Gina Spence's latest production in Christ is a collage of images that come together to relay a message of intolerance and staunch conservatism that is quite a bit unsettling at this stage of our collective development.

The play follows the life of one family from the point when the only son/brother is killed in a bike accident, to when the entire family is re-united in heaven.

Along the way we are treated to intermittent commentary by `Deception' (played quite well by Chris Paul) and `Reality' (played by Brendell Hall), as well as glimpses of the family's various struggles throughout life.

The struggles include a shaky father-daughter relationship, a shaky mother-daughter relationship, a stand against pre-marital sex and a bout with drug abuse. Tia (played spectacularly by Tamesha Hodgson) is the archetypal `wild' daughter, who dresses `like a heathen', hangs out all hours in the night with various male company and leaves drug envelopes in her jeans for her `concerned' mother to find.

Lisa (played by Alisha Hodge) is the `good' daughter who has a few problems communicating with her dad (but who doesn't?), refuses to entertain the idea of having sex with her boyfriend of a year and starts a youth group to talk about the trials and tribulations of family life for teen-aged Christians.

The parents, Mr. and Mrs. Wade, are played with satisfactory skill by Freddy Simmons and Gina Spence respectively, and most of the scenes involving the family are quite entertaining (although they may just be entertaining for the wrong reasons I suspect).

The problem arises when the production tries to get too preachy, and depicts the kinds of things that cannot be known, or are highly improbable!

One example of this is when, on `Judgment Day' (a truly unfortunate scene), God chastises the good Reverend Doolittle for misusing the Gospel and being more concerned with the advancement of his own lot than the lot of his `flock', then admits the wayward Reverend with the warning that `I won't forget your indescrepancies' (or something like that).

So here the Rev. is, trying his best to tread lightly around the Kingdom of Heaven, having read and believed his entire life that once he was admitted to the Kingdom, his life of selfish servitude would be wiped away i.e., the slate would be cleaned.

Now why would a bunch of good Christian folk get together and try to accurately predict, by way of depiction, what the Lord would say and do on Judgement Day?

That seems a bit arrogant to me ... what do you think?

Scene eight was perhaps the most tasteless thing I have seen on a local stage in decades!

See it did not stop with the Reverend ... they went on to depict what would happen if a young man dressed in Kente Cloth espousing the teachings of the Rastafarian faith was to come before the Lord on Judgement Day.

It seems he would be turned away for praising a God other than the one and only Creator.

What this depiction fails to consider is that Rastafarians do not worship a different God!

In fact, they emphasise in every facet of their belief that there is only one God, and that the people of Earth are all of one blood, one aim and one destiny.

It seems painfully obvious from this scene that Christianity holds no such tenets.

Then there was the time when Sister Sally Mae, a good, God-fearing, Church-going woman got up to the mic and proceeded to dictate to God the conditions of her admittance into Heaven.

The Zealot was turned away with expedient force for failing to help a vagrant in need, but not before showing the Lord as much disrespect and disdain as she once showed that same dishevelled vagrant.

Sally Mae (played with aplomb by Roshanda Trott) stormed off the stage declaring at the top of her lungs "I'll be back!", which garnered quite a festive response from the medium-sized crowd.

This woman was depicted shouting and screaming back at God, and for some reason this was deemed funny and amusing by a room full of Christians ... its no wonder our children see nothing wrong with screaming down their teachers and any other authority figure that gets in their way.

Where are we going people?

The Judgement Day scene was horrid, and if I had not been working, I would have walked out well before the end of this production.

I mean, the central theme of the play was not at all bad, but the vehicles used to deliver that theme were crude and, frankly, offensive.

We have all seen depictions of the gates of Heaven and the admission process on television and in the movies many times, but those are excusable because we tend to think that Hollywood does not know any better.

Well Gina Spence does!

And if she does not, she should.

This kind of dogmatic fundamentalist propaganda is what started the crusades a few centuries ago, simultaneously triggering the start of the most heinous period of human bondage and abuse that the Earth has ever seen.

Yes ... it was the Church that first went into Africa ... it was the Church that invaded North America and all but eradicated the indigenous peoples ... it is the Church that continues to preach intolerance and disdain for things that the Church is, more often that not, completely ignorant of!

This play, and that scene in particular, is the kind of thing that causes rifts in the harmony of human relations, and what makes this incident so disturbing is that it was written and directed by Christians.

You see, when Hollywood does this kind of thing, we know it is fiction, and that no one really believes what has been written (yes, even if they wrote it themselves), but when a local Christian production company puts this kind of thing on stage, its a pretty safe bet that whoever wrote it believes it with their entire soul ... that, my friends, is very dangerous.

The truth is the truth, and I take that commandment about lying very seriously.

This article was not easy to write, but I felt that it was necessary ... let the castigations begin.