Hell's a disappointment

In Religion & Theater today we tried to recreate the most exciting discussion from the last time around, updating questions from morality plays like "Everyman" and Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" by turning to Hell Houses, contemporary evangelical Christian haunted houses with a mission. I'm not sure it quite worked.... This might be because the lessons C and I learned from it (and even took on the road to the ATHE) have already been woven into the class, or might be because we started the class with the "Hell House" film and have now looped back to look at it in a different light, but the start of the semester feels oh so long ago. Been there, done that! Some interesting discussion, though, about a recent performance of a Hell House by a secular theater company in Brooklyn, Les Frères Corbusier, of which I found a video (where else?) on youtube. What were they doing, how should one judge it, does it show the power of theater to broaden understanding? An article about a religious Hell House and this one, by Ann Pellegrini, showed categories used by Les Frères about their performance ("authentic" and "sincere" and not "ironic") to be slipperier than they realized. Performance aims to go beyond all of them...