Storefront Church
Opening Night: June 11, 2012
Closing: June 24, 2012
Theater: Atlantic Theater
Storefront Church is the final installment of the trilogy called Church and State, which began with Doubt. The story concerns a Bronx Borough President who is forced, by the mortgage crisis, into a confrontation with a local minister. The question they confront is one that faces us all. What is the relationship between spiritual experience and social action?
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June 11, 2012
Burdens are just about equally distributed among the eclectic characters in “Storefront Church,” John Patrick Shanley’s unwieldy but affecting new play about a handful of Bronx dwellers whose lives become tangled in unexpected ways when a mortgage goes sour. With the exception of one willfully oblivious bank executive, the men and women who find themselves gathering for a church service at the play’s conclusion all feel a measure of sorrow from the hard compromises life demands — but perhaps also a sense that burdens are lightened when shared. The play, which opened Monday night at the Atlantic Theater Company in a vividly acted production directed by Mr. Shanley, sometimes bogs down in windy debates about faith, justice and morality. The grinding last scene of the first act, to cite an egregious example, could surely have been finessed into better shape by a director with a little distance from the sometimes overripe oratory.
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June 12, 2012
Playwright John Patrick Shanley has always had a soft spot for outer-borough "little" people. And in "Storefront Church," he celebrates a small Bronx rainbow coalition. To affirm his street cred, he takes a few well-placed kicks at sleazy bankers, who foreclose on the homes of poor folks they shouldn’t have given mortgages to in the first place. The play, which opened Monday night at the refurbished Atlantic Theater Company, advances in fits and starts — mostly fits — and offers a simplistic notion of good and evil. But it’s well-acted, and has a sweetness that lets it go down easy.
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June 12, 2012
John Patrick Shanley completes his "Church and State" trilogy with his terrific new play, Storefront Church, receiving its world premiere at Atlantic Theater Company’s newly renovated Linda Gross Theater. The three works — which also include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt and the military-set Defiance — stand on their own, unified not by plot or characters, but by a probing of moral and ethical complexities.
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June 12, 2012
If it takes most believers a while to construct the foundation of their faith and a lifetime to reinforce it, it stands to reason that much the same will be true about plays concerning that particular struggle. At any rate, that’s the case with John Patrick Shanley’s Storefront Church, which just opened at the Atlantic Theater Company. Though the show ends up as a sparkling examination of religion as filtered through the movers and shakers at all levels of the private and public sectors, the turgid and uncentered first act makes the process of getting to that point into an awkward and unsatisfying pilgrimage.
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June 12, 2012
A constituent angrily tells a politician, “You’ve become a bottle of smoke,” in John Patrick Shanley’s new drama, “Storefront Church,” which is about the nature of faith with a capital F. Written and directed by Shanley, a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, the intense drama about several related crises of faith opened in a quirky yet searing production Monday night off-Broadway at Atlantic Theater Company’s newly renovated Linda Gross Theater.
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