JR Foley

It's 1970, D.C. A priest's "wife" -- at odds with her "husband" -- the priest, and communal housemates hold a prayer meeting, speaking in tongues. Dead mad poet-playwright Antonin Artaud suddenly materializes, demanding they assist him in his resurrection -- without God!

An octogenarian is taken to meet the half-sister he denies because she’s the daughter of his father’s girl-friend. He discovers he has five more half-siblings – including one his father got released from reform school to join the Army, and who soon after was killed in Korea.

To hold his besieged city together, an aging saint struggles with a Roman general, the long-lost “wife” he still loves, but especially with himself – the cynic he cannot suppress.

Stripped of civil duties, and having delegated his religious duties, Bishop Augustine of Hippo Regius, Roman Africa, is desperate to do something useful while besieging Vandals threaten the city. The public crisis provokes two personal crises. The refugees mobbing Hippo include Tal, his former mistress, now a nun, and members of the “heretical” Donatista sect thought long suppressed. An incipient Donatista uprising has just been subdued, its leader Gildo, Augustine’s former auxiliary, imprisoned.

Coordinating refugee housing, Augustine is bedeviled by a contest between his orthodox conscience, personified by his remembered mother Monnica, warning against Tal and Gildo, and his philosophic conscience, personified by Cynic (or Cyn), who favors Tal (“She keeps you honest!”) and Gildo (“He asks questions you don’t want to face.”) Cyn drives Augustine through reenactments of Adam and Eve, everyone changing roles, even reliving the agony of his conversion. Monnica applies brakes to this drive, especially with the memory of a transcendent moment imagining heaven together.

When, presenting Tal to his congregation, Augustine is hectored not to “fuck” or the city will fall, he renews his vow of chastity, angering Tal. Meanwhile he is allowed to visit Gildo only if he permits the simmering Donatistas their own church. He begs the emaciated Gildo to rejoin him as auxiliary bishop; but Gildo, refusing, asks: is it possible to do great evil even while sincerely believing it is God’s will?

Cast by Cyn into a climactic “ecstacy” recapitulating the double crises, Augustine spurns Tal, makes love to Monnica, and in horror and remorse dies embracing her.

When, in A.D. 430 in Roman North Africa, Hippo Regius is threatened by a Vandal invasion which drives the Roman army into the city, its aged bishop, Aurelius Augustine, suffers the blowback of two major decisions of his life, one public, one personal. Among the refugees pouring into the city are country Donatistas, devotees of a schismatic Christian sect whose suppression in the cities of North Africa Augustine once led. Also among the refugees, however, is the woman, Tal, mother of his son, whom he put away more than 40 years earlier, before either of them became Christian, in order to advance his career in the Emperor’s court.

Count Boniface, the Roman commander, makes Bishop Augustine de facto civil governor of Hippo, in charge of food distribution and shelter for the refugees. Delegating responsibilities, Augustine has his auxiliary bishop, Gildo, himself a former Donatista converted to the Catholic Church, feed and shelter the country Donatistas flooding the city, but hold off on trying to convert them. His first meeting with Tal after four decades is gentle but awkward; he arranges for her to be housed in the convent adjoining the monastery. All efforts to organize the city are violently disrupted when a Vandal raiding party slaughters refugees outside the city and with a captured Roman catapult hurls their heads over the walls. Among those dismayed is Gildo, beside himself: these are his people. The bombardment causes a panic which Boniface means to put down with his troops, but Augustine persuades him it is an opportunity to unite the refugees to the city by giving their “martyrs” a solemn burial in a place of honor (beneath the Emperor’s box in the stadium). Augustine pleads with the refugees to join him in this ceremony.

At the end of the solemn burial Gildo harangues the city Donatistas to renounce the Catholic Church, return to the True Church of the Martyrs, and prepare to do “blood penance” to make their peace with God before the Vandals kill them. Both Augustine and Boniface, from different perspectives, are infuriated; Augustine thinks Gildo is losing his mind. Boniface, concerned that dissention will imperil city unity, defers for the moment to Augustine’s intent to deal with Gildo as a Church matter. Augustine asks his friend Alypius to investigate whether Gildo’s rebellion is something larger. Meanwhile he visits Tal in the convent, and gives her a small book he once wrote with their son shortly before the son died, age 15. The meeting is interrupted by more trouble from Gildo and a few followers, issuing in a demand for access to the river, outside the walls, to perform baptisms. Boniface again lets Augustine deal with Gildo directly, but warns that dissension will not be tolerated. Gildo confirms that he has rejoined the Donatistas. Augustine strips him of his basilica and authority; Boniface arrests Gildo and remands him to the Citadel. A demonstration demanding Gildo’s release fails when Boniface promises extra rations to all men who demolish a pagan temple to build a new interior wall. For their families’ sake the followers disperse to the temple and only the leader, Primiyaan, is seized.

