The Christians

Lucas Hnath's The Christians, which has recently been extended through mid-October at Playwrights Horizons, is a compelling play about contemporary evangelical Christianity. It asks a number of interesting and complicated questions about religion as a means to unite and to divide, to connect and to alienate, to sustain and to harm. It also touches on the need for religions to grow and change in order to adapt to the contemporary world, and on altogether more earthly matters: building maintenance, membership numbers, mortgages, money. It is not a perfect play, but it is a very good one, which is worth seeing for the questions it raises, its conception and direction, its strong and committed cast, and its totally excellent megachurchy set.

Joan Marcus

At the start of the play, which begins with a few energetic (if seriously underharmonized) numbers by the church choir, Pastor Paul (an appropriately soothing Andrew Garman) delivers a sermon in celebration of his huge church's final mortgage payment. Professing a spiritual crisis that began when he learned of a boy who gave up his own life to save his sister from a burning building, he announces to his congregants that such a boy should not be damned to Hell because he was not a Christian. Even further, he informs them, he no longer believes in the concept of Hell and feels that no one in his congregation should, either.