David Yee’s funny, enigmatic one-woman play acts of faith premieres in Florida on November 21 at American Stage, only the second time it has been performed in the United States. It offers a vivid example of the power of theater to cross boundaries of nationality, politics, race, age, and gender.
The title is a play on words. While Faith is the name of the character guiding the play, the concept of faith—wide, ambiguous, individual—is what we’re being asked to consider.
It’s a play that’s hard to pin down. Even when playwright David Yee is asked for a pitch line, he hesitates several times before finally settling on, "It’s a play about a young girl mistaken as a prophet." In other places, Yee is quoted as acknowledging that before starting to write, all he knew for sure was that "It’s going to start with a joke and end with a miracle." It does both.
Examining the loss of innocence experienced by a teenage girl, it’s not a play about religion. More aptly, it seems to sift through the idea of stamina and whether human faith, or belief, is a tool for getting through difficult situations, times, and events.
In fact, the play was born out of the pandemic. It was commissioned by Toronto’s Factory Theatre (specifically for company member Natasha Mumba, who was born and raised in Zambia) to be streamed when audiences could not attend in person due to the COVID protocols. Through conversations with Mumba about her relationship with God, in the wake of non-pandemic issues of global impact like the killing of George Floyd, what emerged was a play, metaphorically, about getting through it. Not the pandemic per se, but the personal crises we all eventually must endure, overcome, or accept.
What is faith? Is it a feeling…or an act of belief?
How is it expressed…and who or what inspires it?
Can it be lost? And if so…can it be ‘found’ again?
It could be said that it’s a play about justice. While Faith speaks to us from within the "sanctuary," she is relegated to a post-miracle-maybe-crime, and the plot quickly reveals a true villain who, while unseen, is based on a real-life child abuser. In Yee’s play, the story of faith and justice working hand-in-hand culminates in a shocking miracle and provides a solution that the real-life version of the story could not.
"It’s a play about faith in its various meanings—with faith comes redemption; with faith also comes a challenge, or a testing; with faith comes a sort of unique questioning," Yee added.
As someone who grew up engaged in both Buddhist and Roman Catholic traditions, Yee acknowledged that the questioning of faith within the play is rooted in the tenets of "the specifically dogmatic Roman Catholic faith."
Yee found a way to merge his conversations with Mumba, world turmoil, and questions of faith with the stories of two other young American women he’d read about:
I was also reading about… the stories of Cyntoia Brown and Chrystul Kizer, who were both young Black women who killed their abusers—both at the age of 16—and were in the midst of being granted clemency or acquitted for their crimes. So that sort of provided a general thesis or frame for what I wanted to tackle. To see how, when we're talking about forgiveness, redemption, and clemency, the stories of those women and what we've been talking about in respect to God seemed to click together in a fairly unexpected way
Yee’s mastery is in how he weaves all these references into the character of Faith, whose dark humor and insightful wit wrap the audience into her personal purgatory as she recounts her journey.
Calling himself a "lapsed" Catholic, Yee acknowledges the play delves into his own revelation on the importance of holding onto faith even while "losing" one’s religion. Referring to a line where Faith talks about the loss of faith and the effect it has on a person, Yee added,
We have to believe in something; believing in something is what makes us human. It doesn't really matter what it is. I think what I have—what I own, maybe—is a fairly complex interrogation of my own beliefs, as well as a deep and profound sense of respect for the power that faith has to either enrich your life or cause a gaping hole in it.
Yee wants audiences to come in with an open mind. For him, the play shouldn’t be viewed as an attack on anything, but rather as a "celebration." Yee also didn’t set the playin America. He hopes audience members will be able to experience the idea of faith devoid of specific cultural or political references.
I think we can learn the most about who we are by listening to people who aren’t who we are. I think for me, the vital message of this play has always been that there is power in belief and that we're accountable for our actions as a result of those beliefs.
acts of faith by David Yee, directed by Patrick Arthur Jackson, runs from November 21 through December 17.
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acts of faith
by David Yee
directed by Patrick Arthur Jackson
From the African Copperbelt to the backwoods of Canada, acts of faith follows a young woman named Faith who gets mistaken for a prophet. When a revered religious leader attempts to take advantage of her plight, Faith begins using her ‘gift’ to right wrongs and punish the wicked. In this subversive and witty new play, she will face the ultimate test of her convictions in a final showdown between good and evil.