-autobiographical solo work (written with Frank Winters and at Playwrights Horizons through Nov. 16): You can walk away from the church, but the songs stay with you.
Similar sentiments are evoked in two downtown shows as well. Like “A Strange Loop,” each is about a young gay Black man who finds himself caught between his religious familyand his queer identity.
Jordan E. Cooper’s “Oh Happy Day!,” running through Sunday at the Public Theater, is a riff on the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark. Cooper plays Keyshawn, whom God has tasked with saving his family from a coming flood. But he really, really doesn’t want to, especially since his father threw him out when Keyshawn wouldn’t renounce being gay. The play also includes gospel music — by the Grammy-winning songwriter and producer Donald Lawrence — that a trio called the Divines perform, coaxing the audience toward celebration and Keyshawn toward fear of the Almighty. (And if you don’t feel like you’re in church right off the bat then it isn’t the show’s fault.)
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“Saturday Church,” whose New York Theater Workshop run recently ended, had a related thread. Its protagonist, Ulysses, is caught between his deep yearning to sing in the choir at his church and the family he finds at the gathering for L.G.B.T.Q. youth on Saturday nights. But the show, adapted from Damon Cardasis’s film (with a book by him and James Ijames) and featuring music by Sia and Honey Dijon, boldly declares that all music is sacred, if you want it to be, and boasts some serious gospel brio.
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“Oh Happy Day!” is set in Laurel, Miss., while “Saturday Church” is a thoroughgoing New York tale, but both are well-versed in Black church traditions, calling on the “congregation” to vocally participate and priding themselves on a bit of flair. And both protagonists — perhaps surprisingly — aren’t quite ready to ditch the idea of God altogether. “Oh Happy Day!” wrestles with the age-old question of evil, and whether God might exist in unlikely places; “Saturday Church” concludes that maybe both kinds of congregations, the Saturday and the Sunday kind, have a place in Ulysses’s life.
In Louisville, Ky., Frances can’t quite ditch her church either, even though she’s tried. She’s also hooked on the choral music performed by the white evangelicals at her home church. Justin Vivian Bond conveyed a similar story during their recent concert residency, “Flaming September,” presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. Between performing Marianne Faithfull’s songs, they talked about their own happy youth singing in church, and reveled in reclaiming a church space for their own kind of sacred music. And in “Heaux Church,” over at Ars Nova through Nov. 21, a former pastor’s kid, Brandon Kyle Goodman, leads “the congregation” — that is, the audience — in a celebration of sexuality and self-acceptance, complete with “storytelling, divine muse and all things heaux-ly.” There’s no mistaking where the template comes from here.
In moments like these, it feels as if artists are working through something fresh when it comes to their relationship to faith. Anger and sadness are there, because of the rejection and abandonment. The church they love left them, not the other way around. Theater is where they found a home, a place to belong — a community and an experience that not only fills a void but also heals a hurt for many.
At times, that search for transcendence can take truly unexpected forms. The composer Heather Christian, a newly named MacArthur Foundation fellow and a 2025-26 resident artist at Signature Theater, grew up Catholic and worked as a cantor in Catholic services into her 30s. She characterizes her work, which uses forms with roots in music associated with ancient Christian religious practice, as creating “space to contemplate the sacred and spiritual in structurally complex works of musical theater.” Though she’s neither a believer nor an atheist now, she has said that her work represents an “active, deep searching for divine guidance” because it’s what she misses from church.
In 2024, Christian’s “Terce: A Practical Breviary” — part of a planned eight-part cycle modeled on the eight major Catholic masses — reimagined the early morning prayers of the church life through the “lens of the divine feminine,” according to a program note. The impetus, she said in an interview, came from “feeling alienated from a creator who did not understand how a woman moves socially through the world and the hardships that come with that.”
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Christian’s “Oratorio for Living Things” has returned to the stage (at Signature Theater through Nov. 23) after running Off Broadway in 2022, during those months when we were beginning to have live events again. Using the form of an oratorio — a choral and orchestral work, usually on religious themes, typically narrative — she tells the story of the whole universe, of time, of humanity and of our smallness in the grand scale of the cosmos.
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It was breathtaking, quite literally, when I saw it in 2022, and it brought me near tears again this fall. I was not the only one. Christian has referred to what “Oratorio” does for the listener — explaining elements of the universe’s mysteries that have moved her, through the music that moves her still — as “a holy vocation.” I think her fellow theatermakers would agree.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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