Salvation, self-awareness at core of Northlight's 'Discord'
Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy walk into a room. Substitute “bar” for “room” and you have the setup for a literary-historical joke. In this case, however, the situation in which these men find themselves is no laughing matter.
It's the premise for “The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord,” the unwieldly titled dramedy by Scott Carter - the Emmy-nominated writer/producer of “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher” and HBO's “Real Time With Bill Maher” - that tips its hat to Jean-Paul Sartre's “No Exit.”
A solid, albeit dense piece of theater directed with brio by Kimberly Senior for Northlight Theatre, “Discord” is a witty, giddily cerebral exercise in which the titular characters meet in the afterlife to debate the nature of God, religion, philosophy, politics, social justice, art and literature.
Their conversation, it turns out, is less than harmonious.
It unfolds on designer Jack Magaw's sterile, Spartan set, an institutional purgatory that recalls a police interrogation room. Considering the confessions forthcoming from these clay-footed icons, it's an ideal setting. Their efforts to puzzle out why they've been placed together lead to the realization that each of them created his own version of the Gospels detailing the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's a particularly hubristic undertaking. Then again, who ever achieved greatness without being compelled, at least in part, by his or her own ego?
First to share his gospel is pre-eminent storyteller Dickens (a needy, emotional, self-important Jeff Parker), whose traditional interpretation is rooted in “the word.”
Decorous statesman Jefferson (the square-jawed, cooly aristocratic Nathan Hosner) takes a rational approach, centering his gospel on “reason,” which he describes as “the oracle by which we rise above the animals.” Excising all evidence of the miraculous (he likens the virgin birth to a Mother Goose tale), the author of the Declaration of Independence included only Christ's teachings in his gospel.
Meanwhile Tolstoy (the deliciously coarse, perpetually gruff Mark Montgomery) insists upon the primacy of “the spirit.” He reduces the gospel to its essentials: a philosophy of passive resistance he construes as “resist not evil.”
Senior, who will receive a special non-equity Joseph Jefferson Award next month in recognition for her 21 years in Chicago theater, goes beyond the gimmick to get to “Discord's” emotional core, where truth and salvation lie.
She has in Hosner, Montgomery and Parker an accomplished trio who play off each other beautifully and whose performances suggest a sense of humor as well as hard-won introspection.
That no definitive Jefferson-Dickens-Tolstoy scripture emerges comes as no surprise. The point of “Discord” has nothing to do with the validity of the re-imagined gospels or their authors' attempts to collaborate in an attempt to escape their Sartrian prison.
It has everything to do with a recognition by these characters of their moral failures and hypocrisies - and their repentance. Jefferson, after all, championed independence and fought tyranny, yet kept slaves. Dickens celebrated fictional families, while rejecting his own. And religious convert Tolstoy lived among peasants without entirely relinquishing the privileges of his social status.
Carter's suggestion that salvation follows self-awareness isn't a particularly revelatory conclusion, but it's definitely worth repeating. And that's no joke.
“The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord”
★ ★ ★
Location: Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, (847) 6730-6300 or
Showtimes: 1 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday through June 12
Running time: About 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $25-$79
Parking: Free in adjacent lot and parking garage
Rating: For teens and older