The Impossible Dream

How an NYC theater luminary and a Center City holy man brought Quixote — and a cast of pro and homeless actors — to a Broad Street church.

by A.D. Amorosi

Michael T. Regan TILTING AT WINDMILLS: Lear deBessonet and Bill Golderer at Broad Street Ministry.

On a rainy Wednesday on Broad Street, there's a "shadow play" rehearsal being conducted on a makeshift stage with taut bed sheets on wires substituting for scrims.

"The action goes like this," says the director, New York's Lear deBessonet, in a soft voice that manages to echo through the room. "A woman beating a child. A man beating a woman. Three people beating a cripple. A child robbing an old woman."

It's through this interaction of messy human detritus that deBessonet's idealist lead character — the Cervantes hero Quixote — walks.

This theater production is evolving on the Avenue of the Arts, but not at the Merriam or the Kimmel Center or even the Wilma. Though there're several New York City-based actors and local professional performers on board, there're a few ragged, lost characters here who don't quite seem to fit the bill.

That's the point.

Philadelphia's marginalized sorts — homeless, jobless, soulless — found a home at the Broad Street Ministry in the church at 315 S. Broad St. And not just for shelter, prayer and food.

People from disparate social, financial, racial and religious backgrounds — rich and poor, Union Leaguers and Wharton grads, bike messengers, artists and transients — gather together at BSM, as it's referred to, and examine spiritual and social questions as one.

And now, a bunch of them are acting, singing and dancing in their Broad Street home for deBessonet. The New York theater renegade found a home at BSM, too: as an attendee for the last two years and, now, for her site-specific theater extravaganza, Quixote.

Her Quixote (which will open here on May 21) wrestles with the dissonance between the reality of suffering and the character's vision of the world. At BSM, she's found an intersection of art and community, where cutting-edge theater can get to a more truly diverse audience than would ever usually congregate in the regular world of theater.

In quixotic terms, what's more insane: to see the world as it is or as it should be?

Baton Rouge native and former Fundamentalist Christian deBessonet has done this before — create socially poignant, spiritually themed communal works in non-traditional, site-specific spaces.

DeBessonet's shows and subjects under her Stillpoint Productions banner have won acclaim from the likes of The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Though deBessonet's Quixote was created with playwright Lucy Thurber, her closest collaborator in this production is Bill Golderer, BSM's convening minister.

DeBessonet, 28, thinks of Golderer as a principle heroic inspiration. "Golderer's a man who holds a funeral on the steps of City Hall for the homeless who passed away whose names were unknown," she says. "You cannot scare him away with your darkness."

To 39-year-old Golderer, deBessonet is an artist who takes seriously the gifts that people bring to the table. "She didn't need to convince me that she'd find beauty and a way for all heaven to break loose through this production," says Golderer. "She knows God in more profound ways than most clergy I know."

It's not just destiny that brought them to work on her kinetic Quixote with a cast made up of BSM's mix of tony professionals, bohemian hipsters and battered marginalized types. Neither the director nor the minister is didactic or preachy. Both hold social justice and faith's role in a changing planet up to a magnifying glass with everything they do.

Still, you can't help but ponder how an acclaimed director who has the heads of the Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera banging at her door found a nearly abandoned church next to a gravel pit in Philly.

"The first thing I wondered about Lear was how many churches there are on Bolt's bus line between NYC and Philly," says Golderer. "It's not her local parish. But intellectually, spiritually, emotionally — maybe in other ways transcending language — Lear's finding her way to BSM is the least surprising thing ever. She belongs here in ways I can't articulate."

DeBessonet is the star of this story. But Golderer and BSM are her muse and medium. "I wouldn't be doing this show anywhere else," says deBessonet.

A scene, not from Quixote but from a recent Sunday service at BSM, explains how the heroine and hero of our story got together. This sort of holy event is what deBessonet witnessed when her boyfriend, Tom Gray (then a Philadelphia public defender), brought her here two years ago.

The second floor of the 101-year-old Chambers-Wylie Memorial Presbyterian Church building houses a high-ceilinged chapel that, if you look hard enough, you can tell needs a new coat of paint. Since Golderer took control of the spot in 2005 along with getting 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, he's added little things to cover the sins of churchly wear-and-tear.

Cut-paper birds and windmill mobiles obscure most of the peeling paint while an elegant sunny mist streams through dusk's stained glass windows onto the congregation. It's mere coincidence that Tilting at Giants, artist Dayton Castleman's windmill mobiles, will be on display during Quixote. Castleman erected them in 2006. They're always here. Providentially though, they were inspired by Don Quixote and the artist quotes the character's creator, Miguel de Cervantes, at length in his installation's mission statement.

