From Thornton, Colorado to Brooklyn, New York, Hell House performances defy neat boundaries between audience and performer, secular culture and religious event.

By Ann Pellegrini

Fire safety violations almost shut down Hell. Hell House, that is. Two days before the New Destiny Christian Center in Thornton, Colorado, a Denver suburb, was due to start a ten-performance run of its annual Hell House, the congregation learned that the plastic sheeting they were using as scenery did not meet the local fire department’s flame retardant standards. But the fire department inspector would not get the last word.

In a rousing display of religious commitment and can-do theatrical spirit, the extended church community sprang into action. The father of a girl involved in Hell House donated dry wall and sent a crew to install it; a woman in the church bought cans of paint; and an army of volunteers worked day and night preparing the new scenery. It was human labor, but God’s work—a “blessing,” as New Destiny’s pastor, Keenan Roberts, glossed the happy ending. The show would go on; the Word would be spread.

Hell houses are evangelical riffs on the haunted houses that dot the landscape of secular culture each Halloween. Where haunted houses promise to scare the bejeezus out of you, hell houses aim to scare you to Jesus. In a typical hell house, demon tour guides take the audience though a series of bloody staged tableaux depicting sinners whose bad choices-—homosexuality, abortion, suicide, and, above all, rejection of Christ’s saving grace—lead them straight to hell.

The primary targets of hell houses are teenagers, and this targeting is among the reasons hell houses have become controversial. Detractors accuse them of preaching hate to an especially vulnerable population. In the run-up to this year’s Halloween season, for example, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) released a report entitled “Homophobia at ‘Hell House’: Literally Demonizing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth.” The report charged hell houses and their purveyors with “contributing to the climate of anti-gay harassment and violence that mercilessly threatens the safety and well-being of LBGT youth on a daily basis.” The report’s authors, Sarah Kennedy and Jason Cianciotto, also criticize hell houses for perpetuating the “false notion that youth cannot be both LGBT and Christian.” Hell houses have also come under criticism from Christian groups, such as the Colorado Council of Churches, for their use of scare tactics to win converts and their misrepresentation of the Christian message. For his part, Pastor Keenan rejects accusations that he is trafficking in hate: “Just because someone doesn’t agree with the message, doesn’t mean it’s a hateful message….We also believe that communicating to people what the Bible says doesn’t make this judgmental. We believe the Book to be the all-sufficient source for life direction.”

It seems to me that the terms of this debate are inadequate. I share NGLTF’s concerns about the plight of LGBT youth. What’s more, as a queer, I hardly think I am going to hell (not that I believe in it). However, I am also not so sure that Hell House’s effects on “Christian youth who may be struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identity” are as one-way or unidirectional as the reports’ authors worry. What if theatre queers the pitch of the message? One of the things that most interests me about Hell House is its faith in the power of theatre to reach in and transform its audience. More than theatre, more than religion: Hell House defies neat boundaries between audience and performer, secular culture and religious event. At its best, and sometimes even at its worst, theatre can make you susceptible. To what, and whether such susceptibility is a “good” thing, depend on who’s doing the accounting.

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Curious to experience for myself this creative and controversial fusion of theatre and evangelism, in late October I headed out to Thornton. Curiosity is a weak word, actually. Documentary film-maker (I’m You, You’re Me) and NYU doctoral student Debra Levine met up with me in Denver, adding her eyes and insights to my own. (When you are going to hell, it is nice to have company.)

Pastor Keenan, as his congregants call him, has been mounting hell houses in the Denver area since 1995, first at the Abundant Life Christian Center in Arvada, and currently as senior pastor of New Destiny. Both are Assemblies of God churches. He is a charismatic man, whose easy laugh and gift of story belie an intensity of purpose. At 6’ 5”, he is also a towering physical presence. He must have made quite an impression as a demon guide, a role he has played every Hell House season until this one. He himself describes his demon guide performance as “the best,” and, somehow, I have no reason to doubt him. He “had a great time doing it,” he says, “Being big was fun.” But “with everything else that is on [his] plate”—from writing the script and overseeing the production to dealing with the media, not to mention his pastoral responsibilities—it was time for a break.

Pastor Keenan did not originate the idea of hell houses. They have been a growing phenomenon within Evangelical culture since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell began staging an annual Scaremare at his Liberty University. Hell houses first appeared on the radar of secular popular culture with George Ratliff’s 2001 documentary Hell House, a film festival favorite that was also featured on a memorable May 2002 episode of NPR’s This American Life, “Devil on my Shoulder.”

