After Tartuffe by Judy Klass
Full-length Play In Verse: This is a re-imagining of the Moliere play Tartuffe, set in a post-apocalyptic future America that has become a Christian Fundamentalist state. (The play was written several years before the 2016 election -- but it feels right for the current dystopian moment.) In the world of this play, the population of our country has been decimated by the super-strain of the Avian Flu – stolen...
Full-length Play In Verse: This is a re-imagining of the Moliere play Tartuffe, set in a post-apocalyptic future America that has become a Christian Fundamentalist state. (The play was written several years before the 2016 election -- but it feels right for the current dystopian moment.) In the world of this play, the population of our country has been decimated by the super-strain of the Avian Flu – stolen from a lab, probably by Fundamentalists. We’re now ruled by Baptist Fundamentalists out of Selma, Alabama.
Oral, a prosperous businessman, opens his home to a former megachurch pastor who has been disgraced in sex scandals: the Reverend Chadwick Pusser. Oral’s son Daniel cannot feel free with Tyler, the guy he loves, with Pusser around, probably planting hidden cameras around the house. Daniel reads SF and alternate histories and suspects that his world is an aberration – a false history. He asks a website called oracle.net for the lost original draft of Moliere’s play Tartuffe – the one that was banned, before Moliere watered the play down. Daniel thinks if he can get a pdf of the original, the universe will shift back to what it should be.
Tyler’s older brother Vaughn is engaged to Daniel’s younger sister Mary-Anne – but Oral decides to force Mary-Anne to marry Reverend Pusser, which horrifies the teenaged girl. Pusser advises Oral about how to control women in his family; he cites Lot – who threw his daughters outside to be gang-raped, whose wife was turned into a pillar of salt for caring about her city, and who had sex with his daughters and fathered their children – as an example of the kind of upright man the Lord smiles on. Doreen, the outspoken housekeeper, and Oral’s second wife, Alma, express themselves very differently, but both of them try to help Mary-Anne avoid the horrendous impending marriage.
Oral won’t listen to Daniel when he speaks up after Reverend Pusser makes a pass at Alma, or to Doreen, who denounces Pusser and tries to get Mary-Anne to stand up for herself. Mary-Anne surreptitiously listens to old rock music from our era, but she is timid – not the rock rebel she wants to be. Alma indulges in old Rodgers and Hammerstein movie musicals, and Doreen is partial to old sitcoms; they use these ancient, forbidden texts to help them interpret their world, as Daniel uses the things he reads on-line.
Daniel himself rejects a pass from Pusser, and tells Oral about it. Pusser claims to have taped footage of Daniel and Tyler having sex, but says he erased it – too painful for Oral to watch. Daniel says Pusser is lying, but comes out to his father, and Oral throws him out of the house. Alma convinces Oral to hide under a table and listen as she pretends to be interested in Pusser. Soon, Pusser’s all over her. Oral confronts him at last. Pusser tells Oral the house is Pusser’s now; Oral has given the preacher Oral’s on-line banking password, and Pusser has dirt on the family. Things don’t go quite as Daniel hopes, in terms of the Oracle, and thwarting Pusser in the way that Moliere’s Tartuffe is thwarted ... Yet ultimately, Daniel is not without hope or a sense of purpose, and in some ways the whole family may be better off.
Since the play is set among a racist white upper-class, I think of the characters as white. But when it was produced in the Fresh Fruit Festival in NYC, people in the cast were from all different backgrounds, and it worked fine.