Soul of a Whore
Soul of a Whore, which grew in part out of a Rolling Stone article Johnson wrote in 2000 about capital punishment in Texas, is a messy work. And Whitney Blakemore’s Viaduct Theater staging doesn’t tease out all the strands in this nearly three-hour voyage of the damned. While it’s not essential to have seen or read the first two plays–Hellhound on My Trail and Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames, which also premiered locally at Viaduct under Blakemore’s direction–it certainly makes parts of the plot more comprehensible. Johnson’s dramaturgical excess doesn’t help–the play is mostly written in blank verse. Still, this is a big-as-Texas canvas for the bloodlust that’s burgeoned with a terrible fury in recent years.
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Abandoned by Masha and his congregation, the downward-spiraling Jenks still has the stubbornly faithful John. His belief–in his mother’s innocence, in Jenks’s capacity to work miracles–is the one unsullied virtue in Johnson’s world. Tellingly, John is the only Cassandra brother who never acquires a nickname and never sheds his prison whites–and the only character who doesn’t lie and try to excuse his own actions. Clearly intended to evoke Christly compassion, faith, and justice, John carries a giant cross covered with symbols of Christ’s crucifixion–hammer and nails, the dice the Romans used to divvy up his garments. On the day of his mother’s execution John dresses in a clown suit, explaining that “when men go murdering murderers, they mock God’s saving work and make a clown of Christ.” But Masha gets the last word, declaring at play’s end, “Let there be no Resurrection Day, if that’s what it takes to keep these killers dead.”
