This spring, Alternate College Theatre performed its first-ever original musical: Mania, a dark comedy written by Blake Sheridan of the class of 2024. Sheridan also stars as Billy Higgins, a father who offers to coach a struggling boys’ soccer team mostly so he can antagonize a rival coach, his old enemy Bruce (Frank Amuso). At their first match, passive-aggressive conflict builds between the families of each team, culminating when the referee (Max Coté) reveals himself to be a damned soul involved in a type of spiritual pyramid scheme, releases hallucinogens over the playing field, and encourages the characters to murder each other.
If that sounds dark, it is. It’s also very funny. I’m quick to see a clichéd gag approaching and have sometimes felt vicarious embarrassment for less-than-original “comedies,” but Mania’s humor consistently surprised me and evoked genuine laughter throughout. Acting, directing, and production were all excellent. What most interested me about Mania, though, was its engagement with religion. As a dilettante art critic, I consume film and literature reviews regularly, and in this process I’ve sometimes heard Christian critics praise a work for exploring “the absence of God.” I never quite understood this sentiment. Granted that such an exploration doesn’t make art bad, why would it inherently be a point in the art’s favor? Perhaps the highest praise I can give for Mania is that I finally understand what those critics were getting at.
It would be easy to construe Mania as anti-religious, or at least nihilistic. The storyline is quite brutal at times, and there aren’t any clear rays of grace. Petty grudges spiral into violence. A dead character (Connor Morine) who, though past the age of reason, seems too young to have committed mortal sins is unambiguously shown in hell (or at least an afterlife that’s enthusiastically marketing itself as such). The antagonist runs gleefully through the show without seeming to receive any comeuppance, and nobody else has a happy ending. By the time one of the characters (Hillary Boadu) protests her Christianity and expresses the belief that God will rescue her, we’ve seen enough of the show’s world to be doubtful of this prediction, and in any case, her treatment of others to that point has been far from an example of Christian virtue.
Yet though I’m usually quite attuned to digs at religion in media, I never felt that Mania was goading me. Part of this was due to it demonstrating a clearer understanding of Christian theology than most supernatural fiction. Seeing an afterlife cashing in on pop-culture images of hell, one character remarks that it doesn’t look too bad — whereupon the referee explains, quite rightly, that the chief torment is not physical punishment but decay of the soul. While most supernatural fiction tends to portray demons as ordinary bogeymen with an end goal to frighten or kill people, Mania’s referee is far more orthodox, striving to corrupt characters and noting that he doesn’t benefit by directly killing them himself. (The referee isn’t a demon, but he serves one.) It helps that, though many stories which try to subvert Christianity portray the demonic as a positive and misunderstood force, Mania never paints its antagonist as anything but villainous; and while the pious characters come in for their share of satire, the script is ultimately even-handed in its distribution of both criticism and understanding to all characters.
I have suggested that Mania explores the absence of God. What particularly intrigues me is how this theme is handled. In a purely nihilistic production, the absence of an ultimate good would be taken for granted, and it’s unlikely the villains would be couched in religious terms because religion would simply be irrelevant. Yet Mania’s referee explicitly engages with Christian typology. He relates a conversation he purportedly had with Satan and frequently switches from speech to cant, evoking — especially given the musical’s debut at a Jesuit university — a priest celebrating Mass. Both of these behaviors challenge the reading that God is simply nonexistent in Mania’s world. Satan’s very identity implies opposition; if God doesn’t exist, whom did Satan rebel against? Why? If religion is irrelevant, why does the referee satirize liturgical language instead of, say, royal addresses or terms-and-conditions disclaimers? These things do not negate God’s absence in Mania, but the negative space becomes a paradoxical presence, suggesting the necessity of God by drawing our attention to what’s missing.
At rare moments, other characters indicate that the bleak world of Mania is not the status quo. Near the beginning of Act II, the referee explains to the deceased young character whom I previously mentioned that he avoids the torments of hell by tempting other souls to damnation. After the vicious conflicts and self-serving behavior of Act I, one might reasonably expect the dead player to want in on the scheme. Instead, he protests, “But that’s immoral!” Much closer to the show’s end, another character (Erin Ledwith) defiantly asserts that the referee won’t get away with his crimes. The villain laughs it off, but this sense of justice should give us pause. None of the preceding events encourage the idea that Mania’s world is just; indeed, the character speaks these words bitterly amidst a field of bodies. So from where does she derive her knowledge of how things are “supposed” to be?
The story’s status as a theatrical comedy is relevant here, I think. More than any other medium, theater draws attention to its artificiality. Sets are disassembled before the audience’s eyes; dead characters get up and walk offstage at scene changes; and, of course, all of the actors reappear together for bows at the end, dispelling the illusion of enmity between them. Mania particularly embraces its fictionality when, near the climax, the referee directly addresses the audience members to mock them for their silence and stillness. As we should expect from a dark comedy, which invites us to laugh at things that would be unpleasant in real life, Mania frequently reminds us that the story is a secondary world, not the primary one, and should be engaged with as such. Perhaps this is how the characters dimly know, despite lack of evidence in their own world, what morality and justice should look like. Their world cannot exist independently but requires our world’s rules for a foundation, even when those rules are internally defied. Or perhaps Mania is simply making a point about reality. Even in our world, we sometimes know what the ideal should look like despite lacking an experiential foundation for that understanding. From where do we derive this knowledge?
My ultimate conclusion is thus. Mania is, I think, doing something complex with its religious themes. It does not make assertions about God’s status in our world. Rather, it posits a hypothetical world in which God is conspicuously absent, then asks us to contemplate that world. What would existence there be like? What would happen to morality? Does that world even make sense? Mania provides no easy answers, but it suggests — by illustrating evil as dependent on a higher good to flout, by challenging whether reality can be unjust unless there exists some external standard of justice — that the questions are more complex than one might think.
As a Catholic, I also appreciate Mania’s exploration of the absence of God for another reason. Mania debuted on Thursday, March 21st — almost exactly one week before Good Friday, when Catholics are asked to reflect on the crucifixion and death of God. We should not gloss over the existential horror those ideas should provoke. Yet it can be hard to internalize in the modern day, when Easter is familiar and we are used to happier holidays. At the end of this Lent, I appreciated the chance to (lightly, humorously) stare into the void and ponder what the world would be like without an omnibenevolent foundation.
I would ordinarily finish this review by stating whether I’d recommend the show to others, offering qualifications for those who might find the material intense, and exhorting the rest of the target audience to see it. (Here’s a litmus test: if you can see the funny side of a character attempting to kill somebody with a modified t-shirt cannon, Mania is for you.) Unfortunately, Mania has had its full run at Holy Cross, and while I’d highly recommend it to all readers, there is no news yet of where one might catch it in the future. So I shall close with this recommendation: watch the careers of those involved in Mania. There was a lot of talent on display in this production, and I would not be surprised to see it bear more fruit in the years to come. With luck, the future will bring more unique offerings from students involved in every aspect of Mania’s production.
Overall grade: A