As with all Sundays and all Wednesday "No Barriers" dinners — a nourishing take on communal white-linen dining served by the city's best restaurants — the crowd is mixed. It includes ruddy-faced gents with few teeth in ratty shorts and athletic socks reading their Bibles and elderly African-American women knitting while speaking out loud to themselves — not about crises of faith, but about which stitch comes next. There are tattooed post-teens with groovy eyewear and well-heeled couples, whitely starched with haircuts that cost as much as a good meal.

They listen to civilian congregates reading self-penned texts, full-band-and-choir selections led by dreadlocked Tony Moore, and, on this Sunday, a performance by hard-core folkie John Francis. Other locals — jazzy soul man Mister King, multi-instrumentalist Devin Greenwood — have held center stage. Still, the main attraction is Golderer.

"Where there's you, there's church," says Golderer during his service, before preparing communion (sourdough bread and juice) and crafting God's word for human consumption. Golderer, a sweet-faced man with impossibly thick brown hair goes on, in plain-spoken friendly language, to assuage fears about lousy economies and the hereafter. If anyone can do that, it's Golderer.

He's a minister who gets his shelter's meals catered by Whole Foods and other anonymous local fine-dining donors. (As an aside, he once told me that BSM and Starr Restaurants share a linen provider.)

DeBessonet is at this late April service, too, watching the goings-on from a hard-backed last-row seat — just like she did two years ago when she first caught the White Plains, N.Y.-born Golderer (who now lives on Pine Street with his wife and two kids) in action.

Golderer's community is his philosophy. After this April service, he explains what it is he does at BSM in a fuller sense.

"BSM is not a membership organization," says Golderer. "You can't join. But you can belong. Belonging is something deeper that doesn't require a paper trail or a contract."

He's creating community based on his observations of what goes on with all of Broad Street, and brings God's word to the jawn. It's not about rich helping poor or smart helping ignorant. In Golderer's church and his world — quixotic as it seems — all must be, beyond mere ideal, on an equal playing field. In his church, he'll be damned if they're not hashing it out together.

"People experience fullness of life here — grace and love and forgiveness, loss, betrayal and violence," says Golderer. "We're not a user-friendly church. It requires immense spiritual and emotional grit to participate. Places where we see beauty, hope and resilience, others will see smelly, ill and broken."

After hitting BSM services throughout 2007, deBessonet made her way to the Ministry during non-worship hours. "Once you've been there after services and saw what's gone on — what they do is beautiful and absurd," she says. One scene that stuck with her came in winter of 2007, when, during a service's quiet, ritualistic communion, one of the congregation's homeless regulars was soused.

"An African-American guy who looks like Santa, drunk and reeking of urine, just as the body of Christ was being broken, tripped and spilled his bag of thousands of pennies," she recalls.

The coins made the loudest sound and took five minutes to settle. As communion continued, half of the church was squatting on the floor, helping him collect his money back. That's when the germ for deBessonet's Quixote at BSM took hold.

"One of the gifts of doing church from scratch is you join the articulated needs of the community you are called to serve with what you feel called to do by God," says Golderer. "The programming that goes on at BSM is a 'demonstration' of the gospel. People know Jesus, what he cared about, what he stood for, whom he loved. I think people are pretty put off or bored by the church when it acts like it's enough to believe in him but not put into practice his life's commitments."

One story Golderer tells about "Philadelphia's Most Dangerous Dinner Party" — his nickname for "No Barriers" — revolves around its initial shot in 2007.

Ashley Collinson SWALLOW'D PRIDE: Allison Dilworth's Fall to Flight and Dayton Castleman's Tilting at Giants installations. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"When we had the first one and tried to see how many different folks we could get, one person who attended the church when it was Chambers-Wylie tugged at my sleeve when she saw 400-plus people," says Golderer. "'Preacher, you have to give these people a word,' she said to me, referring to some gospel notion. And I was like, why? This is the word. Look at this crazy assembly of people sharing a meal and stories of their lives."

These stories are what turned deBessonet on after having gone to BSM for a fleeting few months. She made the ministry the driving force for Quixote and its tale of radiant idealism in a morbidly horrific world.

The "misery montages" throughout Quixote that start as "shadow plays" are a mix of puppetry and live human interaction based on what she witnessed and how she processed it. The ensemble beats and thrashes each other through a rich choreography of movement. Her stumbling hero enters.

