Peter, Paul and John look down from the stained-glass windows onto “3 Christs,” a play staged in the sanctuary of Judson Memorial Church. And boy, have these saints got some preaching to do.
Peculiar Works, a company that stages site-specific productions throughout Greenwich Village, based this piece on an infamous case study in social psychology. In a state hospital in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 1959, Dr. Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics, each claiming to be Jesus Christ.
Rokeach (Christopher Hurt) hoped that mutual confrontation might lessen their obsessions. Certainly it would provide useful data about psychotic habits of mind and the limits of identity.
“My main purpose is scientific,” he insists in the play’s opening scene.
A nurse (Catherine Porter) asks, “An experiment?”
He replies, “An investigation.”
Don’t be too sure. The script, adapted by S. M. Dale and Barry Rowell from Rokeach’s published study, condenses this two-year trial into 100 minutes. Though Rokeach is intent on aiding the men, he sometimes seems more interested in what information a new factor (a placebo, a spot of transvestitism) will yield. Nothing improves the men’s condition.
That the men persist in their delusions is a problem dramatically. Much of the play exists in a kind of stasis, as the Christs (Donald Warfield, Arthur Aulisi and Daryl Lathon) shuffle and twitch and fabulate. This invites a nasty kind of voyeurism, even the occasional snicker.
Maybe this is deliberate, meant to scold us for our callousness toward the mentally ill. But where’s the line between implicating the audience and exploiting insanity for entertainment? The play acknowledges this predicament when one of the Christs remarks, “Why pay to see a comedy, when we have a comedy right here?”
But “3 Christs” is more tragedy than comedy, and the tragedy is Rokeach’s. Mr. Hurt does a fine job of making him both well-meaning and hubristic. For most of the play, he veers from one ethically dubious stance to another. Under Kelly O’Donnell’s direction, he introduces each adjustment in protocol with the flourish of a magician.
Finally, he has to acknowledge his own delusions, like his belief that he could treat these men so cavalierly in the name of scientific inquiry. They believed they were God. So, it seems, did their doctor.