HAVERFORD (PA)
America [New York NY]
April 4, 2025
By Elise L. Ryan
In 2018, Jay Sefton was writing the story of his life in op-eds and legal documents.
A survivor of sexual abuse by clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Sefton advocated for a bill stalled in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives that would allow a “lookback window” on abuse cases that had passed the statute of limitations so that alleged perpetrators could be tried in a court of law. He was also left frustrated by the archdiocese’s Independent Reconciliation and Reparations Program (I.R.R.P.). (The I.R.R.P. is promoted as an opportunity for survivors to tell their story to an independent audience and receive both personal acknowledgment and financial compensation.)
With no satisfactory response from the Catholic Church or the Pennsylvania state government, Sefton decided to keep writing his story, but this time through storytelling and theater. As a professional actor who had spent 13 years living and working in Los Angeles, he knew, “There’s something about the theater, you start to get it into the body, you start to get it in front of a live audience and something different happens.”
That something different is Sefton’s one-person show “Unreconciled,” an extraordinary 80-minute performance in which Sefton plays himself and a bevy of characters, including his father, his school friends, his inner critic and a priest since laicized by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia due to credible allegations of sexual abuse of a minor.
Set in Haverford, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, the show manages a double gut-punch of high-pitched humor and horror. With precision of language, gesture and timing, Sefton’s performance manages the remarkable feat of showing what a journey of healing can look like.
“Unreconciled” looks abuse, disregard and callousness in the eye and witnesses instead to radical kindness, a persistent belief in justice and a compassionate worldview that admits to human complexity and the possibility that love in action can be salvific.
Sefton co-wrote the script with Mark Basquill, whom he initially met when Basquill emailed him after reading Sefton’s 2021 TribLive editorial on the I.R.R.P. process. Basquill, who testified in the grand jury hearing on clerical abuse in Pennsylvania, published in 2018, also considers that process to be a “betrayal to what I believe the mission of the church was supposed to be.”
Having written several plays exploring his own family trauma, Basquill agreed to co-write a script based on Sefton’s childhood experiences. What followed was a series of workshop performances at Chester Theatre Company in Massachusetts. Geraldine Hughes, who had written and performed her own solo show dealing with trauma and resilience, “Belfast Blues,” and knew Sefton from performance workshops, took on the director/producer role for the show.
Having performed “Unreconciled”in New York and in Ireland, Sefton began a cross-country tour of the show at barebones productions in Pittsburgh, where I saw his performance. Pittsburgh is another Pennsylvania city with a still-present Catholic culture and another damning grand jury report on clerical abuse. (From Pittsburgh, the show travelled to Wilmington, N.C., and Los Angeles and will be seen April 5 at the Perelman Center in Philadelphia. This summer and fall it will play in two theaters in Massachusetts.)
Initially drawn to the project by the script and conversations with Hughes, Patrick Jordan, the artistic director at barebones productions, committed to the show after seeing clips of Sefton’s performance. He said he was “blown away” by his acting and his ability to “seamlessly move between characters.”
In 22 years of running barebones, Jordan had never mounted a solo show. While acknowledging the seriousness of the topic, Jordan points to the nerve and energy embedded in the script: “It’s not a dirge. It’s not a lecture,” he said. “It’s not a therapy session. It’s a beautiful piece of theater.”
When Sefton appears onstage, he is dressed in an unbuttoned flannel shirt over a gray T-shirt with jeans and work boots. He’s playing himself, clearly at a critical juncture in his own life. Suddenly, Sefton’s body is possessed of a related but distinct energy, distilled into the hard drag on a cigarette: We meet his father, Joe Sefton, who introduces himself, his son and the play (and asks us to take a moment to unwrap all our hard candy now).
As the show unfurls, Sefton’s transformations dazzle, and the pacing of the production is as precisely mapped as the best poetry. There is exactly enough time and rhythm and stress to move us all through an entire world of story, following young Jay through an eighth-grade year marked by crushes, Villanova basketball’s championship run, being cast as Jesus in his school’s Passion play, and being targeted and abused by the parish priest who wrote and directed the school play.
The show features precise transitions in the script’s language and Sefton’s fearless bodily engagement with each character. Hughes’s ability as a director was also on display; as Sefton told me in our conversation, she was able “to slow down a moment and kind of curl up inside it.” The show also performs Jay’s adulthood struggles with alcoholism, journey into sobriety and encounter with the lawyers in the I.R.R.P. process.