That's how deBessonet works. She takes reality and mashes it with theatrical fiction and spits it back out. When she did the impoverished-kid musical OLIVER! in 2008 at NYU, she deconstructed Lionel Bart's version of Charles Dickens' wretched streetscape into her own take on global sex trafficking. She remade Bertolt Brecht's gloomy St. Joan of the Stockyards into a bluegrass romp with its lead handing out warm bread by show's end. Throughout Quixote, she's taken all that Broad Street is — the goodness and madness at the church, the sadness and occasional violence on the streets, the heroism of it all — crushed in Cervante's ideas and brought her own beliefs to bear.

DeBessonet's work is fueled by the collision of historical fact and present-day imagination that draws upon odd source materials to open up resonant questions specific to "this human moment."

BSM has all of these things and all of those questions. "This community knows how to mash the reality of suffering right up against unrelenting hope," says deBessonet.

The fact of "Don Q," as deBessonet calls the character, holds sway in the contemporary imagination through what she sees as the urban decay and renewal.

"The insane contradictions of Center City Philadelphia and how they meet at BSM," says deBessonet of haves and have-nots living apart in real life but chatting under one roof at BSM, is a collision of community that never happens in the regular world. "I can't stress how different this church is, how holistic and innovative BSM's approach to community urban renewal is."

If Lear deBessonet knows anything, it's church. And theater. And havoc.

At our first meeting, the Southern beauty is tousled. Until May's Quixote run-throughs at BSM with four "professional" actors and a supporting cast culled from BSM regulars, she's traveling between Philly and her home in Brooklyn.

"I always intended to do what I do despite my weird background," says the director. She laughs a lot, hard and loud, about everything from the Jerusalem Syndrome storyline that filled her first show in Manhattan, 2003's transFIGURES ("these poor people wake up [and] find that they've spent the last two days in togas preaching the word of Moses") to her first third-grade production ("no boys would do my shows, so I got a beau just to get Annie's Daddy Warbucks").

"Baton Rouge is not a theater town, so I can't explain where that obsession came from. Yet by 10 I had a vision of a theater company I thought I would run ... in Russia."

She's unclear as to why Russia and why theater. What wasn't unclear to deBessonet was her devotion to God. At 10 she made the decision to become a Fundamentalist Christian with the deep belief that the Bible is inerrant. It didn't come from her parents.

"My folks are Christian, but not that Christian. Nothing excessive like my beliefs were," she says.

"When I realized I needed to be a Fundamentalist Christian, I came home, said I'd had an encounter with God, that I shouldn't return to school and should probably move into the prison and help prisoners," says deBessonet in one breath. "At age 10 this was my idea of what God wanted me to do."

Her mom told her that prison duty was not an acceptable idea and that perhaps her daughter should start a Christian club in her school.

"Boy, did I feel wildly misunderstood," she says. "Then again, I didn't have my first kiss until I was 22 in New York from a man on the subway I didn't know. This is probably why I came to working out all that I was through theater."

It wasn't until she moved to Manhattan that her devotion to Fundamentalism began to crumble.

"American Christianity where Jesus is your friend with whom you have a relationship leads you to think of God like a human being," she explains. "That made realities like genocide and global atrocities confusing. I couldn't reconcile the horrors of the world with a God who has this interpersonal relationship with each of us and knows the number of hairs each of us has on each of our heads. How could the God who loves me allow people to swim in shit?"

Michael T. Regan

Though no longer Fundamentalist, the still-Christian director found — and finds — correlation between her faith and her work as a director. "For me seeing a show — being a show — is like church. ... The theater is a place where people should be able to examine life's questions."

Space is a crucial part of her process, and her Stillpoint Productions' m.o. has included gambits like staging Death Might Be Your Santa Claus at an abandoned bank next to the NY Stock Exchange ("It was supposed to be at a Bennigan's in Times Square until it closed and boarded up") to discuss the conflict of faith and capitalism. This autumn she'll unleash On the Levee, a Yale Repertory Theatre commission based on the 1927 Mississippi Flood, told through the lens of Broadway classic Show Boat with inspiration from Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke.

She's worked in sacred spaces — transFIGURES at Episcopal Calvary Church in Manhattan, namely. But churches are radically different from what BSM offers.

In her mind, BSM understands that the work of social justice has to begin with people encountering each other in those kinds of spaces. Having dinner together with people across classes and races is revolutionary. That BSM refused to serve "church oatmeal slop" and that its congregation's rich and transiently poor must mix speaks volumes.

