Live From the Pulpit

One of David Rambo’s most vivid memories of his youth was a weekend retreat with his confirmation class at his Lutheran church, in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania.

The teenage boys were assigned to bunk in the basement, the girls in the attic. Around midnight, however, a few of the female Bible students became obsessed with the notion that 15-year-old David, down in the basement, looked like David Cassidy, the era’s reigning teen idol.

The girls ran down two flights of stairs to check out the resemblance--and they didn’t go back. “We stayed up all night,” recalled Rambo, now 46, “practicing kissing and all the other things you do on religious retreats.”

The chaperons? “I think they had their own party going on.” Thinking back on that weekend, his only other memory is of the food. “I don’t remember a thing we learned. But I remember everything we ate: lasagna, caramel apples, doughnuts....”

Much later in life, L.A.-based playwright Rambo again became interested in the culture and the trappings of modern American Protestant churches. He set a play, “God’s Man in Texas,” in an enormous Baptist mega-church in Houston.

Introduced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana festival in 1999, “God’s Man in Texas” has gone on to 15 productions, with five more scheduled. The latest opens Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse. It’s one of the most important for Rambo, because it will be the first major production of any of his plays in his hometown.

The play centers on the relationship between the church’s senior pastor, who is nearing retirement, and a younger preacher who might take over. The younger man begins to wonder if the voice of God can still be detected among the many activities and amenities the huge church offers.

For Rambo, who drifted away from organized religion soon after that fabled retreat as a teenager, the play isn’t necessarily about religion. “It’s a parable about art and the life of an artist,” he said, “about how ambition and large-scale commercialism can threaten the ability of the artist to be inspired.”

Citing audience talk-back sessions at earlier productions and e-mail he has received, Rambo said the play has reached a wide swath of theatergoers--”people who are religious and people who are not,” he said. “I’m astonished at how it speaks to people on opposite sides of religious beliefs.”

Hershael W. York, who teaches Christian preaching at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, saw the premiere and wrote a program note for later productions that said: “Just where does Jesus belong, anyway? In pulpits or politics? Is he best represented by thunderous sermons or thoughtful speech? ... ‘God’s Man in Texas’ asks these questions and makes us laugh in the meantime, eliciting a smile even when we are uncomfortable with what it might mean. Some laugh out of derision, some out of recognition, but ultimately the two laughters coalesce into one and we are left to ponder just what faith really looks like.”

Stephen Rothman directed “God’s Man in Texas” for largely Jewish audiences at Florida Stage in Palm Beach County and then two other productions in Cincinnati and St. Louis. “This play is so universal in terms of the bigger themes,” said Rothman, who heads the theater and dance department at Cal State L.A. “It could be set at a big Jewish synagogue or in the Vatican, or it could be about how people behave toward each other in any business. It cuts across everything.”

The connection between churches and other institutions was one reason Rambo started thinking about a play on this subject in the mid-’90s. He was fascinated by a report on National Public Radio, in which the director of a mega-church’s dinner theater performed selections from the latest production on the air, and by an article on the mega-church phenomenon in the Atlantic Monthly.

“I was struck by how many similarities there are between a theater and a mega-church,” he said. “They both have scripts, production teams, music directors. Some mega-churches use more lighting and sound equipment than ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ And it’s all in support of a star, the preacher, who gives weekly performances. The object is to move an audience.”

Rambo was drawn more to show business than he was to the church. He began playing piano in taverns at age 15 and started acting in dinner theaters at 17. After high school, “I stupidly decided I didn’t need college,” and he joined the ranks of would-be actors in New York, appearing in some off-off-Broadway shows.

He began living in Los Angeles part time in 1980, trying to make a living as an actor in film and TV. He co-starred in a 1981 pilot, “The Best of Times,” with Nicolas Cage and Crispin Glover, and paid a few bills by acting in commercials. In 1984, he settled in L.A. permanently, and he began selling real estate for a steadier source of income.

He was good at it. He attained a six-figure income and eventually managed 60 agents in a Sherman Oaks office, handling deals for Rosie O’Donnell, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Tim Curry, and Rue McClanahan. The profession began to acquire near-religious significance for him.

