Shouts from a Third Act

from the documentary, City of Joy

This past Sunday The New York Times ran a story about two U.N. human rights investigators killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in March, and the unanswered questions that hover around their murders. Reading the story was a much more visceral–oh no, I get it! experience than it would have been had I not seen the documentary City of Joy at the Dallas International Film Festival. For starters, there’s nothing democratic about the DRC apart from the fact there’s lawlessness and poverty everywhere. Unlike the Democratic Republic of Congo, City of Joy is not a misnomer, but it takes a bit of explaining to get to the JOY part. Stick with me, and you’ll get there.

The DRC is the second largest country in Africa, after Algeria. In the 15th Century, The Kingdom of Kondo in the western Congo was a sophisticated empire with its own aristocracy and a civil service form of government. The country’s problems began in the late 1400s when Portuguese traders discovered a land with many people–strong, disease-resistant natives–who could be turned into slaves by upsetting the current power structure. By the 1600s, the kingdom had disintegrated into anarchy. It’s estimated that 4 million people were forced onto ships at the mouth of the Congo River. That’s only Part 1. In 1876, the Great European “Scramble for Africa” was underway. King Leopold II of Belgium decided he wanted in. Misrepresenting himself as a man with good intentions, he hired explorer Henry Morton Stanley to travel the Congo River Basin and, by 1885, persuaded Western Europe and the U.S. to recognize the Congo as his personal property. He called it the Congo Free State, another misnomer since he looted the country–first of ivory, then of rubber–using atrocious methods. (His private army forced native men into rubber-gatherers by holding their women hostage and cutting off their hands if they didn’t cooperate.) Some humanitarian types in the western world eventually caught on, and the king was forced to turn over his private colony to the Belgian government in 1908. The “Belgian Congo” lasted until 1960. By then, it was abundantly clear that the Congo’s natural resources made it one of the richest places on earth. Its copper was used to make shell casings during WWI. Its uranium was used for the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in WWII. The country was also blessed with diamonds, gold, coal, oil, and countless minerals including one called coltan–today an important component of cell phones.

Part 3–Independence–was predictably disastrous. The Congolese fought for it and drove out the Belgian elite, but there was nobody they could put in place with the skills to govern wisely. Under Belgian rule, the Congolese had been allowed only the most basic of educations.  They didn’t have bragging rights to a single economist, lawyer, engineer or doctor. In short order a military man, Mobutu, took over and ruled the country as a tyrant, milking the country of billions of dollars to finance a “Versailles” life-style. Decades later, in 1997, he was forced out, and so began Part 4, the Great War of Africa. It’s a complicated story, but it began when Rwanda invaded the Congo, furious that Mobutu was sheltering many of the people responsible for the Rwanda genocide three years earlier. From that point on, other African countries jumped into the madness. Ethnic and language differences sparked further violence, but the unabated demand for the Congo’s great natural resources turned it into a powderkeg attached to a lit stick of dynamite. The developed world, including Europe and the U.S., still wanted and needed all those minerals. Rebel groups wanted a piece of the action.

Anarchy, violence, murder, destruction. Somebody’s got to finally say enough, right?

The City of Joy is not the name of an actual city. It’s a small enclave in the eastern Congo inhabited by a changing group of Congolese women. The community has its own hospital–the starting point for every woman and for every good thing that’s happened since it was built.

Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege is a world-renowned gynecologist. He specializes in the treatment of women who have been gang-raped. Given the DRC’s tortured history, it should come as no surprise that rebel forces use rape as a weapon to destroy villages and consolidate power. Congolese women who are raped (but not killed in the process) are shunned by the men in their communities. Without the woman, the family unit breaks down. Children become orphans. Boys become child soliders for rebel groups–willingly or not. In 1999, Dr. Mukwege opened Panzi Hopital and began treating a rape epidemic.

Eve Ensler was visiting the Panzi Hospital in 2007 when she met a patient named Jane. Eve is an American writer, activist and playwright of the Tony-award winning The Vagina Monolgues, and during their chance encounter, Jane told Eve her dream was to build a place where women survivors could live together, heal, transform, and heal. It took a few years, but the City of Joy Leadership Center opened its doors in June 2011. Its founders were Dr. Mukwege, Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler-Deschryver, a women’s rights activist raised in the Congo. Jane Mukunilwa was a member of one of the first graduating classes. Illiterate when she arrived, she was able to read, write and count money within 6 months. Today she’s a key member of the staff.

The film follows the first class of women at the Leadership Center. Today the work continues. Ninety women, 18-30, to a class that lasts six months. Afterwards the determined graduates return to communities in the Congo. As teachers and activists, they are a powerful voice for change. Nothing seems impossible as long as there is hope–and JOY.

The Gospel according to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord, at the Water Tower Theater in Addison, TX

Last week after seeing a new play at the Water Tower Theater in Dallas, I returned home with a great story. Not the greatest story ever told, but something in the runner-up category, a story to delight and surprise, a story to unite sinners and saints in smile.