Pastor Keenan had not even heard of hell houses until the early 90s, when a fellow youth pastor told him about the basic concept. He was, he says, “immediately gripped” by their potential as an evangelizing tool. He went on to stage his first hell house in 1993, at a church in Roswell, NM. Pastor Keenan may have been late to the scene of hell houses, but he has cannily capitalized on their potential as instruments of outreach and amplification. In 1996 he began selling Hell House Outreach Kits (the 2006 edition cost $299), and says they have sold approximately 800 outreach kits in the past ten years. Hell House Outreach brilliantly joins marketing, missionizing, and mediation. Pastor Keenan offers his services as a consultant to churches staging hell houses. The outreach kit itself features advice on, “Effectively Handling The Media Including The Tough Questions And How We Answered Them.” Pastor Keenan welcomes such “tough questions,” and considers the controversies that have swirled around Hell House an “incredible blessing.” The media storm has been a means of “amplifying the message” well beyond what the church could achieve on its own.

The message is about to get an even bigger staging ground: a fictional treatment of Hell House is in development with producers Adam Shulman and Julie Silverman-Yorn, of Firm Films. Scott Derrickson, who directed the 2005 film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, has been tapped to helm the project. The feature film will focus on the controversies that engulf a town when a Christian group stages a hell house.

Pastor Keenan compares the new forms Hell House is taking as it meets secular culture head on to a “fresh wind, new air, that keeps pushing the eagle flying to higher heights.” The language here bespeaks a deep grounding in Christian allegory. The eagle has long symbolized Christ’s resurrection and ascension—hence the eagle that graces the top of the New Destiny Christian Center’s webpages (“Soaring At A Godly Altitude”). The eagle also has a long history of association with St. John the Evangelist, for whom spreading the Word was central.

Pastor Keenan and his ministry understand that propelling the Word forward today requires engaging with contemporary media and technology. Starting with the 2006 version of the outreach kit, all the components are on disc, including: a how-to guide to production; a DVD of a Hell House performance; and a compact disc soundtrack containing sound effects and music to amp up the fear factor of specific scenes—“from the voice of Suicide to Lucifer’s bone-chilling introduction to Hell House to a myriad of others you absolutely cannot find anywhere else,” the website promises.

Pastor Keenan’s script is included in every kit as a rewritable document, allowing individual churches to adapt it to their particular needs. His Hell House features seven scenes. The first five scenes of the basic kit depict what Pastor Keenan calls “social-sin issues,” addressing homosexuality, abortion, suicide, drunk driving, and Satanism. Pastor Keenan writes a new script every year for production by his own church group, reserving two of the five “social-sin” scenes each year to cover homosexuality and abortion. Pastor Keenan says he will continue prioritizing these two topics until God gives him a sign otherwise.

This leaves three scenes whose topical focus can vary from year to year, as new issues present themselves. (For example, the 2006 production featured a brand new scene on the evils of methamphetamine use. It ended—badly of course—with a fiery car crash, which had some overlap with the drunk driving narrative of the standard script.)

Churches do not have to buy a new kit every year. Instead, to supplement a kit they have already purchased, they can buy up-dated and new scenes as stand-alone CDs. The website currently advertises 16 individual scenes for purchase, complete with sound effects and any needed background music. Scene one in the standard script depicts “the funeral of young homosexual male who believed the born gay lie and died of AIDS.” But, for an additional $45, you can get the “Gay Wedding Scene Package” :

This energetic scene will give you another powerful weapon in your arsenal against the homosexual stronghold and the born-gay deception. The demon tour guide conducts the ceremony that actually involves a young married couple. (The wife dons masculine make-up for the necessary male look.) The tour guide pronounces them “husband and husband”. Then the scene utilizes a time warp to move several years into the future with one of the partners dying of AIDS as demon imps swarm into a hospital room. This package comes with the originally produced rock-n-roll wedding march CD, the air of evil background music CD and the death drum track also on compact disc.

In the 2006 production, this scene opened the play, underscoring the way homosexuality and same-sex marriage in particular have come to function as the defining issue for many Christian conservatives. But there is such a thing as theatre that succeeds too well. The “born-gay deception” is a trap set by Satan to ease the path to sin. Pastor Keenan’s insistence that the gay male couple be played by a married heterosexual one can be seen as an attempt to minimize risk to both audience and actors.

