CHESTER (MA)
BishopAccountability.org [Waltham MA]
July 9, 2024
By Terence McKiernan
[Photo above: A scene from Jay Sefton’s Unreconciled, with a film still from the passion play performed at Annunciation B.V.M. church in Brookline, Havertown, Greater Philadelphia in 1985. Courtesy of Jay Sefton.]
For the rest of this week and the weekend, you have a golden opportunity to see the best play to come out of the Catholic clergy abuse crisis. Jay Sefton is performing his beautiful, funny, haunting Unreconciled in western Massachusetts on Wednesday through Sunday, July 10-14. I guarantee you, it’s an experience not to be missed. There are both afternoon and evening performances that make it a very doable outing, whether you live in western Massachusetts near the excellent Chester Theatre Company or are coming from farther away:
Wednesday 7/10 2:00 pm
Thursday 7/11 2:00 pm and 7:30 pm
Friday 7/12 2:00 pm and 7:30 pm
Saturday 7/13 7:30 pm
Sunday 7/14 2:00 pm
Unreconciled is also playing in New York City in September, but why wait?
Can the one-man show Unreconciled by actor, writer, therapist, and survivor Jay Sefton possibly be better than the famous Doubt? I’ve seen both in the theater, and Unreconciled is more real, emotionally more true, and simply a better play – beautifully written, clearly and ingeniously constructed, and superbly performed.
Unreconciled brings to vivid life one of the most disturbing cases from the Philadelphia Grand Jury report – Fr. Thomas J. Smith’s serial abuse of young teenage boys selected to play Jesus in the parish passion play. We see astonishing original video from that play-within-the-play, and photographs of the trips where Smith also abused the boys. But those images are really parts of Jay Sefton’s reverie, as he thinks of his abuse experience and his long recovery, and presents his story to church mediators, and struggles with that process and its dubious result. His reverie includes those mediators, rendered to a T, and also his parents, and the nun who taught the class that year, the eccentrics in his old Philadelphia neighborhood, his classmates, and even an archbishop and the priest himself.
All this with Jay Sefton alone on-stage? I was skeptical, but I’ve seen the play twice now, and both times, I saw Sefton move among the people in his story, including his various selves, with a character actor’s genius and a knack for gesture and physical comedy. As you watch the play, those characters – inside Sefton’s head and there on-stage – are made real.
You could call this a mystery play of forgiveness and redemption. But it’s also a funny riff on working class life in the sports-crazed Philadelphia of the 1980s. It’s a tender story of parental love and bewilderment in difficult times. It’s a precise portrait of an abusing priest and the culture that sustains him. Above all, it’s a great artist’s tribute to where he came from, as he figures out where he’s going. Beautifully, he brings us along.
Don’t miss this brilliant play!