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After dinner one night, Carl and Anna Maria engage in a typical activity in their cerebral existence: they sit and read The New York Times to each other. They discuss a story about the Shroud of Turin having been stolen from its Italian museum. This initiates one of their standard arguments: he bemoans her disinterest in their physical and emotional relationship, while she laments his inability to make progress on a book that he is writing. They are a typical young professional couple. A few years ago, they moved to Bozeman, MT because Carl received a job as an assistant professor of history at Montana State University.

Carl, 33, has indeed been struggling to write the book, a revision of his polemical dissertation arguing the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as a cure for contemporary American religious apathy. Carl was a stand-out Ph.D. student in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he and Anna Maria met, but he has never quite lived up to his early potential.

For her part, Anna Maria, 34, a biochemist with an M.D./Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis, is significantly more accomplished than Carl. But, since they had a two-year-old toddler, she found herself forced to follow him to Bozeman or endure an indefinite long-distance relationship in which one parent would be permanently separated from their son, Johan. Anna Maria is quietly resentful of Carl’s inability to get a teaching position in California.

However, not being one for self-pity, once in Bozeman, Anna Maria worked hard to succeed. Having tried but failed to find a position worthy of her talents at the university, Anna Maria founded a biotechnology start-up company. Anna Maria’s quick success in making a go of the company has put further strain on her marriage with Carl: she demonstrates in words and actions his limitations at successfully completing the work that society rewards. In keeping with this world-view, for the past year, Anna Maria has been attempting to build venture capital interest in her company. Indeed, just before tonight’s tumultuous dinner, Anna Maria received the exciting news that she has been awarded a multi-million dollar grant to do work on a new line of animal tissue cloning that would one day potentially help infertile couples have children.

Anna Maria, who was raised a Lutheran by her strict parents but is now a willful atheist, is reluctant to tell Carl about the research award. Carl is a devout Catholic, and, despite the fact that they have long since amicably worked through their religious differences--Anna Maria consented to raise Johan as a Catholic—Anna Maria’s new work would surely suffer Carl’s moralizing scrutiny. Given the other strains on their relationship, Anna Maria thinks it best not to breach the subject now.

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Months having passed in this state of tension, Anna Maria has begun her work on the new research, making quick and steady progress. Carl has continued to sputter, getting some writing done here and there, but overall being too easily distracted by teaching and other academic interests of his. The marriage has continued to decay.

At the health club she attends, Anna Maria finds herself unusually attracted to another member, J.R. When he asks her to go for a drink afterwards, Anna Maria surprises herself by agreeing to the illicit rendezvous. At a quiet restaurant downtown, she learns that J.R. is in some ways like Carl, yet another man in her life incapable of living out his responsibilities. J.R. had been a very successful antiquities dealer in Los Angeles. Having finally gotten sick of the fast pace and phoniness of life there, J.R. came to Montana. He now lives in a small apartment, works at a ski shop putting bindings on skis, and spends most of his free time skiing and hiking. Despite her disdain for J.R.’s childishness, she pursues an affair with him, mostly out of ennui with her failing marriage.

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One night, J.R. visits Anna Maria at her lab. She shows him her research findings. She has successfully been using tissue cultures from dead animals to harvest DNA and create living animals. They discuss the ethical and philosophical ramifications of the research. Unlike the moralizing Anna Maria expects from Carl, J.R. gets excited at the possibility of exploiting the research for profit. In direct address to the audience, J.R. plots to get in contact with some of his former colleagues in Los Angeles, arguing that this research could be used to bring to life people from the past, and could serve as J.R.’s ticket to fame and fortune.

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Thirty-three years later. Once again, Anna Maria and Carl are revealed in their ritualized dinner tableau. Anna Maria has long since broken off the affair with J.R., and has returned to her state of passive repression. Carl finally did write his book, which earned him tenure, but he has done little else to fulfill his promise since. Now in their mid-60s, Anna Maria is astonished to read in The New York Times that someone has claimed to have cloned Jesus from the Shroud of Turin. Carl initiates a conversation about the implications of the research, which has been performed in Los Angeles secretly, and without the tight medical and ethical supervision typical within the United States. Anna Maria’s aloof air during the conversation changes drastically when, in the background of a photograph of the researchers, Anna Maria spots an aged but still recognizable J.R. Realizing that her research of long ago has been stolen, and used for fully illegal human cloning, Anna Maria books a flight to Los Angeles.

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Anna Maria tracks J.R. to a taping of a Nightline-like television program, in which the Archbishop of Boston and J.R., as representative of the researchers, debate the ethics of human cloning. Mid-way through the show, J.R. brings out the 33-year-old man, whom he claims is Jesus. The man is soft-spoken and speaks in ways that one would stereotypically associate with Jesus: he especially laments human indifference to the pain and suffering of others. In what clearly seems a gimmick, J.R. has arranged for Jesus to heal a man who is dying from the last stages of AIDS. Voicing reasoned skepticism, the television host interrogates the man’s status as Jesus, and the authenticity of the spectacle before his audience.

