The Gospel According to Billy

His pulpit, when he performs in theaters, is a red Village Voice distribution box stolen from a street corner, with his own picture displayed in the window. He wears a clerical collar over a black shirt and a white dinner jacket, the bleached-blond tips of his Roy Orbison hairdo adding just the right touch to his uncannily accurate Jimmy Swaggart imitation. He rushes in, flashes a politician's smile, and begins preaching to his typically hip downtown congregation of faithful nonbelievers: "We believe in the God that people who don't believe in God believe in. Hallelujah!"

This is Reverend Billy, a.k.a. Bill Talen, minister of the Church of Stop Shopping, and over the past few years his brand of mock evangelism poised on the border of real belief has risen to lucent prominence in the depressed landscape of radical theater in New York. Talen is a self-sacrificial political gadfly, a theatrical species generally given up for dead in the United States--Alisa Solomon calls him "the Al Sharpton of the ultra-ironic yet politically committed downtown set"--and like his spiritual predecessors in the 1960s, he doesn't confine himself to the controlled environments of auditoriums and playhouses. With startling information-age savvy, he also dreams up pointed and often hilarious guerrilla theater for (in his words) "the tight proscenium arches that are in the subways, in the lobbies of buildings, and in parks."

In 1997 Talen began preaching on the sidewalk outside the Times Square Disney Store, eventually conducting numerous "preach-ins" and political actions inside the store, which led to several arrests. During the same period, he also preached ninety- second sermons as "Reverend Billy" on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" and performed the character in solo plays at various venues around New York City. By the end of 1999, no less to his surprise than to anyone else's, he had become a lightning rod for the creative and political aspirations of an extraordinary range of theater artists and community groups.

The week-long festival he organized and cohosted in December of that year at Judson Memorial Church, "Millennium's Neighborhood (Not a Celebration of the Malling of New York)," drew more than 1,200 spectators on its first night, even though there was no preopening coverage in the city's major newspapers. Conceived as an alternative to the Disney-led millennium celebrations in Times Square, it was devoted to the causes of resisting consumerism, battling the encroachment of corporate monoculture in New York, and (in Talen's words) reclaiming "contested and surveilled public spaces." It began with a "permitless parade" from Charas Community Center (a former public school that the city is trying to sell for luxury development) to Judson Church, led by two men bearing aluminum crucifixes with large Mickey and Minnie dolls duct-taped to them. Performances and exhibitions by some eighty artists, pranksters, and activists followed, among them the Surveillance Camera Players, who led group addresses to the cameras attached to streetlamps in Washington Square Park, and the labor advocate Charles Kernaghan, who arrived directly from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and delivered a fiery lecture on Central American sweatshops.

Talen now enjoys a unique seriocomic celebrity. He not only has a growing following as a performer but is also frequently sought out by local groups just as an actual spiritual leader might be. During 2000 he was at the center of protests against the efforts of New York University to tear down a nineteenth-century building in which Edgar Allan Poe once lived and replace it with a tower for the law school, and he was arrested several times for that. His main work, however, is on his own quasi-sacred stage: he conducts comic church services featuring clownish deacons, obscene exorcisms, propagandistic canonizations, and a gender-bent gospel choir, usually leading his audience out of the theater afterward to commit a political action on the theme of the evening. These actions have...