The Wake

The Guthrie Theater is an eclectic institution chock-full of thespian magic and musical genius. When they hosted Leigh Fondakowski’s The Peoples’ Temple, they threw a little arsenic-laced Kool-Aid into the mix, too. The play centers on The Peoples’ Temple cult led by Pentecostal preacher Jim Jones that ended in a mass suicide in Guyana, South America in the early ’70s. It was written to mark the 25th anniversary of “Jonestown,” as the event is called. Fondakowski based the play on actual interviews with relatives of those who died in Jonestown, journalists, scholars and public officials.

The story is told through testimonials from people caught up in the cult, Jones himself, and his family members. The actors describe Jones’ irresistible charisma and gift for public speaking, and how The Peoples’ Temple gave them a community during a time in which they had none. An unsigned document found at Jonestown after the infamous Kool-Aid incident describes the South American settlement as “a monument to life, to the renewal of the human spirit, broken by capitalism, by a system of exploitation and injustice.” The preacher doesn’t sound so awful at first, and indeed he wasn’t, but he appears to have eventually declined in mental health, as the ridiculous statements that he made later attest to: “I am the only fully Socialist. I am the only fully God.”

The premise of the play is certainly fascinating, but it turns out to be much more attractive on paper than onstage. The plot movement is painfully slow and sometimes sputters to a complete stop, providing numerous opportunities for the audience to lose interest. The actual text of the play likely reads something like a U.S. History book, and at times the only thing differentiating the production from a lecture is the superb singing and acting showcased by the cast. However, the tedious manner of the performance does allow for audience members to contemplate the underlying and rarely discussed issues that The Peoples’ Temple brings to light. The majority of Temple members were African-Americans and almost all members were lower middle-class. The tragedy at Jonestown has inspired countless “drink the Kool-Aid” jokes, but the role that social and economic injustice played in this event is often downplayed or not even mentioned. In the playbill author Leigh Fondakowski asks the questions, “How did this piece of American history become reduced to this? … Can we [as theater artists] use the power of the theater to bring out the nuance and contradiction in this complex story?” In that sense, the play is an unmitigated success.