James McLindon
Title of Play
Faith
Date and Place of Reading
June 30, 2014
Manhattan Theatre Club Creative Center
New York City
How to Access the Play
Director
Lewis Magruder
Cast
Lisa Birnbaum–Theresa
Patricia Cancio–Stage Directions
Andrew MacLarty–Simon
Grayson Powell–Owen
Jenny Strassburg–The Harbinger
Playwright's Website
About the Playwright
James McLindon’s When We Get Good Again won the Playhouse on the Square’s New Works @ The Works competition and premiered there in Memphis, winning an Ostrander Theatre Award for Best Original Script. Comes a Faery, was developed at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and premiered at the New Ohio. Salvation was premiered by Hudson Stage Company, directed by Giovanna Sardelli, to critical acclaim in The New York Times. Faith premiered at Local Theatre Company in Boulder, Colorado. Distant Music has enjoyed eight productions around the country,
most recently at the Stoneham Theatre in Boston. Mr. McLindon’s plays have been developed and/or produced at such theaters as the Broad Horizons Theatre Company, Abingdon, hotINK Festival, Irish Repertory, Lark Play Development Center, Samuel French Ten-Minute Play Festival, PlayPenn, Victory Gardens, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Lyric Stage, Boston Playwrights Theatre, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, and Telluride Playwrights Festival. His plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing, Smith & Kraus, Brooklyn Publishing, Applause Books, Next Stage Press, and Original Works Publishing.
About the Play
All that Simon, a young boy, wants for Christmas is the stigmata, and to be God’s prophet. If prayer and sacrifice have anything to do with it, Simon is well on his way. Theresa, his mother, prefers that he go to the mall and let Walmart tell him what he wants for Christmas. Simon does visit the mall or, more exactly, the Walmart parking lot, as it is the closest approximation to a desert for wandering in that he can find in his snow-swept upstate New York. And it comes to pass that, there, in the parking lot, Simon sees the Harbinger, a visitor to him from the heavens and, no doubt, God’s emissary to him and to the earth, hovering just above the halogen glow of the parking lot lights. His prayers have been answered.
Or have they?
Faith considers the quintessentially egocentric origins of fanaticism, a timely subject in a world where fanatics, domestic and foreign, seem to threaten our nation, if not our whole civilization. Faith places its subject matter in an immediate, rather than a remote, setting. That is, the play does not consider how fanaticism develops in a rightwing chat group on the dark web or an Islamic madras, but rather in a suburban American home.