J.R. explains the science behind the researchers having scraped cells off the Shroud of Turin in order to find the preserved DNA necessary to inject into a viable human embryo. The Archbishop explains calmly that the Shroud was revealed to have been a fake, but J.R. replies that all one need do is talk with the test-tube Jesus to validate his authenticity. As the taping finishes, an astonished audience is left speechless. Busy reveling in his hijacked infamy, J.R. does not recognize the aged Anna Maria in the back of the audience.

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During the next few weeks, a media circus ensues. Fanatics of all sorts gather in front of the hotel in which J.R. and the test-tube Jesus are staying during their publicity barrage. In particular, Christians have been decidedly split over this unprecedented historical development. Most Protestant fundamentalists are outraged over the claim that the man is Jesus, claiming another example of science’s assault on their religion. Other less literal-minded believers argue that there is no reason that the Second Coming spoken of in the Book of Revelations could not be an allegorical rendering of what the scientists have accomplished. Such believers have begun to form a cult following the teachings of the test-tube Jesus.

Amidst this backdrop, Anna Maria confronts J.R. in front of the hotel about his unethical hijacking of her research. J.R. smugly claims that her research was intended to help infertile couples conceive, and that he has fulfilled this promise at the ultimate level, through an Immaculate Conception for the 21^st century. J.R. and the test-tube Jesus are whisked away into a limousine, hurried off to their next press conference. Anna Maria is left standing among the chaos of the religious protests.

Scene 7

Anna Maria returns home to Bozeman, and to Carl. She explains her connections to the events of the past weeks, telling Carl the full story of her affair with J.R. all those many years ago. The thirty-year overdue break-up of their marriage becomes explicitly connected to their differences in religious views. Carl believes that the man really is Jesus, while Anna Maria is fixated on J.R.’s theft of her research to produce a charlatan human clone off some cells from a medieval hoax. Hurt by the revelation of the affair, but moreso by the severity of their life-long difference in religious world-views, Carl packs his clothes and finally leaves Anna Maria.

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Six months later, the federal government is prosecuting J.R. and the scientists for having conducted the illegal human cloning research. Anna Maria is the chief witness for the prosecution against J.R., due to her knowledge of his direct theft of her research. During her testimony, she refuses to acknowledge that the test-tube Jesus is anything other than a lab experiment. The federal government easily wins the case, sending J.R. and the principal researchers to jail. Anna Maria presses for the euthanasia of the experimental subject, because he is a daily reminder of the perversion of her research.

Outside the courtroom, it is revealed that Carl has joined the cult of disciples following the teachings of the test-tube Jesus. He and his supporters pray quietly on the steps of the courthouse. Anna Maria confronts him on the steps. They share a tender conversation: Carl has learned from the test-tube Jesus the necessity of forgiving Anna Maria. They walk off together, entertaining the possibility of a reconciliation.

Scene 9

In secret, the government, feeling the test-tube Jesus is in fact a threat, pursues Anna Maria’s plan of euthanasia. Feeling pangs of regret, Anna Maria tips off Carl as to the time and place of the execution. The curtain falls as Carl and Anna Maria witness the test-tube Jesus meeting the fate of his namesake.

“The Test-tube Jesus” is principally my attempt to work through a high-concept idea I had one night in which a scientist scrapes cells off of the Shroud of Turin in order to clone Jesus. After telling my production students at the University of Texas the next morning that I finally had a viable creative idea, they laughed at me, telling me the idea had already been done, in the guise of a Star Trek episode about the Klingons cloning their mythological religious figure. Feeling I had been scooped, I didn’t give the idea much further thought.

Unwilling to give up on my pretensions to a career as a creative writer, I returned to the cliché governing all neophyte writers: “write what you know.” And so, I began to formulate a script about a humanities academic, much like myself, and his relationship with his smarter and harder-working wife, a scientist, much like my wife, Anneke. Anneke is a religious person, a practicing Catholic, while I am a “willfully stubborn atheist” (as I phrase it in the treatment); I’m intrigued by the dynamics of this relationship, as many of the most interesting conversations we have concern religion. She typically interrogates my absurd misanthropy, one manifestation of which is my inability to get along with the people at her church, largely because they are part of an elitist organization founded on exclusivity. For my part, I interrogate her seemingly naïve belief in a God who could have allowed the Holocaust and the development of the atomic bomb.

I wrote the script by reversing some of our characteristics, inspired in particular by the central conceit of “The X-Files,” one of my favorite television programs. The central thematic genius of that show is that it reverses the gendered history of Western philosophy, in which the masculine is associated with reason and the feminine with emotion. In “The X-Files,” it is the man, Agent Mulder, who believes in the supernatural, while his partner, Agent Scully, is the disbelieving rationalist. So as I wrote the script for my relationship melodrama, I reversed the religious beliefs held by Anneke and me in order to interrogate these standard narrative assumptions about masculinity’s logic and femininity’s irrationality.

