by Sami Zahringer, Ojai Valley News
Photo by Alexander Schottky
“Evolution. Religion. Elvis.” All three have incited controversy and provoked passionate feelings in American culture, and all three have met powerfully in the life of Richard Camp.
In his autobiographical comedy-drama “Bless Your Heart” opening September 6 at Ojai ACT, evolution, religion, and Elvis are the catalysts which helped pluck the young protagonist Thomas (portrayed by David Nelson Taylor), out of extreme poverty, away from his abusive step-father, a fire and brimstone Baptist preacher with a sixth-grade education; and Martha, his devoted but poorly educated mother (portrayed by Susan Kelejian.)
From these beginnings in hardscrabble North Carolina, Camp found his way, through education, tenacity, and dumb luck, to Rawlins, a privileged school in Florida. With financial support from an anonymous donor – probably a high school teacher – this penniless boy struggled to fit into the kind of world where parents bought their twin sons matching Porsches for their birthdays. A transformative theater class led him to change his major and, from Rawlins, he launched himself into a successful career in writing and theater, taking in Hollywood an Emmy win and two nominations for screenwriting along the way.
“Bless Your Heart” is in no way meant to be a polemic against faith. Camp chose Tom Eubanks, a staunch conservative evangelical and also the son of a preacher, to direct the show. These two men of very different visions were able to find much common ground with the material and its production. Humor, laughter, warmth and familial love infuse the play despite the serious tensions brought about by the violent father, J.D. (played by Michael Holden) and the competing world-views of Thomas and the rest of his family. In real-life, as school valedictorian, Camp was urged by his teachers to go to college but his father wanted him to drop out and get a job. The light of knowledge and education would be the lamp out of that world for Thomas, as it was for Camp.
Thomas gives his mother an ancient fossil of the first known creature to have evolved eyes on the planet; the first creature therefore to see. Martha (played by Susan Kelejian) tries hard to understand but cannot see how she could have evolved from such a creature. Surely, she comes from Adam and Eve, not this strange, blobby creature in a rock? Ashamed of her 7th grade education and inability to understand, she nevertheless tries and tries, something J.D. is too blind to even approach.
The tension between these two world views, between faith and science and between a loving but mutually baffled mother and son, is treated with both tenderness and humor in “Bless Your Heart,” not rancor.
“It breaks my heart” Lucille says “that I have raised an atheist!” But neither Thomas in the play, nor Camp in real life is an atheist. As agnostics their argument is not with God or God’s existence, it is with religion. They cannot believe in the type of capricious, vengeful God they were taught with fear to worship as children. They cannot believe in a 6,000-year-old anthropocentric world with the overwhelming evidence of their eyes on the fossil record, and from the light of the stars is that the universe is at least 142 billion years old.
Thomas and Martha share a love for Elvis along with Thomas’s shriekingly funny, eleven-times married aunt, Lucille (Julia Hamann) a woman not short on opinions or, it seems, energy. “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit!” is her favorite catchphrase.
The supporting cast also includes Chance Kelejian as John David, Thomas’s younger brother, and KiSea Katikka as Chelsea, David’s fiancé, who is not what she seems at first glance.
With “Bless Your Heart” Camp wants to present in honest, human terms the complexities of, and strictures upon the very poor, white, working class in America. It is a population under-represented in our culture and especially on our stages. It is the source of much good and much evil, fun and pain, and as such, fertile ground for both humor and drama. Evangelical Christian director, Eubanks, who wants the Christian community to come and see the play, and Agnostic playwright, Camp, have assembled an outstanding cast for this thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and also very funny production.