“I’ve had the religion of selling,” he said. “It’s so fundamental to our culture. Real estate agents listen to their own gurus they way other people listen to preachers. They’re looking for a magic wand that can make them richer and happier. A lot of people, myself included, thought the ticket to that was to sell a lot of houses.”

It wasn’t all about the hard sell, though. “I sat at all these kitchen tables, dealing with people’s dreams and ambitions. I came to understand that you can’t muscle them into a deal. If you do, they’ll wiggle out of it. If you really understand their dreams, then it sticks.”

The real estate market soured in the early ‘90s, and Rambo sometimes found himself sitting at open houses with no customers for as long as four hours. To pass the time, he began jotting down ideas for plays and then trying to develop them.

He used his professional milieu in “There’s No Place Like House,” a farce set in the world of L.A. real estate, which enjoyed a successful run in 1997 at two sub-100-seat theaters on Melrose Avenue. And he ventured into a more tragic mode in “Speaky-Spikey-Spokey,” inspired by an underground fire that burned in Pennsylvania for nearly 40 years. It was presented at the Ashland, Ore., New Plays Festival.

Once he got the idea for “God’s Man in Texas,” he researched it for more than a year--a habit he credits to two generations of librarians on his mother’s side. He visited a number of big churches, including the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and the Church on the Way in Van Nuys, where he was introduced to Testamints, candy that comes with ecclesiastical wrappings, which he now uses as gifts on opening nights.

He began writing the play for a cast of seven actors who would play 15 characters. “But it wasn’t working. I kept writing around the story.” Rambo is a season subscriber at the Geffen, as well as at South Coast Repertory, A Noise Within and Interact Theatre. When he saw the Geffen production of Jon Marans’ “Old Wicked Songs” in 1997, he was impressed with “how I could see the whole city of Vienna even though there were only two characters on one set.”

He reduced his characters to just the two ministers. But then he added a third man, Hugo, a church factotum who had a wild past. Hugo, he said, is “the portal for the audience. If we’re laughing with Hugo, we’re not laughing at religion.”

“If the story was going to have any power,” he added, “I couldn’t make it a Carol Burnett sketch. I had to buy into what they believe in much more than I ever wanted to. And once I had three characters, the light went on. I had a trinity.”

He also came up with the notion that the first act is Old Testament in spirit, “God speaking from on high,” while the second is New--”God is among men,” as the younger preacher works with members of the congregation.

Rambo found himself distracted by the noise of remodeling at the Los Feliz home he shares with Theodore Heyck, an attorney who has been his partner for 27 years. He rented a Hollywood office to work on the play--and found that it was next to an office where sing-along kids’ videos were being edited. So he wore earplugs.

Finally, to finish the play in peace and quiet, he rented a house in Idyllwild in December 1997. “I knew the last word would be ‘Amen.’ That last day of writing, when I typed ‘Amen,’ I wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for a month.”

Although a New York agent had been encouraging Rambo, she didn’t think any of his plays would sell widely until she read “God’s Man in Texas.” She submitted it to the Humana Festival, a prestigious showcase for new plays. When Rambo got the call that it had been selected, he hung up the phone and cried.

The play was a hit, but Rambo kept working on it. The final, slimmer version was first presented in San Diego, in a 2000 production at Globe Theatres’ Cassius Carter Center Stage. It was directed by Leonard Foglia, who helped whip it into shape, Rambo said.

Soon after Humana, Rambo decided to retire from real estate. Although his income has decreased, “the phone doesn’t ring every five minutes. My thinking is deeper, I don’t wear as many ties, and my dry cleaning bill is nonexistent,” Rambo said. He works at home, in his pajamas and dirty hair, he said.

Rambo quoted a line from his play, in which the older minister tells the younger one, “God could be working to change your life beyond your wildest dreams.”

“That’s what has happened to me.”

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“GOD’S MAN IN TEXAS,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Dates: Opens Wednesday. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends March 17. Prices: $30-$46. Phone: (310) 208-5454.

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Don Shirley is The Times’ theater writer.