In Actors Express’s absorbing revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s faith-and-incarceration opus, Jesus Hopped the A-Train, we open in the stark prison cell of Angel Cruz, who’s stumbling through the Lord’s Prayer, peppering in curse words with every forgotten line. Quickly, we hear ricocheting voices from around the cell block telling him over and over to shut up.
It’s a moment that sets a course for the next two hours that are both funny and increasingly dark — two staples of Guirgis’s writing. This work debuted more than a decade before 2011’s hilarious and harrowing The Motherf*cker With the Hat, which starred Chris Rock on Broadway and garnered seven Tony award nominations — and 15 years before his Pulitzer-winning Between Riverside and Crazy.
Angel, we learn, is awaiting trial at Riker’s Island — New York’s largest jail, infamous for decades as one of the nation’s most inhumane, abusive prisons. He’s facing charges for the attempted murder of a wealthy “prosperity gospel” type figure (and probable cult leader) who had “stolen” his friend. Caught up in a kind of waking grief over his friend and his freedom, Angel is filled with righteous anger about the hypocrisy of the man he shot; someone who claimed he was the messiah amid ski trips. The more details we learn, the grimmer the cult sounds.
Allusions to the power that extreme belief organizations exert upon their trusting and obedient followers is one of many ways that the 2023 audience may have caught up more now to Guirgis’s 2000 play than the audiences that first consumed it. In more recent years, we have been inundated with the methodology of cults: how they operate, and especially how they peddle faith and spirituality, or even self-improvement, to draw people in. Everything from 2015’s “Going Clear” to this year’s “Secrets of Hillsong.”
But that’s just a backdrop for the rich tapestry of the power (and abuse of power) dynamics going on inside the prison itself. To that end, we have prison guard Valdez (Luis Hernandez), a cruel, bigoted bully who’s not the least bit interested in the constitutional rights of those he lords over. As played with cold efficiency and malevolent glee by Hernandez, he’s an incredibly mundane version of evil — someone who thrives by enforcing rules no matter what. As one character asks, what kind of a person sticks around in a system so corrupt and miserable? Only someone who likes subjugating others.
We learn that Angel is facing a severe sentence in part because of his “felony” conviction at age 16 — because a child can often wind up being counted as an “adult” in some jurisdictions. His brutal experience in the hellscape of Riker’s can be difficult to watch, thanks in large part to a beautiful, vulnerable performance by Christian Gonzalez.
Which brings us to the other star of the show, the only character who extends any empathy toward Angel: Lucius (Sekou Laidlow), a serial killer and deeply unreliable narrator. Delivered in a captivating, layered performance by Laidlow, the magnetic Lucius never loses the tinge of danger just beneath the surface, even as he claims to have found God.
At one point, he’s exercising in the yard, yelling books of the Bible as a kind of motivational chant and delivering bumper-sticker worthy proclamations (“Make me a mustard seed, hold the mayo!”) until he, and we, are breathless. But even in stillness, Laidlow creates a tension between what we are being told and what is really going on beneath the surface.
When the truth emerges about the horrors that Lucius is responsible for and the casualness with which he has extinguished lives, it adds another layer to our questions about his transformation into spiritual enlightenment. It also comes through by way of a beautifully delivered monologue from Laidlow about how he used to recoil from the sun’s light.
But it’s also unclear whether these questions of morality even matter in an amoral environment like this. If a serial killer is the only person being kind to the mistreated, what does that say about us?
Under the skilled direction of Eric J. Little, some of the longer exchanges between Lucius and Angel from their separate cells, situated across the stage from one another, can feel like watching a heated tennis match. Utilizing a sparse but impactful set by scenic designer Seamus M. Bourne, Little brings unpredictability to the actors’ movements and reactions, subtly choreographed so that we’re always engaged. The focus is on the actors, rightly, given the skilled performers assembled here.
One major qualm: The play’s one woman character, Mary Jane, Angel’s court-appointed lawyer, is thinly drawn in the script, making several choices that seem less like the moves of a seasoned defense attorney and more like the easiest way to set up certain stakes later. It’s frustrating that she’s given short shrift in the writing, not only because she’s the one woman onstage, but also because actor Cara Mantella does fine work getting under the skin of an advocate experiencing existential crisis. In one particularly well-delivered line, she advises Angel, “The trick is to get a lawyer who makes the least mistakes.”
The play raises many urgent questions, many of which have no answers by the end of the play’s runtime. The latter half of the show sort of loses its way in favor of too much exposition and some confusing character development. Most gratingly, toward the end, we get a few hacky explanations for why Lucius has done what he’s done – including an entire cadre of mental health diagnoses and substance use disorders, none of which fully explain sociopathy or psychopathy. And yes, it’s possible that Lucius may be a pathological liar, but all of this is thrown in so quickly and casually at the end, it sticks out.
But even as the piece unravels toward the end, there are highlights. For instance, we are treated to a glorious monologue from actor Andrew Randolph, as a more sympathetic guard and foil to Valdez, which made me think of the writing of Sister Helen Prejean. And it’s absorbing to see the building blocks that Guirgis would use to develop his voice later on.
In fact, it’s always a fascinating experience beholding the early work of any artist before they’ve fine-tuned what they do — like Van Gogh before he discovered sunflowers. And this imperfect tale of our deeply unjust judicial system, and the systemic hostility toward kindness and dignity in our prisons, is a bold and often moving outing that is absolutely not for the faint of heart.
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Alexis Hauk is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines including Time, The Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian. An Atlanta native, Alexis has also lived in Boston, Washington D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. By day, she works in health communications. By night, she enjoys covering the arts and being Batman.
