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Nov 29, 2018

Children of Eden: A Beefcake-Free Adam and Eve

The musical Children of Eden is not the beefcake-fest you might imagine, with a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah. 

















1. The actor playing Adam is rarely nude.  He wears heavy Patriarch robes, or a modern costume.   They can wear heavy Patriarch robes, or modern costumes.

















2. So there is no reason to cast anyone particularly hunky.

What do you expect from something originally written in 1986 for a group called Youth Sing Praise
















The Adam and Eve plot is relatively faithful to the two Biblical accounts, but it ups the heterosexism: love! love! love! is the key to everything.  Always choose love over power, regardless of what the Serpent says.















Cain's story is different.  He wants to leave the family, and bring Abel with him, but Adam forbids it.  They fight, Abel takes Adam's side, and Cain in a rage beats him to death.  Then, heartbroken, Cain says it should have been him who died and leaves.

Ok, there's a little homoerotic buddy-bonding there, but it's drowned out by the Second Act, a forbidden romance between Noah's son Japheth and Yonah, who belongs to the wrong race (it's as uncomfortable as it sounds).

I suggest that you wait around for the Community Theater's next production of Tarzan.




4 comments:

  1. Wrong race? Like, nephilim? Please tell me it's nephilim and not something continuity would forbid.

    I always wonder when a production clothes Adam before he eats the fruit. (The fruit is unspecified; a fig would be deliciously ironic.) You really need to get over gymnophobia if you're going to do a production of the story of Eden: Otherwise you have two choices: Clothed Adam and Eve (and clothes are important at the END of Genesis...) or Adam (and presumably Eve) moving around with their backs turned to the audience, breaking the fourth wall and cursing the ground so no more fourth walls can be built there, forever and ever. Amen.

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    Replies
    1. You can just have them wearing modern clothes. Yonah is a descendant of Cain, a racial group that is innately evil and destined to be wiped out, but Japeth sneaks her on board.

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    2. I thought it was Ham who had Cain's descendant. As part of Operation Find Any Reason To Exclude Black People.

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    3. I believe that Cain's descendants aren't mentioned in the Noah account, although they are responsible for the invention of musical instruments and metallurgy. Ham was cursed because he looked on his father's nakedness, which I assume is a euphemism for doing more than looking.

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