Guyana Trip

By Richard Zoglin

JONESTOWN EXPRESS by James Reston Jr.

A Jim bare red Jones at light center bulb stage, reveals the slumped Rev. in that familiar straight-backed armchair, legs akimbo, dark glasses shading eyes that gaze off dissolutely into space. The image has become one of our era's most indelible, and the events that sprang from it --Jones' the People's suicide-murder Temple of in 913 Guyana members in of 1978--still cry out for explanation. Jones town Express, which premiered last week at Providence's Trinity Square Repertory Theater, flounders somewhat as it butts against the incomprehensibility of the tragedy. But at a time when dramatists are shying away from "big" social issues (or muddling them, as in Arthur Kopit's End of the World), Jonestown Express exhibits some admirable qualities: a bold conception, provocative ideas and the ability to give those ideas theatrical life.

James Reston Jr., a journalist who chronicled the Jonestown story in his 1981 book Our Father Who Art in Hell, collaborated on the drama with Trinity Artistic Director Adrian Hall. The result is a some times unwieldy melange of docudrama, sociological argument, fragmented monologues and musical interludes. This stylization moves the play closer to Brechtian irony than to Greek tragedy. Jones, played with grim conviction by Richard Kneeland, is not a satanic Pied Piper but a drug-addicted preacher with delusions of grandeur. His followers are not pathetic flotsam but all too recognizable products of the '60s: a rebellious flower child, a medical student avoiding the Army, a socially concerned lawyer. "We were 913 individuals," one proclaims to the audience at the end. The message comes through with clarity and power: it could happen again; it could happen here . --By Richard Zoglin