Scott Carter
Playwright, Discord

The writing of this play began, really, in June 1986 as I awoke choking on a Sunday morning. As a lifelong asthmatic, this was not unexpected, but the attack was to be the most severe of my life and I spent nearly a week in the hospital. At that time, I was a struggling standup comic and, like many colleagues, I was either indifferent or hostile to God; Jesus was the ghost who came into my bedroom when I was a child and tried to choke me to death on a nightly basis.

I was released from Bellevue that Saturday afternoon. At the intersection of 26th and First Avenue, I had an epiphany like Saul on the road to Damascus when a thunderbolt knocked him to the ground, scales fell from his eyes and he knew that Jesus Christ was his Lord and Savior. My metanoia was less-specific and more non-denominational; I went from cynical comic to nonaffiliated deist. I received the unshakable realization of God’s existence and that of grace ‘ for which I thought myself unworthy but grateful. I guess that’s why it’s called grace. I entered into a bliss state ‘ loving all whom I met and forgiving previous transgressions done to me. It lasted about a week. Then it faded and I felt a return to the petty life I’d always led. I didn’t want this to happen. I wanted to make this event into the B.C./A.D. of my existence. But I had no strong religious affiliation to which to turn. My parents were devout believers in whatever Protestant community was closest and nicest.

I grew up Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran. Post service coffee and donuts were sacraments as sacred as any wafers or wine. So I made a pact with the universe in the summer of 1986: I would remain open to signs and direction from anyone offering religious literature, conversation or ritual. On October 5, 1988, I watched an episode of A World of Ideas on PBS. Host Bill Moyers was interviewing Reverend Forrester Church of All Souls Unitarian in New York. And it was here that I learned about the Jefferson Bible. In 1804 President Jefferson bought two identical copies of the King James Bible. Needing both sides of each page for his project, he then, over three consecutive nights, used a razor to cut out only the verses he liked from all four gospels. Jefferson then pasted his chosen scraps of scripture into the pages of a blank book. He named his volume The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. I became fascinated with the details of this history. What modern president would hatch such an idea and then spend his White House evenings executing it’

For the next eight years, my fascination stopped short of creativity. I was getting jobs writing and later producing television. In 1993, HBO teamed me with Bill Maher to develop Politically Incorrect for Comedy Central. As that show took off, Jefferson gathered dust. In 1996, my wife and I moved from New York to Los Angeles. We rented a house near Larchmont Village where, one Saturday at the independent bookstore, Chevalier’s, I discovered The Life of Our Lord by Charles Dickens. I subsequently learned that Dickens, between 1846 and 1849, condensed the gospels for the first five of his ten children. He read it to them so often that they had it memorized before they learned to read. Dickens’ favorite word in the English language was ‘fancy.’ And, as you will soon hear, Dickens embraced most of the gospel verses that Jefferson jettisoned. I now had a play to write: two great men debating whose version of the gospels is better. The first pages of these men’s fictive theological spat multiplied madly during the ensuing months.

One day, while allegedly doing more research (procrastinating), I happened on this note in Stephen Mitchell’s superb The Gospel According to Jesus: ” Tolstoy, too, compiled a gospel harmony, which he called The Gospel in Brief.’ My excited first thought ‘ adding Tolstoy to this debate ‘ instantly gave way to an easily imaginable five more years of research to turn this duet into a trio. After the global success of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy suffered a Russian epic of a depression so severe that his family hid his hunting guns to avoid his suicide. He embarked on a 30-year spiritual quest, learning Greek and Hebrew to freshly translate scripture. The Gospel in Brief, unlike the work of Jefferson and Dickens, was published during Tolstoy’s lifetime ‘ though not in Russia. His increasingly controversial works were smuggled into Switzerland and would later result in Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Harmonizing this latest Tolstoy research with the other two was proving unwieldy and was going to require much more work. The Jesus narrative is hardly ‘the greatest story ever told.’ Yes, there’s a beginning and end but the middle is a structural mess. At the end of 1999, after producing the first 1,100 episodes of Politically Incorrect, I left to develop my play and knew I needed help. Michael Bruner, a graduate of Princeton Seminary and the University of Hamburg, began to meet with me regularly over the next three years. We organized the messy muddle of Christ’s ministry into a 315 page multicolored volume. My literary agent shopped it around; no publisher was interested (at least not yet). Still, in 2005, this source material gave rise to the first draft of the play! It was universally hated. My wife hated it. My agent hated it. My lawyer hated it. And I felt guilty for wasting their time reading and so much of my time writing. I shelved it. But, please, no pity: I’ve had a long and lucrative career in television. By then, Real Time with Bill Maher was on HBO and scheduled in a way that allowed me to develop other projects.

In December 2008, I found myself with three open months and re-read my play’s 151-page first draft. Every bit of Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy trivia had been thrown in; using the passage of time as perspective for this editing, I promptly removed most of it, focused on the Christ narrative, and distilled the page count from 151 down to 47 and increased the font size. But did I really have anything’ I wanted someone to hear it that both had killer story chops and a spiritual simpatico.

I called my friend, the brilliant writer, actor and comedian Garry Shandling. We were fellow Tucsonans who went to the same high school. He’d enjoyed my monologues and appeared on Politically Incorrect. We made dinner and reading plans for his house and I brought three little sticks with the heads of Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy to keep clear which character was talking. Garry interrupted me halfway through the stick puppet reading and gave me 23 pages of notes. We finished the play the following night with another round. I hosted reading after reading with friends and rewrote time and time again. Notes came from annotated scripts and post-reading discussions. Norman Lear, Stephen Mitchell (the translator who’d introduced me to Tolstoy’s gospel), Byron Katie (the author and Stephen’s wife), my wife Bebe, Elaine Pagels, the Princeton Religious Studies professor who wrote The Gnostic Gospels (which you might know under its alternate title, Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code) and many others participated and I am grateful for it.

After one reading, Arianna Huffington said: ‘We must have a performance at my house.’ That December, the play was read in front of a 20-foot-high Christmas tree and 60 guests including Shirley MacLaine who, afterwards, gave me her phone number to discuss the play. We met in a dark corner of a Malibu restaurant. She ordered a bottle of red wine and, after a sip, asked, ‘Do you know why the star of Bethlehem hovered over the manger” I responded that I did not. ‘It’s because,’ she continued, ‘it was not a star. It was a spaceship. Let’s start there.’ Then, with the world weariness of a Cassandra used to having her truth doubted, she told me that she had slept in Jefferson’s bed (in this lifetime, through a connection at Monticello). She said workers there report that his ghost roams the halls, whistling. Then she got to the purpose of our meeting: ‘You need a fourth character in your play ‘ My friend Stephen Hawking believes that he is Sir Isaac Newton reincarnated. I really feel that Newton would have a lot to add to what those other three are saying.’ I said, ‘Shirley, I appreciate you caring so much. But I’ve been working on this for 21 years. And I have to stop adding people or it will never get done.’ My Cassandra looked at me, as through the eyes of Fran Kubelick, of Irma La Douce, with an expression that said: ‘Brother, you are making a big mistake.’ And maybe I am. But you’ll have to be the judge of that.