The theatre-maker Joel Bray’s new work, Homo Pentecostus, is animated by a series of dichotomies. The first is implicit in the title – Bray’s homosexuality sits in opposition to his Pentecostal upbringing – but others are just as potent.
There’s the duality of Apollo and Dionysus, with the cautious, rational and rule-based on one side of the ideological fence, and the wild, intuitive and sexually liberated on the other. There’s the believer and the non-believer, the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, the sacred and the profane.
Religion and sexuality have long made fractious bedfellows and Homo Pentecostus takes a deep dive not so much into the reasons but the effects of this enmity. Queer people have felt the stigma and shame of religious condemnation most of their lives, and Bray – along with his collaborators, the actor Peter Paltos and the writer and director Emma Valente – asks if there’s any way back, any path to spirituality that celebrates and champions rather than merely tolerates homosexuality.
The piece opens on a prayer meeting – deeply ironic, full of “welcome to Jesus” smiles and gestures of faux-profundity – before sliding into confessional and eventually into a sincere grappling with matters of the spirit. For a while Bray represents the rationalist and non-believer, with Paltos as the spiritualist. But these distinctions break down over the course of the play as the two performers deepen their interrogation of belief, faith and religion.
It’s often very funny, full of awkward biographical detail and playful pillories of religious culture – from the desperately uncool Christian rock favoured by Hillsong to Bray’s mum using glossolalia (speaking in tongues) to get a decent car park. Most of the humour is highly specific, which is precisely why it resonates so universally.
Humour is a means to an end, though. It constantly taps into the ambivalence of queer religious thought, that sense that, for gay men, theology is always entwined with persecution. A hilarious slideshow of sins devolves into paganism and uncontrollable fitting and personal admissions that initially seem sweet, often turn sour in an instant. Homo Pentecostus shows the path in and out of religion as necessarily abrasive and bruising for queer people, even masochistic.
Bray tends to throw a lot of ideas into the pot – as a multidisciplinary artist, he employs dance, speech, audiovisual design and props in a vibrant, unsteady mix – and Homo Pentecostus would benefit from some distillation and clarity of intent. Structurally, it’s a bit of a mess, with some unnecessary repetition and severe pacing issues late in the work. A good 15 minutes could be trimmed from the running time.
There is also, with the oscillation of those dichotomies, a tendency to fall into rhythmic monotony. The work’s tilt into sacred spaces is constantly undermined by a return to a more conversational register, a sort of pricking of the holy bubble. This is amusing for a while but Homo Pentecostus can afford to more fully embrace its own spiritual side, especially when it shifts into topics of profound consequence – like the exodus of Armenian Christians and the desecration of sacred First Nations rites.
Kate Davis’s set, with its slatted back curtain and quotidian white plastic chairs, is deceptively simple – it’s capable of suggesting both the stultifying blandness of a church hall and the seedy anonymity of a sex-on-site venue. Katie Sfetkidis’s responsive, sometimes ingenious, lighting and Marco Cher-Gibard’s subtle sound design aid these transitions at every turn.
Emma Valente’s direction encourages some expansive and engaging performances – there’s something courageous, honest and genial about Bray and Paltos’s rapport, with Bray’s boundless enthusiasm contrasting nicely with Paltos’s more guarded circumspection – but she fails to bring various discursive elements together.
Homo Pentecostus tends to wander away from themes that are only partly examined, and needs a firmer structure and more rigorous dramaturgical focus. It suggests some interesting parallels between the codified rituals of Pentecostalism and the language of gay male desire but abandons this idea early on and doesn’t return to it. There are a few meta-theatrical gestures that land awkwardly.
But it goes some way to describing what a world beyond dichotomies might look like, a world where oppositional forces could conceivably cohere. It imagines the possibility of the spiritual non-believer, the gay Christian. In such siloed times, that feels like progress.
Homo Pentecostus is on at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne until 25 May.