This porousness is something the Hell House Outreach Kit tries to control for, and it exists on the side of the audience, too, who bring to the experience their own set of expectations and vulnerabilities. This interaction is among the reasons theatre’s emotional reach cannot be so easily micro-managed. The audience member who knows she is seeing a married couple just playing at being gay men but “really” kissing may find herself alongside another spectator who sees two men exchanging vows and exchanging a kiss, and then witnesses one stretched in grief over his dying lover’s body, a final embrace as his beloved passes from life. The emotional power of this scene exceeds, or potentially exceeds, attempts to subject it to theological straight-jacketing.

The final two stops on the tour are always hell and heaven, in that order. Although the script for these two scenes may vary from year to year, the basic plot points remain the same. In the production I saw, the actor portraying Lucifer spoke through a voice box, which distorted his voice and lent it a menacing quality. The scene as a whole was theatrically accomplished and well-thought out. The audience was squeezed together in a claustrophobic basement hell. Condemned souls, young and old, threw themselves piteously against a chain link fence, screaming for help, while black-garbed imps, their faces completely covered, offered hissing punctuation to Lucifer’s speech. The imps were the youngest members of the cast, and their smallness of size made them especially effective as they slithered amongst the crowd. Their full body coverings recalled nothing so much as burqas, suggesting a hellish variation on the myth of the 72 virgins.

In a kind of Hell House 101, a gloating Lucifer neatly summarized the previous five scenes, underscoring the bad choices that were made in each: from the gay men who chose homosexuality but hid behind the excuse that God made them gay, to the young teen suicide whose worldly success could not hide the emptiness of his spiritual life. The sensory overload of this scene was interrupted by a blaze of bright light and a chorus of white-garbed winged angels, who brought Satan’s speech to an end and escorted us into our final destination, Heaven. Here, a beatific blond Jesus preached the good news before leading the now-seated audience in a prayer of salvation. The two nights I saw Hell House, there was a low hum from the crowd. Some murmured along; others sat in silence.

In comparison to the pyrotechnics of Hell, Heaven was a bit of a let-down. Whatever this says about me and my openness to Jesus, it also says something about how much easier it is to represent sin than goodness. “Sin” is lush, sensual, readily theatrical. By comparison, goodness is vanilla-coated, bland. Preachiness may be good for the soul, but it is not very fun.

For Pastor Keenan and his congregation, though, “God’s word does not return void.” Even if I sat in respectful silence during the salvation prayer, we were still listening, still being witnessed to.

The salvation prayer was followed by a brief address by one of New Destiny’s associate pastors, who encouraged all of us to fill out an outreach response card. The card, along with information about the church, a clipboard, and pen, had been placed under every chair in “Heaven.” It had four boxes to check off:

• For the first time I have prayed the prayer of salvation and asked Jesus Christ into my life tonight.
• I rededicated my life to Jesus Christ tonight.
• I am looking for a church/youth group to be involved in.
• Please remember my prayer request on back of this card.

The two evenings I saw New Destiny’s Hell House, people dutifully filled out the cards, though no one stayed behind for further prayer or conversation, as we were all invited to do. Everything about the associate pastor’s final pitch was warmly and lightly done, in stark contrast to the hard sell of the preceding tour. As Pastor Keenan avers, Hell House is “very go-right-at-you. But that’s the Hell House personality of what we do for a few nights a year…[and] that allows us to reach a lot of people in a different way.”

The Hell House experience is not just in-your-face missionizing. It is an aggressive theatre of transformation. Spreading the Word depends on theatre as a kind of contagion passed from performer to audience.

This promise—that theatre can be catching—is also the reason it has historically been at the center of much moral hand-wringing and outright condemnation. From Plato’s tirade against mimesis in The Republic, to Tertullian’s likening of theatre to idolatry in De Spectaculis (Of Spectacles), to Puritan polemics linking theatre to sexual depravity in Phillip Stubbes’s 1583 treatise The Anatomie of Abuses, philosophers and theologians have worried over theatre’s capacity to “infect” audiences with the “wrong” sort of ideas and practices. The worry is not simply that seeing is believing, but that believing might beget doing.

