Out of Jim Jones’ shadow

A black rag doll. A burgundy choir robe. A bulletproof vest.

Denice Stephenson carefully lifts a few of the remnants of Jonestown from their storage boxes. Much of the detritus of that ill-fated, would-be utopia is kept here, in a vault at the headquarters of the California Historical Society.

A volunteer archivist, Stephenson places several of the hundreds of handwritten letters and photos on a long table. A cursory reading of just a few makes it clear that the 1978 poisoning of 900-plus disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones in a South American jungle was a thoroughly human catastrophe.

Stephenson describes what she feels is an unfortunately common and dismissive attitude toward the deceased of Jonestown -- “They were just crazy cultists.” Then, with little prelude, she begins sobbing quietly.

When she regains her composure, Stephenson says she hopes the voices of those who died in Jonestown will be heard through “The People’s Temple,” a new play that will open April 20 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

It isn’t just an idle hope on Stephenson’s part. The seed for “The People’s Temple” was planted at a 2001 performance of “The Laramie Project” at Berkeley Rep, attended by Stephenson and her husband, David Dower, who runs San Francisco’s Z Space Studio. They wondered if techniques used to create “Laramie,” which examined the community where the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard took place, could be applied to the story of the People’s Temple -- the Jones-intoxicated congregation that left its California home and created Jonestown in Guyana.

The horror of Jonestown hit the headlines in 1978, as Stephenson was working on a student project with Rebecca Moore at American University in Washington, D.C. When her classmate suddenly seemed to disappear without explanation, Stephenson quickly learned that two of Moore’s sisters were among Jones’ most loyal followers -- and among the dead. Rebecca had been called to her grieving parents’ side.

After college, Moore and Stephenson remained in touch. In 2000, Moore recruited Stephenson to assist in the research for a Jonestown documentary on the History Channel. Stephenson began reading the historical society’s Jonestown papers, which included oral histories recorded in Jonestown, as well as letters, photos and objects. “I saw how much life there was in the papers,” she says. “What a drama! What could be a way to get more of these voices heard?”

Dower contacted Leigh Fondakowski, the head writer on “Laramie.” Soon Dower’s Z Space Studio had commissioned Fondakowski to develop a People’s Temple play. Stephenson showed historical-society materials to Fondakowski and her team of three writers. The writers also began interviewing people associated with the People’s Temple -- not only surviving ex-members but reporters and politicians. With Z Space lacking the resources for a full production, Berkeley Rep signed on as the main producer.

Despite the worldwide attention paid to Jonestown in 1978, says Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone, the focus in Northern California shifted quickly to the area’s “other great trauma,” the City Hall assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, nine days after the deaths at Jonestown. Now, “with the great benefit of a 27-year hiatus,” Taccone says, Jonestown is once again claiming center stage.

But not Jones himself. He has been covered in books and in a TV movie, broadcast in 1980. “The production is trying not to begin and end with Jim Jones,” Taccone says. “They’re trying to stay away from what we already know.”

The rehearsal hall for “The People’s Temple,” a block south of Berkeley Rep in the city’s downtown, looks too bright and airy for such a somber play. Natural light streams through skylights in the high ceiling.

The room is hardly devoid of humor. On one wall, a gallery of photocopied images from Jonestown is cheekily interrupted by a couple of print ads that feature members of the cast.

Behind stage manager Michael Suenkel’s desk, a “Godspell Meter” hangs on the wall. “There’s a lot of gospel music in the play,” Suenkel explains, “and rehearsals occasionally get a little too ‘Godspell’-y” -- that is, too close to the style of that ‘70s musical. So the meter was created to discourage excessive outbreaks of hippie-gospel vibes.

During this rehearsal, the cast is going over a scene that uses a gospel arrangement of “Amazing Grace.” Because the music is unadorned, without a catchy backbeat, it’s unlikely to trigger the “Godspell Meter.”

Absorbed in the spirit

Miche BRADEN is playing Hyacinth Thrash, who joined the temple with her sister Zipporah Edwards in 1957, before Jones moved the congregation from Indiana to California. In this scene, Hyacinth says her breast cancer was healed after Jones and fellow congregants laid their hands on her at a temple service.

While Braden sits at center stage, speaking Hyacinth’s narration, the other cast members approach her and touch her with healing gestures, while harmonizing on “Amazing Grace.” Following the guidance of Fondakowski and movement coach Jean Isaacs, the cast tries out several positions and paces, not without a joke or two about just where to put their hands.

Suddenly Braden starts to weep. The rehearsal stops. Braden embraces fellow cast member and co-writer Margo Hall. Finally, Braden says she can go on. The rehearsal resumes.

Asked later about the incident, the now-smiling Braden, who’s also the play’s musical director, says, “I just felt something. In church we call it ‘going into spirit.’ ”

Hall sheds a little more light. Back in their hometown of Detroit, Braden knew Hall’s mother -- who died of cancer, the same disease that Hyacinth says Jones cured. Each time Braden said the word “cancer,” Hall says, she was thinking about her mother. Adding to those personal memories, Braden knows -- and the play reveals -- that the real Hyacinth survived Jonestown, while her sister died there.

Hall and Braden share a real-life one degree of separation from Jonestown. From their Detroit years, they both knew Marthea Hicks and her brother Rod Hicks -- two of the play’s characters. Marthea died in Jonestown, along with her sister Shirley. Hall interviewed Rod Hicks during the writing process.

