'The People's Temple':
Juneau Empire - Juneau,AK,USA
... "In the '80s, there was a lot of media coverage on cults and the dangers of cults and the Peoples Temple was neatly placed in kind of a slot that really defied ...
Mr. Smith goes to Jonestown: Colman Domingo plays Eugene Smith in Perseverance Theatre's production of "The People's Temple."
When "The People's Temple" opened at the Berkeley Repertory Theater this spring, director Leigh Fondakowski and company had the unenviable task of sorting through a period of history that was still very fresh to the people of the Bay Area.
The play explores the social, cultural and racially inclusive dynamics of The Peoples Temple (the cult name carries no apostrophe), which grew from a band of 10 to 15 Pentecostal families in Indianapolis into a movement of thousands up and down the West Coast.
The congregation was centered in San Francisco, where its leader, Jim Jones, was a charismatic hero to his followers and progressive politicians. Jones and his followers emigrated to Jonestown, Guyana, to build a utopian community, but when outsiders began questioning the group's motives and organization, the dream began to crumble.
A congressional party went to investigate and was murdered on a Jonestown airstrip. On Nov. 18, 1978, 913 died in a mass suicide after drinking Kool-Aid spiked with cyanide.
"Usually a play is seen as something from a distance, to be viewed," Fondakowski said. "There was a very immediate connection when we did the play in Berkeley, and there was still a lot of guilt, a lot of regret.
Peoples Temple was part of that community, and people may have seen things that they didn't think were right, but the group was sort of embraced by the progressive community. It was very interesting to see the play stir up that much feeling."
Now in Juneau, its second stop, "The People's Temple" opens Friday, Sept. 2, at Perseverance Theatre. The play stars an ensemble cast of 12, many from the original production. Juneau actor Ed Christian is the lone local actor.
Fondakowski and some of her co-writers will stay in town during its entire run, shaping the text and adding and subtracting text from hundreds of hours of interviews they conducted with Jonestown survivors.
"For us as writers, it was a great relief to leave Berkeley," Fondakowski said. "It was exciting to have the play be so charged, where everyone was talking about it, but there was also a lot of pressure to be making this play.
"This community is looking at it as a time in history," she said. "They don't know the individuals. They don't know someone who lost their kids."
Christian (reporter Phil Tracy, Congressman Leo Ryan) was a senior at the University of Texas in Austin in 1978. He remembers the sudden media coverage of the Jonestown Massacre, the murder of Ryan on the airstrip, as well as the assassinations, nine days later, of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk.
"It was such a confusing story," Christian said. "Was it suicide or not suicide? How did it all fit together and why?"
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"I think a lot of people were left with a generalized Kool-Aid-in-the-jungle picture of it," he said. "In the '80s, there was a lot of media coverage on cults and the dangers of cults and the Peoples Temple was neatly placed in kind of a slot that really defied explanation."
The play runs two hours and 30 to 40 minutes, with an intermission. The first act follows the group's evolution into a giant movement in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and West Coast points in between. The second act chronicles their migration to Guyana and the group's eventual collapse.
There is no re-enactment of the mass suicide.
At the Berkeley Rep, the play was performed on a 600-seat proscenium stage. Most of the last week's laborious technical rehearsals have dealt with producing the performance in a more intimate (150-seat) setting.
The stage, by scenic designer Sarah L. Lambert, is almost bare.
"A lot of the press from Berkeley were calling it a morgue, and that was a little disturbing," Fondakowski said. "It was supposed to be an archive. These archival boxes are part of what drives the action forward. When a character is dead, their costume piece or their text comes out of the box. And that's how the story unfolds."
Fondakowski was nominated for a co-screenwriter Emmy when "The Laramie Project," a play about the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard, was adapted for HBO. She was the head writer and associate director of the play, which was developed by the Tectonic Theatre Project. She's worked with that company since 1995.
Fondakowksi will return to Juneau this spring to direct "The Laramie Project" at Perseverance. San Francisco's 12-year-old Z Space Studio, a center for new play development, commissioned "The People's Temple" after seeing "The Laramie Project."
"I was really hesitant," Fondakowski said. "I had done 'Laramie Project' for two years and that was a very intense experience. It was a lot of grief and a lot of sadness, and I didn't know how I was going to go from one tragedy to another tragedy of a different magnitude."
She kept an open mind and met with some of the survivors.
"I really had similar stereotypes to what the rest of the country had," she said. "I didn't know it was a social movement. I didn't know it was a cultural movement. I thought it was a religious movement. I just became struck by why I didn't know these things. It's a question of why history gets locked in only one version of the truth."
Fondakowski also sat down with Stephan Jones, Jim Jones' only living biological son.
"He brought out a collection of photographs, and he said, 'I want you to see these,'" Fondakowski said. "These were the only candid photos he had of his father. He was always posing for the camera.
"My idea of Jim Jones was kind of blown away in the very beginning," she said. "I really approached the memories that some of the survivors have of him and how he haunts them, especially his biological son. And how (his son) struggled with the fact that he has those genes, he has this psychic and spiritual legacy."
Fondakowski and her co-writers in the Tectonic Theatre Project have spent four years researching and writing the play. They drew from the California Historical Society's Peoples Temple Collection archive and interviewed dozens of survivors. Convincing former members of the congregation to talk to them was a gradual process.
Connecting to the African-American community was especially difficult. Of the people who died in Jonestown, 75 to 80 percent were black, Fondakowski said.
"The survivors have been through a lot of trauma and they've been basically in the closet, very hidden about their past for fear of being stigmatized," Fondakowski said. "A lot of them had lost touch with each other, and the play has facilitated a lot of coming together of that group. I feel very good about that."
• Korry Keeker can be reached at
[email protected]
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