Portfolio at NYU

Posted 05.01.07
An Evangelical Halloween
In a Hell House, demon actors try to scare the Jesus into you.

By Conor Renier Friedersdorf

Rather than visit a haunted house this Halloween, many hundreds of New Yorkers are paying $25 a ticket for the evangelical Christian alternative.

In a Hell House, visitors are led past scenes of evangelical sin and its hellish consequences. Actors portray a drugged-up teen at a rave getting gang raped, a high school cheerleader having a bloody abortion and a gay man getting married, dying of AIDS and being sucked into hell by demons.

Scores of evangelical communities stage these fire-and-brimstone theatrics in Midwest church basements and Southern community centers, hoping to scare the Jesus into sinners and nonbelievers.

"I appreciate you having a desire to shake your city," says Pastor Keenan Roberts, who sells $300 Hell House kits that include a script for actors, stage directions and a video that praises those who stage Hell Houses. "I appreciate that you have the desire to communicate the truth of God's word."

In New York City, where evangelical culture is weak, a majority of residents are less likely to protest raves, abortion rights or gay marriage than evangelicals themselves. Nevertheless an authentic Hell House built by an experimental theater group is attracting rave reviews from New York publications.

And socially liberal urbanites are lining up to see actors perform from a script meant to convince them that they are hell-bound.

Ironic, isn't it? Or is it?

That's the most common question as paying customers step through black curtains to begin a hellish tour led by a demon guide and narrator. Your browser may not support display of this image.

"I've never been to one of these before so I don't know how ironic they're going to get with this whole thing," said John Stevens, a 33-year-old New Yorker who saw the Hell House advertised in The Onion and felt sufficiently curious to wait in the rain for a ticket.

Attendees are drawn by an evangelical culture that seems strange, distant and increasingly influential �" one worth learning about, many Hell House patrons said, though at arm's length.

"I expect it to be done straight, but I will be experiencing it with irony," said Todd Bresnick, a thirty-something attending the show.

Inside the performance's tone is anything but ironic.

"This is the product of young love," a demon intones as 15 audience members gather a few feet from a hospital curtain.

The demon yanks it back to reveal a splay-legged cheerleader on a gurney, blood-covered walls and floors, a doctor with an industrial strength vacuum cleaner and nurses aiding the abortion.

"It's only a medical procedure," the demon says sarcastically, and proceeds to hold aloft a piece of mangled meat meant to resemble an aborted fetus.

The performance mostly keeps to the script written by Pastor Roberts, as well as its stage directions: "Do your very best to buy or purchase a meat product that will resemble as much as possible pieces of a baby that are being placed in a glass bowl for all to see," his Hell House kit advises.

In a scene that portrays a trench-coated teenager murdering his teacher, the demon tells the audience that "I gave Harry his first taste of the occult when he read Goose Bumps. Then he moved on to Harry Potter."Your browser may not support display of this image.

In a gay wedding scene, the demon acts as minister.

"Do you solemnly swear to never believe that you are normal and that God made you this way?" he says.

Later when the now sore-ridden groom lies dying of AIDS, the demon intones, "I told Steve he was born gay. What kind of fool would actually believe that?"

Does Les Freres Corbusier, the theater group behind the production, sympathize with evangelical beliefs? A small piece of paper taped next to the box office that provides the most explicit statement of the theater group's motives.

"This authentic depiction of a Hell House is meant to educate and inform about a particular religious movement, not to endorse any specific ideology," it says.

Nevertheless, visitors sometimes questioned whether the Hell House isn't actually being run by evangelicals.

"I thought it would be a little bit more satirical. I expected all this ironic distance, but there wasn't any, so I'm leaving a bit shaken," said Corey Kosack. "There was no tell."

He gathered his thoughts.

"It wouldn't surprise me if this was an actual Christian group, pretending to be ironically-pretending to be serious," he said. "What better way to get people here in New York to see this."

Diana Torres, 24, reacted just as Pastor Roberts might have hoped.

"I think it made me feel bad for all my sins," she said. "I'm not an evangelical Christian, but I've been confirmed. Even though parts were funny it made me feel bad."

As surely as some audience members walked rapt through the performance and felt touched by it afterwards, even more laughed �" some ironically, some uncomfortably �" during even the most intense moments.Your browser may not support display of this image.

"The production was so authentic, but the crowd wasn't," said Stephan Daschalides, a gay man who laughed during the gay marriage scene but felt freaked out by the abortion. "The crowd really affects your experience. I'm sure all of us New Yorkers represented the sins that happened in every room."

A few regret attending.

"I'm not glad I came and I'm not glad I paid one sent to support it," said an older woman who wouldn't give her name. A friend called her Jenny as she rushed from the theater.

"It was ludicrous," said Linda, the friend. "But there's a whole part of the country that doesn't think it's ludicrous."

In the last room in the Hell House--the one right after audience members are asked to recite a prayer accepting Jesus into their lives--everyone attends a "Christian hoedown" led by a Christian rock band so realistic that several audience members believed them to be duped by the theater group into performing.

A Christian comedian acts as emcee.

"Who was the greatest female financier in the Bible?" the comedian asked.

"The Pharaoh's daughter," he answered. "She went down to the banks of the Nile and pulled out a little prophet."

On the banks of the East River, near a rave club and a gay enclave, a non-profit theater group staged a Hell House. It sold out all month long.