This anti-theatrical prejudice is not just yesterday’s news, of course. It followed the Puritans to the “New World,” where it continues to percolate in debates over “obscenity,” public funding of the arts, and age-appropriate media content, just for starters. These suspicions concerning theatre’s moral dangers have often gone hand in hand with a desire to harness its power for projects of political and/or spiritual renewal—for conversion, even. This too has a long history, from ancient Greek festivals of Dionysus, to the passion plays of medieval Catholicism, to the Ta’ziyeh dramas of Shiite Islam.

As a form, theatre has no one political claim. Although political theatre generally invokes images of the political left—think of the work of Bertolt Brecht or of Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre—theatrical transformation does not point one way only. It has become a commonplace for theatre and performance studies scholars of theatre and live performance to refer, in nearly reverential terms, to the world-making capacity of performance, its ability to conjure into view new horizons of the possible and to consolidate and re-consolidate oppositional publics or lifeworlds.

I share this faith in performance’s power to transform its audience into something more…into a public, perhaps? Or, even, a revolution? Well, so do the hundreds, if not thousands, of evangelical communities that stage hell houses across the United States each year.

To be sure, my own belief in the transformative capacity of live performance is not always easy to sustain in the face of contemporary theatre, so much of which labors under extraordinary commercial pressure. Could Pastor Keenan and his flock be the face of theatre’s last true believers? Perhaps Hell House represents the new avant-garde.

In fall 2005, as part of a panel discussion at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, Debra Levine had more to say on this point, astutely placing hell houses within the tradition of Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty.” In The Theater and its Double (1938), Artaud called for a theatre that, “overturning all our preconceptions, inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten.” Artaud’s theatre of cruelty privileges feeling over plot and moves to break down artificial walls between spectator and spectacle by bombarding the audience from all sides with new sensations.

This is theatre as affective immersion and communal event, and its “therapeutics” are not gentle pats on the back. Conjuring a new theatre adequate to its time, Artaud concludes the preface to The Theatre and its Double by linking theatre to sacrifice and purification: “And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”

These are heady metaphors. But so too is Pastor Keenan’s likening of attacks on Hell House to the Crucifixion: “The same will be true of this [criticisms of Hell House] as what was true of Jesus. That is, they tried to crucify him, and we all know how that worked out. People can try to crucify this [Hell House], and you can’t kill it because it is about the Good News message.”

Pastor Keenan offered this comparison specifically in response to a 2004 parody version of Hell House that was performed in Hollywood and featured such celebrities as Sarah Silverman and Bill Maher, who played Satan—and not very well, Pastor Keenan hastens to add. Maher did not seem to know his lines, a sin against professionalism at the very least.

The experience with Hollywood Hell House made Pastor Keenan doubly suspicious when Les Freres Corbusier, an experimental theatre company based in New York City, contacted him about staging Hell House in the Big Apple. They did not want to do a parody or a hatchet job. They wanted to do a “straight up” version of Hell House, giving New York City audiences a glimpse into a social world that is otherwise completely foreign to them. (This is hardly an accurate picture of the religious diversity of New York City and the greater metropolitan area, of course, home, for instance, to the largest concentration of Pentecostals in the country.) Eventually, the company’s executive director Aaron Lemon-Strauss convinced Pastor Keenan that the company’s motives were sincere.

Les Freres went on to stage their Hell House in St. Ann’s Warehouse from Oct. 1-29, in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. DUMBO, an acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass,” is an area of reclaimed warehouses, art galleries, hip watering holes and eateries, and increasing rents. St. Ann’s is known for its cutting edge theatre and performance events, and its typical audience member probably goes to more art openings than prayer services.

Certainly, the prospect of a “secular” hell house was media catnip, landing coverage by Newsweek as well as articles and reviews in The New York Times, The Denver Post, The Associated Press, and even Variety. Uniformly, the media made much of the fact that the production was a “faithful” and “sincere” presentation of a “real” hell house. For example, in his October 14 review of the production, chief New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley described it as an “irony-free facsimile” of the real thing and said the company managed to present “its visions of the fiery agonies that await non-believers with nary a wink or a roll of the eyes.”

Maybe so, but the sincerity of Les Freres’s approach to Hell House may have been its undoing. To my eyes, the performance felt less sincere than “sincere.” The scare quotes here are not irony alerts. The cast was top notch, professional, filled with talent, etc. Nonetheless, the performances came across as a kind of self-referential pointing at what they were not: “Look at me, I am not ironic” as well as “Look at me, I am not a Christian or, at least, not one of those Christians.” To put the matter in theatrical terms, you could say that Les Frères was coolly Brechtian when it needed to be engaged and Aristotelian, let alone bloody red and Artaudian.