The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord is a play about “the greatest story ever told,” in that it’s a story about the New Testament–and three rewrites. Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy–all ardent admirers of Jesus of Nazareth–decided they could do a better job writing scripture. That much is true. The fact that they all meet for the first time in purgatory, where they posture, banter and defend their beliefs and reputations, is a product of the playwright’s imagination. I’m not spoiling the fun when I tell you that the illustrious/troubled trio decides to try their hand at writing a consensus gospel, hoping it’s their ticket to move on.

Just to be clear, this is a story about art, not religion–a subject which often seems as divisive  as politics. This story is best enjoyed with an open mind. And sometimes, as I was reminded last week, the story behind a work of art is just as fascinating as the finished piece we’ve gone to see.

Scott Carter is not your typical playwright. His real job keeps him busy and well-fed. A former stand-up comedian turned writer for Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and currently Real Time with Bill Maher, he visited the Water Tower Theatre and talked with the audience one night after the performance. Scott explained that he grew up indifferent to religion (his parents were “social protestants,” looking for the nearest church with nice people whenever they moved to a new neighborhood), but a near-death experience made him inquisitive. This goes back a number of years–almost thirty.

In October 1987, TV journalist Bill Moyers interviews Forrest Church, the senior minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Scott Carter is watching the show. Four months earlier, he spent a week in a NYC hospital for a near-fatal asthma attack. When he got out, he made a deal with the universe that, for the next couple of years, whenever he ran into someone who wanted to talk about religion–any religion–he’d listen.

Forrest Church wasn’t yet 40, but he’d made quite an impression on his congregation and his city. First hired at age 29, he quickly drew in the crowds–100 people in the beginning to 1,000 for a regular Sunday service. Listening intently, Scott Carter, future playwright, first learns about the Jefferson Bible.

Rewind to 1826.  Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and two-term President, dies at 83. He’s also $100,000 in debt, and his heirs have to sell Monticello. They keep some personal items, among them a book they didn’t know he’d written, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s basically a cut-and-paste job straight out of the King James Bible. Jefferson’s stream-lined gospel focuses on Jesus’s message, but omits the miracles and the resurrection. (He objected to anything “contrary to reason” and thought the writers of the New Testament were unreliable narrators.) Years later the Smithsonian buys the book from a great-granddaughter for $500, and, in 1904, by an order of Congress, copies are made to pass out to incoming members of the house and senate. In 1956, Senator Frank Church of Idaho brings home a copy to show to his young son, Forrest. It changes the boy’s life and sets him on a path to the Harvard Divinity School.

“The goal of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.” Forrest Church

Nine years pass. Scott Carter is now writing for TV and relocates from NYC to L.A. Browsing a neighborhood bookstore, he’s surprised to discover a volume by Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord . Dickens wrote the book for his children, never intending for it to be published, but published it was–64 years after his death. Adapted from the Gospel of Luke, Dickens’s version includes the miracles. At this point, Scott Carter thinks, there’s got to be a play here. He continues his research and reads The Gospel According to Jesus by contemporary scholar Stephen Mitchell, because it’s modeled after what Jefferson did. He’s astonished, on page 52, to read a footnote that tells him Tolstoy did the same thing in The Gospel in Brief. (Tolstoy’s study of Christianity was prompted by a mid-life spiritual crisis. His goal was to find a solution to “the problem of life,” and he finds Jesus’s message by rewriting the four gospels into one. Like Jefferson, he leaves out the miracles.) Now Scott thinks, there’s definitely a play here! and begins to write in earnest, even though the addition of a third “character” means it’s going to take him a whole lot longer.

Finally, in 2005, he’s done and gives it to people to read. Everyone hates it: his wife, his lawyer, his agent, his friends. Three years later he pulls it out and looks at it with fresh eyes. He does some more rewriting, and one of his successful comedy friends likes it! Encouraged, he keeps editing. He stages 35 readings and sits through 15 workshop performances. After completing about 200 drafts, the play premiers at a regional theatre in Los Angeles and Scott and cast get a standing ovation. The play moves to other cities–Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas–and on September 30 it will return to the city where the idea began. Bill Moyers is planning to be in the audience for its Off-Broadway debut. He and Scott Carter have become friends.

Now comes my favorite part of the story. After so many years of working on the play, Scott Carter realized something. What seems at first like a random connection between Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy isn’t really. These three new-age gospel writers, born in different eras in different countries, demonstrate the “inevitable march of humanity toward liberty.” Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, who then wrote the Declaration of Independence, and who was serving as the Ambassador to France at the beginning of the French Revolution–of which he approved. Charles Dickens chronicled the French Revolution in his novel A Tale of Two Cities, which Tolstoy read when he was growing up, trying to figure out what he wanted to be. By the time Tolstoy was famous, he had a picture of Dickens–his favorite Christian novelist–in his study. Before Tolstoy died, one of the last letters he wrote was to Mahatma Gandhi. Tolstoy believed the three most important words in the Bible are “Resist not evil.” Gandhi developed those words into a passive-resistance philosophy by which India was liberated. In turn, Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Gandhi, which led to the Civil Rights movement by which a man was elected President of the United States, who, in Jefferson’s day, would have been a slave.