The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping (review)

The Reverend Billy Project is a performance diary-cum-manifesto that Alisa Solomon describes in her excellent introduction as a collection of "reflective, narrative, analytical, and homiletic story-essays and sermons" (8). This accessible work follows the experiences of its co-authors, Bill Talen (a.k.a. Reverend Billy) and Savitri D (his director and wife), without attention to chronology between 2004 and 2008. The frenetic nature of the book's structure mirrors that of the performer at its center, Talen, who may be one of the most popular and influential performance activists working in America today. In his guise as Reverend Billy, Talen co-opts the persona of a spirited televangelist to preach a message of anticonsumerism, anticorporatizationism, and free expression. He performs his stage shows and public "interventions" dressed in a white dinner jacket and clerical collar, sporting a blond pompadour, and joined by a well-rehearsed choir from the Church of Stop Shopping. The focus of the book is the process by which Talen evolved from a solitary preacher in front of the Times Square Disney Store to the popular phenomenon he represents today. Talen and Savitri's highly effective approach—the use of revivalist church traditions for radical political ends—has already attracted the attention of numerous scholars; indeed, the couple has motivated audiences to action in ways rarely seen since the heady days of performance activism in the 1960s. This most recent book is both important and timely, as Talen's significant involvement with the "Occupy" movements both here and abroad has brought him increased public attention, as well as provided him with a newly invigorated congregation of activists, artists, and "ninety-nine percenters."

Each of the book's thirteen chapters is dedicated to a different activist cause and its corresponding performance. The early sections detail a number of Billy's interventions at Starbucks coffeehouses. In Los Angeles he exorcises a cash register; in Barcelona he and a group of Spanish radicals lick the restaurant and then simulate vomiting as a way of rejecting the unnatural agent that has infiltrated the cultural landscape. Talen and Savitri alternate as narrator in the book, sometimes retelling the same story from their different perspectives. This involves not only the rehashing of performances, which constitutes highly entertaining reading, but also reflections on the process by which a political goal is channeled into a performance concept. The authors spend as much time discussing their failures as they do their successes. This postperformance analysis, especially those sections written by Savitri, identifies the difficulties in creating criteria for criticism of such unorthodox work. How, after all, can one measure success against a monolith like Starbucks, Disney, or the addictive opiate that is consumer culture? Other passages underscore the practical difficulties of living as a dedicated political activist. After one Starbucks intervention, Talen is arrested, raising the question of where the line between him and his persona is drawn; essentially, Reverend Billy commits the crime, but Talen does the time.

Further highlights include Savitri taking on a performance role and staging a nine-day fast while displaying herself as the "Mermaid Queen" in a storefront window. As the focus of the fifth chapter, her performance is part of an effort to halt the rezoning of Coney Island for the sake of corporate acquisition and outlines a powerful experiment on how to accentuate and amplify one's message. Chapter eleven is one of the book's most compelling, detailing the steps by which the computerized image of Elvis performing on American Idol leads to a powerful sermon on the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The unsettling image of Elvis appropriated by corporate forces prompts research, experimentation, and improvisation, and resolves itself in a performance aimed at channeling the dreams of Dr. King and the spirit of the Civil Rights...