After a four-year hiatus, Gulfport’s annual Theatre Walk was back in business, this year setting up non-ambulatory shop on the stage of the art district’s Art Village Courtyard. The actors were heading into their final dress rehearsal last Thursday of Smitings, a six-play series of Bible reinterpretations by Christopher Buehlman. Everything was going as planned. That is, until someone got (gasp!) offended.
Hours before the premiere, Three Muses & A Fool Productions had to exit stage right, into an alley some hundred yards away. Mark Pohlman, owner and stage manager of Java Nirvana Café, where the actors were originally scheduled to perform, says local patrons and shop owners found the content of Smitings unsuitable for a family gathering-place.
The production features six ironically Bible-themed one-acts with titles like “Goliath and His Heartbreakingly Ugly Little Dog” and “Jesus and the Tiny, Tiny Man," separated by introductory monologues delivered by a prostitute allegedly there for her community service.
The content tends toward raciness when Joan of Arc schizophrenically indulges her repressed sexuality in a French army bunker, but director Ciara Carinci says Pohlman “never asked what the content was going to be,” and allowed his venue to be advertised on Theatre Walk posters for weeks before the group came to rehearse onstage.
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2010.