The Courier
By: Pam Chickering
Play draws Hallelujahs from disbelievers
Entering Waterloo’s Mode Theatre, one has already surrendered disbelief. At the door, the cold air dissipates into warm greetings. Winter’s drab overcoat turns inside out to reveal a plush explosion of color, and the sound of the wind and passing cars fade into gospel-laced improvisational jazz, the House of Sounds overture to Jinx Davis’s original production of “Aimee, Lord Aimee.”
“Aimee” is Aimee Semple McPherson, turn-of-the-century evangelist and faith healer, the first woman to cross the continent without the requisite man in tow, one of the first and most sensational evangelist this continent has seen. She preached not a fiery gospel, but one filled with angels: the spirits of forgiveness, of love, and of our better selves.
Historically, the evangelist so convinced her afflicted audience that one or two of the crippled walked after each show, (even if they were paid to do so) and one or two crippled in the soul left with restored faith (even if they were paid to do so).
At each performance through Saturday night farewell, at least one member of the audience has claimed to have seen McPherson, once, long ago. Preachers, feminists, scholars who knew of her, have come to see her facsimile inspire. Others have entered the theater’s doors as cynics. But to judge from the faces in the crowd during and after the play, no one has left a disbeliever of McPherson’s—And Jinx Davis’s—magic.
Davis opened her final performance with a prayer to the spirit of the woman she’s portrayed, admitting, “At first, I thought you were a rather repulsive woman…but in the few weeks you have been with me, I’ve fallen in great love with you…You had fun—you had the most glorious, incredible life…And you were madly in love with the world.”
One costume change, from dramatist’s black to evangelist’s white, signaled the end of the introduction and the beginning of the old time, music, and movement filled faith healing.
Aside from saxophone and flute player Hanah Jon Taylor and his backup musicians, the audience provided the only other characters in Davis’s one-woman play.
As McPherson, Davis worked he crowd like the musicians played their instruments, masterful and subtle. The sermon rose and fell, now as grounded and conversational as the farm girlhood in Ontario the woman evangelist continued to refer to, now hushed and expectant, now jubilant and exhortative.
As she plied he undemonstrative Midwestern audience, they responded, first with the shake of the tambourine, then with a spattering of “Thank the Lords” and “Say it, Sisters.” Every gaze remained apt throughout the nearly three-hour performance.
At once, she urged her followers to greater faith and justified her own flamboyance.
“This is my task—what’s your task?” asked Aimee, in the repeating refrain. “If you get inspired, you can inspire someone else.”
“People say, ‘You’re more of an actress than an evangelist,’” she said. “I think they are one and the same. We can drop Satan and the angels from the ceiling and stage a battle right there. We do all sorts of wonderful things to get the story of The Lord out there...My critics say it’s all ego – I say it’s all Him. You couldn’t get any bigger than that.”
Aimee’s ego definitely shows, but so does her real passion for the Word and for the world, and some of the pain that must have sent her seeking to begin with.
Recalling “the horrendous things we do to each-other in this world,” she calls on Jesus, “Just let me have that breath Jesus…It can spread the most exquisite life, a comfort that is stage for the faith healing in the second half by speaking of London’s statue of St. George, foot perpetually raised as if to take a step.
“I know people like that,” she said, “All ready to take a step but they never seem to get anywhere.”
When volunteers began to come forth to be “healed,” Aimee half coaxed, half intimidated the wheelchair-confined man, the crutch-baring woman, to heal themselves.
Asking the man in the wheelchair how he came to be there, she turned his sad story on end, saying, “I think this man likes telling his story, but I think he’s got the wrong story. I think, deep inside, this man wants to say ‘yes.’
“You don’t really want it if you can’t say it,” she said, “Don’t whisper,” she whispered. “I think,” then spoke, “I think,” shouted with the trumpet’s flare, “I think…that I would like the exquisite glory of Jesus running through my veins.”
On her knees, the evangelist widened her concept of healing to encompass the spiritual as well as the physical sense.
Dropping to a hushed reverence for her final appeal, she prayed, “Tonight when I see a stranger, I’m going to see the face of God. I’m gonna walk with the angels, hear the rustle of their wings. I’m gonna find something inside that wants to come home to you, Jesus, something that maybe has been there a long time, hidden.”
The words rung so true it seemed even the preacher could find personal revelation.
“You are all angels,” she sang out, “Glory be to God. I am glad that I’m alive.” And the invisible curtain closed on Aimee Semple McPherson for the last time.
