Getting to closing weekend for ALTARCATIONS
June 19, 2012When I learned in early 2011 that my high school principal, a Catholic priest, had enjoyed a year-long sexual relationship with a female student in the mid 1960s, I yearned to write a play. Altarcations slowly began to take shape. Previous working titles included Sin, Worship and Our Father and each was composed of either two, three, four or five characters.
Last fall I entered the playwrights unit at Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA and we read portions of it around a table. Suggestions. Questions. Changes.
Finally an entry in the Hollywood Fringe Festival this month.
We opened on June 8 after a very easy casting process, aided in part by my having seen Travis Michael Holder in The Good Book of Pedantry and Wonder at Boston Court a couple of years ago and having mentioned the project to Maggie Grant of 3 Roses Players. She recommended Robert Keasler (Father Bart). Travis coincidentally was one of Drew Hellenthal’s (Tommy) teachers at NYFA (Ne...
How a NYT article became this play
June 02, 2012We open Altarcations in six days. Today we tech.
Here’s a story.
I graduated Damien High School in La Verne in 1976. Graduation as a Spartan was threatened, however, by a decision I made in my senior year as editor of the school paper, The Laconian.
While I suspect we had no descendants of ancient Laconia or its capital city Sparta, we did have among our all boys’ Catholic student body several agnostics, atheists and other non-Catholics. I had come from Lutheran schools.
A fellow student – agnostic or atheist, I don’t recall – scribed an op-ed piece that protested the school’s policy of everyone attending a weekly mass during school hours, regardless of his religious point of view. Neil, however, submitted it without a title so I stuck “Mass-O-Chist” above the piece.
These were the days when we laid out a paper by hand. It was sent out Friday afternoon and printed at the Claremont Courier.
On Mo...
Steve Julian writes and helms ALTARCATIONS, a look at the Catholic Church abuse scandal
May 25, 2012LOS ANGELES,CA (May 21, 2012) – At the corner of faith and justice, a Catholic bishop’s power alters the course of life for a troubled priest, his naïve and faithful protégé, and the woman who may have all the true power. KPCC radio host and playwright/director Steve Julian’s 2012 Hollywood Fringe Festival play Altarcations confronts abuse at the hands of priests who often are guarded by a powerful Byzantine boys club.
Lust, power, religion, and piety come to the fore in Altarcations, which pulls from real life stories to reveal the alarmingly darker nature of the church, its hypocrisy in shielding abusive priests, and the wisdom of redemption. Do we really need to see the Catholic church’s underbelly, especially when we’re inundated by new stories of priest abuse? Julian believes we do.
“I was fortunate during twelve years of Protestant and Catholic parochial schools. I was never abused. B...