Sefton’s transformations between characters, often with barely a beat separating the shifts, indicate an open-hearted honesty in his performance. In the audience, I felt cared for and entirely exposed, accompanied and within the privacy of my own experience. I was invited into “an entire world of knowing,” as Hughes in an interview describes the use of multiple characters in the show.
“[Abuse] doesn’t happen to just the child,” Hughes continued. “It happens to everybody—all the characters in the play.” From Sefton’s perspective, these are characters he loves playing; their appearance onstage through the medium of his voice and body are part of the joy and puzzle of theater. From both a personal and storytelling perspective, Sefton holds that multiple characters provide “an opportunity to look at it from different sides and see the effect.”
It is not easy to accommodate all the sides. We hear the priest’s point of view. We watch as one character says she does not believe Jay’s side of the story. Yet there they all are because there they all were, all managing some form of their own pain and warped point of view. Seeing the ripple effect of abuse and lies, I remember Basquill’s incredulity at the Catholic Church’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the widespread effects of trauma: “The church has been around for 2,000 years. They should have a far better understanding of trans-generational impacts of trauma than they apparently do.”
The setting is spare in “Unreconciled,” with a wooden-back chair and a small side table as the only onstage furniture. A projection screen hangs above that broadcasts clips from Philadelphia Eagles’ games, a Villanova basketball game, and—most critically—the recording of the grade-school Passion play in which the young Jay Sefton played Jesus.
When I ask Sefton what it’s like to perform his experience and look up at the screen and see himself as an eighth-grader, he admits: “It all seems so ridiculous! What were they doing?!” Then, reflecting on the fact that he’s still performing for an audience, he laughs and exclaims: “What am I doing?!” The particular graininess of the VHS recording speaks not only to an era but to anyone who has suffered through watching a school production taped by a doting family member.
During a climactic scene, we watch the school play projection that shows young Jay as Jesus on the cross, while the adult Jay stands on the chair with arms outstretched. Just prior to this scene, we’ve witnessed the abuse. As the Passion play proceeds, Sefton inhabits his younger self and narrates what he was thinking as he played Jesus: Why doesn’t he have armpit hair yet? Is everyone laughing at his hairless body? His buddies who hung him on this cross played a practical joke that left one arm weirdly bent. He eagerly awaits being taken down from the cross and laid into the arms of Mary, played by the most attractive girl in school. She’ll have to notice him then!
It is startling to see the grade schoolers’ production and to wrap your mind around the reality that the boy on the screen is the man in front of you. You know something about what’s been happening to him when he was 13 and you know that it’s taken him the intervening decades to heal from the abuse; to heal and to be present now, in this theater. Yet Sefton is also voicing all the melodramatic agony of adolescence. That collapse of time and the decision to stage this moment with performance, video and character creates a gravitational force that is undeniable in the theater.
Sefton’s storytelling hospitality flows from his belief in the theater and his work as a licensed mental health counselor. His co-writer, Basquill, is himself a clinical psychologist. Both Basquill and Sefton agree that they could write “Unreconciled” only because they are far along in their individual healing journeys. There is a “commitment to move from anger and disappointment to true artistry,” Basquill tells me.
For Basquill, therapy and writing perform a subtle dance. Writing “allows me to listen with non-judgment,” Basquill says of the effect writing produces on his practice as a clinical psychologist.
Basquill, Sefton and Hughes, believe that their survival of the traumas of their lives results from the deep compassion they have encountered in kind and caring communities. When they speak of one another, their voices soften and round at the edges. Of her relationship with Sefton, Hughes names it “as good of a friendship as one could hope for.” Basquill believes that “compassion is the cure,” though it is a difficult road to walk.
After the show at barebones, I see people with tears in their eyes giving a firm head nod toward Sefton as they go. I watch as Sefton, patient and eager to talk with anyone, listens as people shake his hand and tell him how this show will be with them for a long time.
At its beating heart, “Unreconciled”is a show that—as Hughes gently put it—”flies in the face of the unkindness of what happened.”
When I leave the theater, I walk past the now-closed Good Shepherd Church, looking up at the low-slung sliver of moon suspended alongside the plumes of steam from U.S. Steel’s Braddock plant. The mill’s flame blares into the darkness. A Pittsburgh scene: a Catholic Church built up against the mill, the two eternal flames of so many lives. Sefton tells me, “I do see the theater as a particular kind of sacred space,” and for a moment in the darkness, I feel all the lives around me. For once, it isn’t so difficult to believe that compassion is large and present and that the fire of our stories will light our way back to one another, reconciled.