
Crystal Finn, Annie Fang, David Greenspan, Jon Norman Schneider, Ugo Chukwu, and Mary Lou Rosato in Usus. Photo: Maria Baranova
While T. Adamson’s Usus, the first play in Clubbed Thumb’s indispensable Summerworks series, is set in a French monastery in 1318, it belongs to a kind of mid-2020s micro-canon of historical plays done with a wry modern lens: Perfectly pitched 2020s slang with no attempt to use a unified style for actors’ diction or accents. Casting that is not merely color- or gender-blind but actively demands a range reflecting twenty-first-century culture rather than fidelity to the ostensible historical period (so, here, Adamson’s script specifies that the ensemble of monks match the actors’ ages roughly to their characters, but be of diverse genders and ethnicities). Emotional reactions that, like the language, are born of our moment, not the setting’s. At its best, in works including Gab Reisman’s Spindle Shuttle Needle (another Summerworks production) or Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor, the device works as a sneaky window into the minds of the past, bringing a fresh immediacy to these historical concerns and allowing us to laugh with the shock of recognition at the ways the past resembles and/or is incommensurate with the present, or at our own imperfect understanding of the past. But done too much and too reflexively, the cleverness can start to become its own end; the good joke swallows the insights whole.
For me, Usus does push that cleverness too far. There are legitimate and pressing questions of faith and doctrine being debated here, mostly through the incisive mind and stuttering mouth of Brother Paul (an impassioned Crystal Finn). There are quiet, elegant summations of creed (Jon Norman Schneider’s Brother Matteo gets the best of these, like the world’s most divinely inspired mic drop); there are crystalline moments of gentle contemplation, mostly in the hands of Brother Giles (the always exquisite David Greenspan). At its best moments, Usus does succeed in building that illuminative link: mortification of the flesh transcending to ecstasy via a very modern dance break; Brother Giles’s unshowy but emphatic insistence on calling God “she.”
But too often, the insight is buried under showoffy linguistic riffs. The play asks us to think critically about the nature of heresy and papal infallibility, to think about the roots of the prosperity gospel in the theological debates of the Franciscans–but also involves a lot of Pig Latin, monks who call each other “Bro,” and a papal envoy (Yonatan Gebeyehu) who sounds like a Key & Peele routine. We are, I recognize, supposed to find him more than faintly ridiculous, a representative of the materialistic world in his bright colors and patterns and shoes, against the monks’ soothingly neutral linens. But there’s satire and there’s cartoon, and Usus, too often, goes for cartoon.
The specific theological debate at the heart of the play stems from the stringent vow of poverty taken by the Franciscan Friars Minor, whose entire order commits to “hold no property privately nor communally, but merely use those objects necessary for sustenance”: usus, the right of use, versus dominium, ownership and consumption. Pope John XXII has now decreed that their obedience to the church is more virtuous than their poverty–essentially, that there is no such thing as usus. The friars are forced to grapple with the question of whether obedience to their earthly authority can conflict with obedience to their God and their conscience. Can they quibble with the pope’s orders and still honor Christ? Does papal infallibility lie in the person or the office? And what should they do now?
These six Franciscan friars—in addition to Giles, Matteo, and Paul, there’s the scribe Brother Bernard (Ugo Chukwu), the new novitiate JP (Annie Fang), and Ambrose, who’s taken a vow of silence (Mary Lou Rosato)—have followed their principles to a point where they may constitute heresy. Despite that vow of poverty—to own nothing, and only use what they must—the new pope is trying to force them into, essentially, early capitalism. It upsets their worldview enough that they are drafting a bull, a “clap back” to the pope’s decree. In so doing, they creep ever closer to heresy–a heresy for which the brothers are (mostly) willing to pay with their lives. The stakes could not be higher: recant or die. And the still, simple moment at the end where, even after a shared oration that begins “everything is fart-filled crap,” the monks individually offer their gratitude to their lord, does register. I just wish one layer of frill had been pared off.
Of course, because Summerworks has the highest of production standards, it looks gorgeous, is cast exceptionally, and moves like a dream. The visual elements are simple but on point: Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma’s set recalls both adobe and ancient stones, with pops of color and a staircase to nowhere at one side. Phương Nguyễn dresses the monks in elegant neutrals that inhabit the space naturally. Marika Kent’s lighting brings a rich sense of the cycles of the monastic day, with Carsen Joenk’s sound a subtle counterpoint.
Director Emma Miller lets the actors’ natural diction guide the rhythms, so we learn character by how each one speaks as much as by what they say. The play is a swift 65 minutes, but she lets its quiet moments linger. The performances are sound across the board as well; Finn and Greenspan in particular balance the silliness and the gravitas with an estimable lightness of touch. Schneider, too, commits fully to the divergent styles required to handle the whole.
There’s a lot to value here–it just feels a little overdressed. I very much liked Adamson’s earlier The Straights, which matched this kind of arch tone with more genuine-feeling human beings. Here, the monks and particularly Latin X tip too far toward the abstract, and rather than illuminating the genuine tragedy at the heart of the play, the stylization seems to mock it.