In thinking how I might emplot the religious differences of interest to me, I began to see how the idea of cloning Christ might work as a narrative device to initiate these religious conversations. “The Test-tube Jesus” is the direct result of the collapse of the idea of a script about religious differences in a romantic relationship and one about the cloning of Jesus. The treatment thus features Carl as a Catholic who responds with hope at the arrival of the Jesus clone, while Anna Maria’s reaction is one of cynical skepticism, despite the irony of her research being responsible for the cloning in the first place.

Being a fan of aggressive, modernist art that assaults the logic of classicism, I knew that I wanted the script to embody alternative narrative and aesthetic principles. As I imagined what the response to the cloning of Jesus might be, I began thinking a lot about Bertolt Brecht’s play, Galileo, another text that concerns an oppressive response to religious ideas deemed heretical. Brecht produces his alienation effect in Galileo by resisting Aristotelian structure; he constructs the play around a large number of fractured scenes rather than three coherent acts. In my treatment, I use the same principle to resist classical structure; in particular, I am quite fond of the tremendous disruption produced at the mid-point by having to shift 33 years into the future, so that the test-tube Jesus is the appropriate age to die as per the story of the original Christ.

I also use other standard Brechtian techniques, particularly in the characterization of J.R. Most importantly, the conclusion to scene 3, in which J.R. informs the audience of his scheme to steal Anna Maria’s research for his own profit, is delivered in direct address. In constructing this scene, I was specifically inspired by Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. At the opening of that play, Peachum addresses the audience to inform us of his diabolical scheme to run a business teaching beggars to be better at inspiring pity, so that he may skim a percentage of their proceeds for himself. Because this treatment is so drawn to intertextually rework Brecht, I now conceive as a play what originally began as a film script.

Brecht serves as not only an aesthetic inspiration but also a political one. Brecht believed that the aesthetic revolution of his epic theatre was directly linked to a political revolution. In what he termed the “gest,” Brecht argued that epic theatre produced a political commentary that forced the spectator to take action after the play was over. I believe the gest of “The Test-tube Jesus” lies in its engagement with the possibility that religion and science are not necessarily mutually incompatible discursive systems. The inability to profitably mine these connections has led to irrationalism, witnessed in the recent decision by the Kansas school board to treat Creationism, a literalist interpretation of the Bible, as just as valid as evolutionary theory, a scientifically well-supported structure, fully compatible with allegorical interpretations of the Bible. The strength of “The Test-tube Jesus”--what I believe makes the script avoid didacticism--is that the cloning of Jesus is subject to this very same argument between literalists and allegorists. On the one hand, the Fundamentalists see the cloning as an act of scientific arrogance, meddling with what is only God’s right to create. Carl and the disciples of the test-tube Jesus, on the other hand, pursue an allegorical hermeneutic with respect to The Book of Revelations. If Genesis describes figuratively the scientific fact of evolution, then perhaps Revelations describes figuratively the second coming of Christ as a cloning event.

Finally, the gendered nature of creativity is also allegorized in “The Test-tube Jesus.” In “From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death,” feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox-Keller suggests that both physical and biological science has always been about men’s attempts in the laboratory to replicate women’s natural ability to reproduce. Her most compelling example of this is the nuclear scientists’ nomenclature for the atomic and hydrogen bomb as “Oppenheimer’s baby” and “Teller’s baby,” respectively. Fox-Keller argues that “Life has traditionally been seen as the secret of women, a secret from men” (40). I thus once again return to scene 3 of “The Test-tube Jesus” as being the crucial thematic locus of the piece: here J.R., the Brechtian villain, penetrates the womb-like space of Anna Maria’s lab, and steals her mastery of the secret of life.[1] Complicating Fox-Keller’s argument, my play produces Anna Maria’s control over reproduction as both a question of scientific mastery (her ability to successfully clone) and as linked to the maternal (she is herself a mother, but is also working on research that will potentially aid infertile women).

This focus on gender and scientific creativity drives an intertextual connection between “The Test-tube Jesus” and a much more neglected theatrical tradition than Brecht. For unlike Brecht, who was resolutely unwilling to analyze patriarchy from the same critical filter as he did class, Susan Glaspell’s play The Verge offers a crucial model. In this 1921 play, Glaspell features a woman scientist whose own attempt to break out of the oppressive mold of patriarchally-constituted female identity, is allegorized in her raising of plants. She genetically engineers two plants to attempt to break out of the mode of the normal. The death of the plant in her attempt is mirrored in her own suicide at the end of the play. Set in a historical moment a century later, “The Test-tube Jesus” is a little more hopeful about the possibility of the female scientist to go about her work unfettered, but no less pessimistic about humanity’s ability to learn from its past mistakes.

---. The Threepenny Opera. In Walter Levy (Ed.) Modern Drama. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1998.

Fox-Keller, Evelyn. Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Glaspell, Susan. The Verge. In Walter Levy (Ed.) Modern Drama. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1998.

[1] The connection to Brecht is of course not inconsequential here. His 1946 re-write of Galileo directly forges the connection between Galileo’s decision to crack under the pressure of the Inquisition to the atomic bomb scientists’ decision to prostitute themselves for the American military.

Questions or comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send an e-mail to: metz@montana.edu

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