Both theatre and God have been proclaimed to be dead or dying for longer than most can remember. For God, it was Nietzsche, Derrida and Altizer; the theatre, Grotowski and Kiesler. But theatre and God remain alive and breathing, changed certainly from what they once were, but still beating hearts of communities and ecosystems.
After God, the latest play by Stuart McKenzie, follows his quest to grapple with questions of faith and certainty, travelling the world asking a wide variety of people about their pursuit of chasing after God.
After God is a piece of verbatim theatre, and one in a long line of pieces in Aotearoa New Zealand.
What is verbatim theatre?
Verbatim theatre, a term first coined by Derek Paget in 1987, is theatre made entirely from real words spoken by real people. Interviews, transcripts and communications are collected, edited and performed to present to an audience a factual encounter with an event or topic.
The first verbatim play in Aotearoa, conveniently titled Verbatim (1993), co-created by William Brandt and Miranda Harcourt, took interviews with prisoners convicted of murder, the murderers’ families and the families of their victims, and created a work for them, with Harcourt travelling to each of Aotearoa’s prisons to perform.
Harcourt, After God’s co-director and McKenzie’s life and creative partner, has long worked with McKenzie on verbatim works, ranging from works about issues and events such as Transmission: Beta (2024), and works based on their own family history, such as Biography of My Skin (2009).
Like many of these works, After God returns to a sense of “personal” verbatim for McKenzie. It is evident throughout that the play is something larger than a performance for him; it is a way of making sense of his life at the moment, trying to get answers to questions he has been pondering for almost 40 years.
After God’s text is made from structured interviews, impromptu conversations, theological lectures and McKenzie’s own thoughts.
The question I am left grappling with, one that lingers through all of McKenzie’s verbatim work that I’ve seen, is the idea of “truth”.
Verbatim theatre purports to tell its story through the “real” words of “real” people – but can the truth ever be real, or at least objective, when mitigated through transcriptions and editing, and then embodied by performers? I’m not sure.
Stephen A’Court/Circa
There are moments of ethical dubiousness, too, where McKenzie speaks to taxi drivers and hotel staff members. Were these conversations recorded, or remembered? There is a level of inherent artifice to the theatre, but the label of “A Verbatim Play” quashes these questions. What the audience is being presented must inherently be the truth if we’re presented with this label.
This play is perhaps one version of the truth. Perhaps McKenzie is working in a space closer to “Theatre of the Real”, questioning what “authentic” representation means and exploring how subjectivity is performed on stage.
A play about questioning
After God is very well-performed and conceived.
At the play’s centre is Andrew Patterson, who plays McKenzie (McKenzie is sometimes briefly played by the other actors), as interviewer, narrator and sceptic.
Patterson gives a good performance as an observer, an omnipresent guide in and out of the theological world.
McKenzie’s journey is shaped by his relationship to Mark C Taylor, a renowned cultural critic and philosopher based at Columbia University, who engages with the deep philosophical questions through Zoom calls, lectures and tangential conversations. Michael Hurst plays Taylor with an oozing charisma and a deep sense of understanding – or trying to understand – the unknowable.
Stephen A’Court/Circa
Kali Kopae, Roy Clark and Tara Canton each play every other role, ranging from singing nuns to other eminent theologians. These cast members bring a needed freshness to the play, with each character being wholly distinctive, morphing into each role through their bodies and voice, without changing costumes.
Their performances make this play work; they are the pit-stops on this journey.
The play looks great, but it is sometimes a little lost in its own space. The audio-visual work, definitions, names and locations projected onto hanging pieces of cloth provide a lot for the audience, but if you’re not sitting in the middle, it is hard to read and take in the much-needed context for some of the deeper theology meanings and scholars.
Ultimately, After God is as much a play about grief and mourning as it is about questioning.
While it left me with many questions about the meaning of truth and authenticity in a world seemingly devoid of such, it also made me joyful that we can still come together and think and debate.
After the show I grappled with these questions with my fellow audience members, and perhaps that is the point.
I would be interested to see how the season progresses, and whether the heavy theological discourse will land with audiences. But I am also excited that the McKenzie-Harcourt verbatim theatre dynasty continues. What will come after After God? I pray we find out soon.
After God, plays at Circa Theatre, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, until November 14.