The story of her Broad Street play is how this Quixote is appalled by the banality of reality and his existence within it. As a kid he thought he'd grow up to be heroic, a knight maybe. "Plus, now that he's this dull grown-up, he's observing all this injustice and poverty and violence, and feels helpless in the face of it," says deBessonet. "The question becomes whether his decision is insane or awesome." He reads knight stories and gathers pots and pans from his kitchen, makes those his armor, and he'll sally forth to right wrongs. It's awkward and he's a buffoon. But he's a hero.

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"There's one thing that Quixote does that's totally Broad Street," says deBessonet. "Remember, Quixote never meets Dulcinea. She's an idea that energizes him so that he does things in her honor. God is similar in that we haven't seen God but He provokes courage in his honor. In our Quixote, as he sallies through the 'misery montages,' he attempts to stop violence. Sometimes he does the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing — that's so Broad Street, trying to help even if it puts you at risk, even if you screw up."

It's not an idealistic portrayal of what it means to do courageous work. Failure is built into her script as it often is in life. "The message is that it's still worth doing," she says. By the time of deBessonet's third "misery montage," when Quixote aids an old beggar woman no one's ever noticed, she becomes his Dulcinea. "He recognizes her as being his ideal and she dies in his arms being loved," says deBessonet.

The challenge of using homeless people as actors is endless. Her goal is to make this production of the highest professional quality. But the simple factors, like time, get questioned in a show utilizing such a cast. "Professional actors have, say, allotted six-hour slots in which to rehearse, yet — for a person struggling with homelessness — having to show up at the same place and time every day is a nearly impossible task."

DeBessonet has blocked scenes in which actors have never returned because "some serious shit went down in their personal life." She's accepted, as part of Quixote's finished choreography, that the lifter might not be there to do the lifting. "The obstacles are worth overcoming, but we have to be inventively flexible about how to maximize that diversity yet not crumble because a person isn't there."

A few weeks after auditions, the beautiful madness of who came out is still with deBessonet and Golderer as rehearsals are nearing showtime.

There was Barbara, a middle-aged woman struggling with homelessness who wrote monologues from the point of view of a cockroach. When the cathartic moment of her monologue came, she wept "RAID" with palpable intensity. "She made a reference to Diana Ross, and midsentence, told me she'd written her monologue to bring people to Christ," says deBessonet.

Golderer remembers 19-year-old musical theater girls sitting next to homeless men in the auditions. "Once they figure that this won't be their big break with a New York City director, they won't stay." They don't.

Then there's Harold Brown, a smiling Jamaican man with a few teeth missing who likes to dance. He read a poem he wrote about sexually vibrant older women during auditions. "Fantastic," says deBessonet.

Now that Quixote's rehearsals are in full swing, the cast of professional and second leads — like music coordinator Wendy Gaynor — and a dancing singing Greek chorus of BSM regulars like Brown are re-enacting another of Quixote's misery montages. The cast will execute mock beatings and muggings after breaking out of this large circle. Their movement is free but is meant to feel labored — like watching the Stations of the Cross. Or a less bloody version of The Passion of the Christ.

A veteran of performing-arts study abroad program Up With People and a Pottstown native, Gaynor, 32, has acted and danced in everything from dinner theater to large-scale productions. Yet as a member of BSM since its start, she's excited to portray the cross-section of what Broad Street is in reality. "And how deBessonet sees it," she says. "What she sees is possible with theater in this setting and faithful to what this Ministry is — that's thrilling."

Brown, 42, currently living in and out of a house on 17th and Callowhill, has also been at BSM since its start. "I came here for spiritual gifts," says Brown. "I didn't realize they were here to help the homeless until my circumstances changed. I wound up meeting so many people with so many gifts — guys in do-rags singing to the heavens."

Though he writes poetry and takes photographs, dance moves are a leap for Brown. But he acknowledges that life has lots of leaps and that working with a "mixed vegetable" crew and a "quiet-storm flower" director helped him get over any stage fright.

"You have to make leaps to move ahead," says Brown. "There are people at the Ministry that would leap across great divides just to help out. There's homelessness but never hopelessness. That's why I'm doing this show."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Stillpoint Productions' Quixote opens Thu., May 21, and runs through Sun., June 7, at Broad Street Ministry, 315 S. Broad St. Tickets start at $15 and are available at 800-838-3006 or brownpapertickets.com/event/64119.