While Augustine visits Gildo at the Citadel, failing to persuade him to return to the Catholic Church, Boniface bursts in with the news that two soldiers have been slain and Primiyaan freed. He orders Gildo to take him to Primiyaan, only to be informed that a new demonstration of young men is demanding a gate opened so they can march out to martyrdom. Boniface is surprisingly pleased. In the ensuing confrontation Boniface identifies Primiyaan, but before the young man is grabbed Gildo steps in front, begging Boniface to “have done with it” – “martyr” them both and get it over with. Instead they are both seized along with the other young men. Augustine begs for their lives: Boniface has Gildo cast in a cell for life, the others reduced to galley-slaves, but Primiyaan prepared for execution. When Augustine tries to induce Primiyaan to beg God’s mercy, Primiyaan calls him “Whore!” and is garroted.

Utterly defeated, Augustine tells Heraclian to go to the basilica to be consecrated bishop. Boniface tells Augustine the matter of Tal in the nunnery will only feed Donatista efforts to discredit him both as bishop and as civil governor: she must go. She must leave in the morning on a special ship on a confidential mission to Carthage. Told by Augustine it is not his preference but his duty to insist she go, Tal vents her outrage at this repeated abandonment by him. Even more distraught that he is sending her away again, Augustine declares she is his wife forever. Only partly reconciled, Tal gives him a bishop’s pallium (or stole) she has embroidered for him. He is deeply moved. She asks and receives his hands-on blessing, and her parting words are simply: “I am proud of you.” The ship takes her away in the morning, and Augustine, wearing her pallium, grimly sets forth to prepare the city “for the best or for the worst.”

END of “CITIZEN AUGUSTINE,” Cycle One of “The Augustine Bicycle.”

(Cycle Two is “Augustine the Cynic”)

12th century Abbess Heloise is determined to keep alive the mind of her dead philosopher husband, Abelard, by copying his controversial books. But one day she hears that the heretic-hunting monk Bernard of Clairvaux is coming. Terrified, not only for the books but for a young nun she suspects of heresy, Heloise recruits her worldly Prioress, an unreliable old poet-student of Abelard’s, and the ghostly Abelard himself to help her prepare for a showdown she cannot win. (Notwithstanding the ghost, the style of this play is realistic.)

“The Too Many Deaths of Danny C.,” based on an actual case, is a fable of the dark side of Government power. It enacts a near-ritual conducting a dead man, Danny C., to the secrets he has died trying to penetrate. His conductor, who identifies himself as a professional Investigator, presents the motel room scene of Danny C.’s bloody apparent suicide. Danny’s attorney brother Mike challenge’s the coroner’s ruling. His great piece of contrary evidence is the disappearance of the large accordion file Danny has been observed taking everywhere, including this motel room. where the file contained all of Danny’s research into a growing Government scandal. But Mike’s challenge goes nowhere, and the Investigator turns to Danny himself.

The Investigator asks the dead Danny what he has been searching for. Painfully Danny answers: “The Secrets of the Temple.” Dressing up as a Masonic George Washington, the Investigator now recalls Danny to consciousness – and amnesia of his death – and sends him back onto the journey that has brought him so far. (Washington is only the first of several Good Presidents, impersonated by the Investigator, who guide Danny toward his final revelation.)

A girlfriend, Marie, offers Danny partnership in researching and writing a book about a lawsuit to recover millions from the Reagan Justice Department for alleged theft of computer software “enhancements.” They interview Roger and Eva, the inventors of the “enhancements,” who further reveal a strong rumor that the enhanced software has not only been sold to banks and intelligence agencies round the world, but has also had a “back-door” installed to allow the U.S. Government to spy on said banks and agencies. Their source claims to have done the installing. But he’s now in jail in Washington State on drug charges, “framed by the Feds.” Danny flies out to investigate, but ends up in a wild goose chase on the Olympic Peninsula looking for a cassette tape the “installer” claims will exonerate him. All he finds is an assortment of oddballs, including Thomas Jefferson (impersonated by the Investigator), who embraces him warmly as his one-time secretary, Merriwether Lewis. Returning home, Danny nearly drops the book project until Marie brings him new leads. In fact, he has become more and more intrigued, and even agrees reluctantly to compare notes with a “conspiracy theorist.” He reaches a working hypothesis of what’s what.

But Danny’s research has also discovered a number of Mysterious Deaths of other people investigating related Government mysteries, including one of his own informants. He allows his son to move in with his ex-wife, and advises a brother Charlie, temporarily rooming with him, to relocate. Meanwhile his research has broadened and deepened. Although the misadventure on the Olympic Peninsula made him swear off field-work, he has not only worked the phone extensively, at the Investigator’s suggestion he has contacted some of his villains – in particular the Watergate Burglar and former CIA operative who devotes his post-prison career to writing spy thrillers. He also contacts the “back-door” installer’s former partner, a dashing international businessman who, taking Danny under wing, warns him repeatedly not to look too closely into certain things. Danny ignores the advice and eventually outrages the man, but not before the man himself has freaked out Marie with his bizarre and casually violent behavior.

In response, Marie drops Danny from her book project, claiming he has gone too far afield from the software case, and taking on a new, already published writing partner. Cut loose, Danny follows his own leads toward the Secrets of the Temple, which finally take him to the motel, where someone has promised to deliver the ultimate piece of evidence that will prove the software case against the Justice Department. But the one who shows up, in a wheelchair, with super-confident grin, is not the expected witness but a Great dead President, founder of the National Security State, who in the most friendly and efficient manner reveals the Secrets Danny has been seeking, and explains to him the choice he now faces.