Most off-Broadway stages don’t look like this: five plush hardwood chairs arranged in front of a wooden rail, behind which sit thirty or so chairs. A synthesizer off to the right. Two screens, right and left, hung above eye level, each sporting an identical photograph of a sunrise and an exhortation to silence your cell phones. A giant wooden cross, lit from behind, hung slightly off center. Big artificial plants posed strategically around stage. Five microphones with cords in their mic stands.
That sounds exactly like the platform at most evangelical churches I’ve attended, but this fall you can see it in in an unlikely place in New York City, too: a production of Lucas Hnath’s play The Christians, being staged at the eminent off-Broadway theater Playwrights’ Horizons.
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