Also, from 1973 to 1975, Braden belonged to a church in Detroit, headed by a charismatic minister, that reminds her in some ways of the People’s Temple. Like the temple members, “we’d go out with cans asking for money,” she says, “and we bought land to create food. It’s spooky to think about it.”

Questions arise from the Jonestown carnage that bear consideration by just about everyone, Fondakowski says -- questions about the human capacity for denial, for violence and for cooperating with coercion.

“I want to move beyond that image of bodies lying in the jungle,” she says. “History is fixed on that image, and it’s so incomprehensible that it’s hard to steer the conversation. This piece stretches our capacity for empathy. They murdered their children -- can they expect empathy? But I’m hoping to find an entry on the human level, so they’re not so far out on the extreme.”

The stage will bring something to the story that is lacking on the page or the screen, Fondakowski says. “The stage can contain many voices, a lot of stories. A dead and a living person can stand on the same stage at the same time. We can easily jump from past to present.” So despite the documentary basis of “The People’s Temple,” don’t expect a naturalistic treatment. “Those expectations will be quickly subverted” by theatrical techniques.

Searching for theatricality

Only 2% to 3% of the material collected in the research will end up onstage. Fondakowski acknowledges that some people resisted being interviewed for that very reason -- they felt that only a couple of minutes of their story would be told. “There’s stuff we love that won’t make it. We have to figure out what is the most theatrical material, not just the best material.”

Fondakowski “was being overly respectful of the interviewees” during part of the process, says Berkeley Rep’s Taccone. “This is a piece of art.”

Hall and Greg Pierotti, the two writers who are also acting in the production (a fourth writer, Stephen Wangh, is not acting), say that because of their dual responsibilities they are probably more reconciled than most of their fellow actors are to the shrinking and other editing of their roles, which was still going on in late March. “You have to be very flexible,” Hall says.

Pierotti worked alongside Fondakowski in “Laramie Project” -- and then moved with her into the even more complex and downbeat “People’s Temple.” The “People’s Temple” process was so fatiguing and the material so depressing, he says, that at one point he quit. But he returned because “the alternative was doing conventional material. I didn’t have it in me.”

The writers’ own religious beliefs were tested during the “People’s Temple” work. Pierotti is a Tibetan Buddhist who follows a particular teacher. He says this created “an interesting dynamic” as he examined the suicidal followers of another, supposedly religious leader. But he says Buddhism and his teacher, unlike Jones, always advocate “using your critical intelligence.”

Hall says she sought counseling from her Baptist minister during the process because “I got wary of religious things, and I didn’t want to lose my spirituality.”

Of the other writers, Fondakowski is Catholic and Wangh a self-described “meditative atheist.” But “all of us are pretty serious humanists,” Pierotti says. “We all want to know what’s the human story here. Why do these people matter?”

Most of the Jonestown dead were African American; Hall is the only African American among the writers and interviewers on the project. The team wasn’t surprised that half of potential interview subjects who are black initially declined interview requests, compared with only a couple of the white subjects. “In one of the first drafts,” Hall says, “there were no black characters. In the first reading, I had to talk about the refusals I had received. I was discouraged.

“We got a lot of black voices later in the process,” as some of those who had been interviewed, she says, vouched for the good intentions of the “People’s Temple” team.

The team also drew on the historical society’s oral histories and letters of black residents of Jonestown. But “the records of the dead are more problematic dramaturgically” than the fresh interviews, Pierotti says. “They don’t necessarily have the natural narratives that we got in our interviews.” Some of the documents written in Jonestown have the ring of propaganda, he adds.

Although the final script was still being revised late last month, Pierotti estimates that 85% of it will be based on the interviews and the remainder on the archival documents.

One of the black subjects who decided to participate late in the process is Eugene Smith, 47. He was working for the temple in Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, when his wife and children died in Jonestown.

“I had been secretive about it, but I got to the point where I had to get it off my chest,” Smith says. He hopes the production “will present views other than the doom and gloom of the tragedy itself. A lot of good things happened in the People’s Temple. We were just regular people.”

As for the tragedy itself, “by hearing the voices of people who were there, hopefully something this horrendous won’t happen again.”

He has read a transcript of his four-hour interview. But he’s ambivalent about attending the opening night. “Are you prepared for the exposure, for the rollercoaster of emotion?” he asks himself. “If the show’s at 7, I’ll say OK at 6, I’m ready to go.”

One of the most talkative survivors is Stephan Jones, 45, one of the three sons of Jim Jones who survived because, when the deaths were taking place, they were in Georgetown for a basketball tournament. He was interviewed 10 times by the “People’s Temple” team. Only one of his brothers cooperated.

Jones has often been approached by would-be scriptwriters who want his story, “but it never felt right. It felt commercial.” His encounters with Fondakowski and Hall were different. “They’re storytellers. They’re artists. They’re passionate and compassionate people.”

He discerns “many parallels between the temple mind and the United States mind.” He hopes that these might become more apparent onstage than in a movie. When the action is live, “the viewer can move from being more of an observer to a participant,” he says. “It’s human beings raw, in the flesh.”

“Let’s lay down our preconceptions and allow ourselves to find ourselves in other people’s stories,” he says. “There was a lot of light and a lot of darkness in the temple. It’s important to present it all.”