Issues of gun control, faith to play out in Modesto

A politician’s off-the-cuff remarks go viral, suddenly putting his re-election in jeopardy. Sounds like just another indiscreet moment in the political scene of today, yes?

Not this time. Here the politician is fictional and his remarks are written by playwright Jason Odell Williams whose dramedy “Church & State” seems almost prescient to current day headlines.

And that’s part of what drew Modesto-area theater veteran Jim Johnson to bring the play to a Modesto Junior College stage for a six-performance run, Jan. 25-27 and Feb. 2-4.

“It’s a timely play and couldn’t be more relevant,” said Johnson, who serves as producer, director and star as incumbent U.S. Republican Senator Charles Whitmore. Merced theater vet Heike Hambley is offering an assist with the directing duties.

Set three days before Election Day, Whitmore is vying to keep his post in North Carolina. Polls put him in a dead heat with his opponent until he makes an indiscreet remark to a blogger about guns and God.

The play begins just after a school shooting in Raleigh, a tragedy that’s traumatized the community and the senator, who visits the school site immediately after the shooting. Though his TV ads promote him as a Second Amendment protector, the shooting makes him doubt his stance on guns and leads him to a crisis of faith.

Johnson said Williams wrote the play after a series of mass shootings in the United States, beginning with the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007.

While the topics are deeply serious, the play also has plenty of humor, something the author purposely included, according to Johnson who said the author believes “you can’t have a play just forcing people to listen to issues.”

Those issues of gun control and faith make for a hot-button play. To gauge reaction, Johnson and his castmates did a reading for 25 members of the public, including two ministers – one from a conservative church, one from a more liberal one.

“My concern was that they were going to be offended by the content and both of them said, ‘Absolutely not, we deal with crises of faith every day’,” Johnson said. The discussion was “pretty lively” but all agreed that “this is a very patriotic play.”

It’s also timely. The cast has discussed how closely headlines from the recent Alabama elections were to what’s in the play. “Charles Barkley, for example, said ‘Alabamans, we’ve got to stop embarrassing ourselves’ – that’s right out of this play,” Johnson said, just a different state.

There also are echos of President Trump’s administration, he said. “The problem I (the character of the senator) get into is I go off script publicly and I’m supposed to stay with the same message and, like Trump, I can’t do that.”

Other cast members include Charlene West as the senator’s wife Sara Whitmore, Kimberly Ogden as his aide Alex Klein and Trey Augustus in a variety of other roles.

Video by Wes Page will be incorporated throughout the relatively short play, which clocks in at 80 minutes. After the Feb. 2 performance, there will be a panel discussion with ministers and people on opposite sides of gun control issues who will speak and take questions and comments from the audience.

This story was originally published January 17, 2018 at 11:58 AM with the headline "Issues of gun control, faith to play out in Modesto."