The program notes begin with a disclaimer “FROM LES FRERES AND ARTS AT ST. ANN’S: This authentic depiction of a Hell House is meant to educate and inform about a particular religious movement, not to endorse any specific ideology.” Les Freres serves up its Hell House as a kind of sociological artifact, not a living thing, and the company’s anthropological approach proved theatrically limiting.

This limitation is related to the company’s assertion that it is offering an “authentic depiction of a Hell House.” The language here is confusing. Les Freres’s claim is smaller than it first appears. They are not putting on a Hell House, but a representation, a “depiction,” of one. This sets them at remove—a safe distance, perhaps-—from the “real” thing, where the “real” means “religion.” The modifier “authentic” is puzzling in this context. What, exactly, is an “authentic depiction”? Is this their way of distinguishing good copies (good because sincere) from bad ones (as in: bad Hollywood Hell House, bad)? Staking out claims to authenticity even as they proclaim their difference, Les Freres wants to have its evangelical cake, without having to eat it, too.

It is interesting to speculate how Les Freres’s Hell House would have changed if they had done outreach to evangelical churches, in a kind of reverse missionizing. But this would have required recognizing that the religious landscape of New York City already includes many people whose worldview evangelical hell houses do accurately capture. It would also have meant confronting some significant overlap between the truth and consequences theology of Hell House and the worldviews of many urban “hipsters.” Les Freres’s hipster audience surely included many people who profess pastoral notions of good, spiritually redeeming sex versus bad, corrupting sex or who ascribe to a watered-down version of karmic retribution. For whom, exactly, is a hell house an otherworldly experience?

There were certainly numerous departures between the evangelical (the “authentic”?) Hell House put on by New Destiny and Les Freres’s. Where Pastor Keenan’s model calls for seven scenes, each with the dramatic arc of a “one-act play,” Les Freres had nine rooms. Pastor Keenan’s version suggests using two demon guides per tour; Les Freres’s demons worked solo. Les Freres also freely adapted Pastor Keenan’s script. The version they performed combined elements from his script, scenes from the 2001 documentary, and additions by the company itself.

The most notable addition was scene 6, which was set at a hipster café, or “Café Hell,” as the demon guide dubbed it. Three twenty-somethings—two men, one woman—excitedly discuss The Onion, Jon Stewart, and the possibility of putting on a show that will make fun of “religious people.” At this, a pack of lesser demons drags the trio of ironists away, as the demon guide growls his review: “Do you know what’s really hot right now? Sincerity. Painful Sincerity.”

Pastor Keenan’s own verdict on Les Freres’s production was not that it lacked sincerity, but that it needed more “intensity.” The intensity of an Evangelical Hell House derives in part from the cast and crew’s belief that there are cosmic stakes involved in their performance. Ultimately, the numerous structural or textual differences between Les Freres’s Hell House and Pastor Keenan’s pale beside the question of affective sensibility.

Hell House is theatre, but it is also something more than theatre. As Pastor Keenan observes, “It’s not just a play, it’s not just a theatre thing, it is something that has tremendous spiritual significance for people’s lives.” This “not just”—this “excess,” let’s call it—is the structure of religious feeling. It is what Les Freres, for all their commitment to playing it straight, cannot duplicate or capture.

On their website, the New Destiny Center claims “Outreaches average a 33% salvation and rededication decision rate!” These statistics can be argued over: exactly what is being counted, and how? What does seem unmistakable, though, is the circuit of feeling that passes amongst the participants in the Hell House, all of whom, young and old, cast and crew, are embedded in a larger community of meaning-making and, as they see it, higher purpose. Conversion is never a finished process, and Hell House performances are as much about reconfirming the individual participants in their faith commitments, as it is about spreading the good news to others.

As theatre, though, Hell House also exceeds religious understanding or sectarian attempts to control its overflow of feeling and meaning-making. Pastor Keenan is right: “Being big is fun.” So is getting to be other than who you are if only for a night, or maybe ten. The pleasures of putting on the theatrical mask are the pleasures of transgressing the everyday, being who you are not, and opening yourself—sometimes dangerously—to the leakiness between roles on stage and off.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. She is the co-author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.