‘The Matter of Frank Schaefer’ at Curio Theatre Company

In an era when we expect civil rights protests to be packaged for us in real time via Twitter roundups in the local media, or at least scrambled into funny segments for tomorrow’s late-night talk shows, mounting a play about an event just a year after the fact still feels like speed to marvel at in the theater world.

Defrocked, refrocked, and re-defrocked?

As the original world premiere’s materials point out, Schaefer’s story is still unfolding. A 2013 ecclesiastical trial of the United Methodist Church defrocked the Pennsylvania minister for flouting the discipline of the Methodist Church with the “crime” of performing his son’s same-sex wedding in Massachusetts in 2007. He got his robes back on appeal, but another appeal threatens to defrock him again.

Curio Theatre Company is credited with “creating” this play, based on recollections, transcripts, and interviews surrounding the trial. Gay Carducci directs a naturalistic ensemble of six, including Aetna Gallagher, Tina Giovannone, Ken Opdenaker, Colleen Hughes, and an affecting Steve Carpenter as Schaefer’s gay son, Tim.

Despite being at the heart of the story, both in its plot and his physical presence onstage, Kuhn plays the gentle Schaefer, who “wasn’t trying to be an advocate,” with a passive air of discomfited bemusement, watching the consequences of his choice become an unexpected American maelstrom while he sits quietly in the middle of it all.

The idea of “defrocking” itself is a worthy companion to this theme: something done to you that affects the external trappings of your life but can’t move your intentions or your convictions.

Unknown outcomes

According to the play, the ecclesiastical prosecutors took up the case so zealously in hope of discouraging any other clergy members from officiating at any more ceremonies “that celebrate homosexual union,” but they just ended up galvanizing Christian LGBT supporters across the country instead. It seems that nobody in Frank Schaefer can predict the consequences of their actions when it comes to supporting or condemning marriage equality.

Although we can all agree that in the case of Schaefer — and in pretty much any other painful life scenario — “hell hath no fury like a pissed-off, passive-aggressive church lady.”

The action alternates between tearful Schaefer family reenactments and scenes from Schaefer’s trial and its lead-up and aftermath, with the ensemble, all in black shirts, often addressing the audience like a jury. I found myself wondering if this relatively static, talk-heavy format, often repetitive in its dialogue and heavy on the exposition of the case, is rendered more effective than it otherwise would be because the events are so raw and recent.

The script intones words like “discipline,” “love,” “disobedience,” and “conscience” like interwoven mantras. In ten or 20 or 30 years, when (I hope) every U.S. state has written marriage equality into law, would this presentation make for a compelling exploration of the issue?

Prejudice onstage and at home

My own family’s church is still grappling with gender and sexuality prejudices similar to the ones explored in Frank Schaefer and his United Methodist Church. So the script raised more than a few painful moments for me, including classic bits of disingenuous love-the-sinner, hate-the-homosexual-lifestyle-sin rhetoric from Schaefer’s detractors, or the idea that people who want equality should just uproot their lives and go someplace more accepting instead of fighting for change at home.

But the most difficult part for me was seeing the message of acceptance through the play’s Christian lens.

“God is proud of you, so be proud of yourself for who you are,” Schaefer tells his son, who struggles with “abusive, homophobic rhetoric” from his beloved church that almost drives him to suicide.

We need to “stop treating [LGBT people] as second-class Christians,” another character says. Not second-class people: second-class Christians. Especially with a rather treacly finish as the ensemble sings “Amazing Grace,” I wonder how this particular message of inclusiveness feels to someone from a non-Christian or nonreligious background. I’d be thrilled if every house of worship in America embraced LGBT people as a tenet of love and faith. But I squirm when the message of acceptance comes as the modern benediction of any particular version of God instead of as the simple, secular affirmation of every person’s human worth.

But, as they say, the personal is universal, and maybe that’s why the performance succeeds overall. We can’t tackle issues of social justice as one giant jeremiad that encompasses every view, especially in a single play. All we can do is try as many lenses as possible, one at a time, and in that sense, the Christianity-steeped Matter of Frank Schaefer should be an important piece of the American dialogue on marriage equality.