A first-time raver pops a pill, gets gang-raped and commits suicide. A pompom-toting cheerleader endures a literally gut-wrenching industrial vacuum included abortion. Two gay men wed and smooch each other and one soon dies an excruciating AIDS death. A trenchcoat-wearing, Dungeons & Dragons-playing, heavy metal geek guns down a classroom of bullies. A virgin gives it up to her new boyfriend on her out-of-town parents’ bed and contracts HIV. Coffee-swilling hipsters write a comedy sketch about Christian fundamentalists.
They will all go, kicking and screaming, to Hell—escorted by a chortling, black-robed demon-MC, snarling hell-hounds and mortal ticket-buyers brave enough to enter Hell House. A production of Les Freres Corbusier at the 14,000-square-foot St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, this is a haunted house of sin and consequence. During my hour-long tour through dozens of rooms and levels, creaky corridors and sticky curtains, I was bled upon and looked into the eyes of a doomed fetus (played by an actor in a red leotard). I heard the moans of the damned (actors playing terrorists, drunks, dandies, unwed mothers), stepped over their prostrate bodies and shook off their clutching, blood-stained hands. I had an audience with Satan himself (a vocoder-voiced lounge lizard), and I politely refused a prayer session with a blond girl-angel standing beside a bearded Jesus. Giggling, wiping the dry-ice vapor from my eyes, I felt like an escapee from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch as interpreted by a crazed Outsider Artist—just the kind of avant-garde theater experience only available in New York.
Except it’s not, and New Yorkers are over a decade behind what’s become an October ritual at hundreds of Christian Evangelical churches in the South and Midwest. First innovated by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s, Hell Houses became a Bible Belt institution in the mid-’90s thanks to youth minister Pastor Keenan Roberts. In a press release, he describes Hell Houses as “a spiritually based adventure depicting the hell and devastation that Satan and this world can bestow on those who choose not to serve Jesus Christ.” The explicit aim of this full-sensory-assault morality play is straightforward: to shock lapsed Christians and non-believers into converting or recommitting themselves to godly, sin-free lives.
Now a mini-mogul, Roberts stages annual Hell House extravaganzas near his New Destiny Christian Church Center in Thornton, Colo. More expansively, he sells Hell House Outreach Kits to churches and ministries nationwide. The $300 kit includes sound effects CDs, DVDs with scene footage and a 263-page manual with instructions on casting, set construction and how to simulate fetus parts with hamburger meat.
He’s sold thousands of kits and, according to his church’s website, has attracted millions of Hell House attendees; he claims a typical salvation/rededication rate of 33 percent.
Using this kit and consulting with Roberts himself, Les Freres Corbusier’s is the first Hell House to be presented in our big, rotten apple. The three-year-old troupe has produced A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, Heddatron and other experimental, cheeky fare that deals with religion and history. Yet they approached Hell House earnestly and methodically, according to Artistic Director Alex Timbers.
“The way to do it is sincerely,” he explains. “To do it judgment-free, so that people could make their own decisions.”
Timbers, along with Les Freres’ executive director, Aaron Lemon-Strauss, encountered their first Hell House in 2004 in Los Angeles, where another company was staging a parodic, intentionally comedic version. “We were shocked and horrified by the underlying material,” Timbers admits. They studied Hell House, a 2000 documentary about Roberts’ brainchild, and began recreating a NYC tour, painstakingly engaging the text “without irony.”
When they contacted Pastor Roberts, “he was understandably skeptical about our intentions,” Timbers recalls. “But we explained, ‘We’re not Evangelicals or interested in proselytizing. But we do think this is an important cultural phenomenon for people to understand and see a faithful reproduction of in New York.’ [Roberts] feels the message will win out, that he’ll save people through us. So, while we have different goals for the production, we could agree on what we wanted the actual piece of theater to be.”
Sticking to the content and tone of the original text, Timbers and others “only cut things that were so bizarre that people wouldn’t believe we were not making it up,” including a “Suicide Dancer” (during the rave scene) and a “Bootylicious” song interlude during the teen sex segment. They also updated one scene that featured the RU-486 pill, substituting a Terri Schiavo-like patient instead. (Roberts’ kit allows all Hell Housers to make judicious amendments and updates if they’re appropriate to headlines and local culture.)
The project’s nearly 100-member cast and crew likely harbor far more liberal political and social views than Roberts’ usual acolytes, Timbers admits. Regardless, “it’s actually gotten more intense” for everyone as performances roll on. “To do this theater of hate 10 times a night … Wears you down. You get to a place of rawness.” Not that playing with fake blood and smoke machines isn’t a kick.
“I’m used to creating plays, and there’s something more exciting about digging into an experiential horror spectacle,” he admits. “Even though it’s intended to be real, layered entertainment, at the basest level it’s fun to be doing things that are spooky.”
Pastor Roberts himself flew to New York for the first weekend of shows and “loved it,” Timbers says, offering notes and praise for the troupe’s impressive sound-and-lights cueing system and even a job offer in Colorado for one of the talented actors playing a “demon guide.”
According to Timbers, early audience responses have fallen under three categories: the first is unmitigated laughter; the second, horror and disgust “that people actually believe this, that this is a conversion tool”; a third segment misinterprets the project as “totally real”—as if it were run by actual Evangelicals. Among this group, some are deeply religious, “telling people in the tour that they’re praying for them.” Others are “furious,” who believe “they’ve been hoodwinked; they thought they were going to some parodic piece, but they’re experiencing a real Hell House. To me that’s the most interesting reaction,” says Timbers.
Thus far, no attendees have yet to actually convert as a result of their Hell House ordeal, though Roberts assured the team it’s only a matter of time.
Although I also didn’t see the light, my own tour of terror provoked something more complicated than laughs. (Plenty of those, though, thanks to flying guts and a grinning demon guide quick with puns like “there’s womb for more!”) Breathing that uncanny haunted house air of plaster, wet wood, plastic and face-paint briefly returned me to my 10-year-old self. I believed in fear, guilt, punishment and being dragged away by drooling, cackling demons. This regression was energizing and, yes, terrifying—much more so because I realized how many folks really do think gays, pro-choicers and other “liberals” should burn in hell. It put the urgency and vehemence of the so-called culture wars into high-pitched, blood-red perspective.
Emerging from the cacophony and darkness into the final scenario, a brightly lit “Hoedown,” this lapsed Jew briefly contemplated accepting Christ into his heart over donuts, punch and a live revivalist folk band called Take Back Sunday. (Coincidentally, it also happened to be Yom Kippur, and I hadn’t fasted or attended shul.)
“We wanted to have a room where people can decompress [and] have a bit of release [while] staying on message,” Timbers explains. Roberts’ script called for a church-discussion and prayer session; instead, Les Freres opted for this post-tour party, complete with smiling, blandly dressed youth group members and a “Pin the Sins on Jesus” game. Loading up on sugary snacks, grinning and clapping with other Converse-clad attendees to chestnuts like “I’ll Fly Away” and “Down in the River to Pray,” I felt my Blue State irony slip away. We’d all survived something together, and the shared sense of relief and goodwill was palpable, celebratory—maybe even spiritual. It was more than I’d expected from an edgy theater in Dumbo: both comforting and radical.
Hell House runs through Oct. 29. St. Ann’s Warehouse,
38 Water St., Dumbo, Brooklyn, 718-254-8779; Tues.-Sun. 7:30-9:45 p.m. with tours every 15 minutes, $25.
