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The Reverend Billy
The Philadelphia Independent, February 2004
On a recent Sunday night, as the rain outside fell down in heavy sheets, the Reverend Billy was bent over his pulpit at St. Mark's Church in the East Village, his body moving in a series of semi-spastic gyrations. With fingers clenched knuckle-white around his microphone, Billy trembled like a Pentecostal televangelist, pulsating with the power of the Lord. One moment he was falling to his knees, burying his face in the floor, and the next he seemed to hover recklessly above terra firma, his arms flailing above his head, as if trying to summon forbidden knowledge from the air. The Reverend was in rare from that night. He was dressed in his usual preaching regalia, a standard issue cleric's collar complemented by a white tuxedo jacket and matching polyester slacks. His bleached blonde hair, fashioned in a sleazy rockabilly coif, pointed insistently upward, as if signaling the heavens. "I want to sniff your sin!" he bellowed, his fervent voice washing over the couple hundred parishioners strewn about the pews, each having coughed up ten dollars to come and bear witness.
Reverend Billy, a.k.a Bill Talen, has been preaching in New York City for seven years now, railing against the perilous sins of consumerism in Disney stores, Starbucks coffee shops, and anywhere else corporations seek to destroy neighborhoods by serving up handfuls of Luciferian temptation. Perhaps you have come face to face with his radical proselytizing while innocently standing in line for a grande mocha. Perhaps he whispered softly in your ear; "Step away from the product," he might have said. Perhaps you even saw him get dragged out by the cops, down on his hands and knees shouting, "Maybe you think I'm a preacher with a church. But I gotta Odd God! I got Mahatma Gandhi and Johnny Rotten and James Brown coursing through my veins. Children! Pick up what is left of your true self and then... then we will run!" By staging such "unnecessary interventions," Talen brings his unique brand of agitprop into the "smooth mindlessness" of the modern retail environment. The purpose of these interventions, according to Talen, is to place "social change language...where social change language can no longer be purposeful." It sounds like a futile endeavor, and maybe it is. But futile or not, Bill Talen's performances are a refreshing departure from your typical activist fare.
The story of Reverend Billy doesn't begin in a church, bearing steeple, crowded with a left-minded flock. It begins in a theater. Well, a church that doubled as a theater, but a theater nonetheless-an empty theater. And in this empty theater, the old American Place Theater, sits mild-mannered Bill Talen (stage center), a recovering Dutch Calvinist, who, drawn by the allure of the Great White Way, left sunny San Francisco for New York in 1993, "with all the expectations that can be assigned to New York City." He came with romantic visions of the old Actor's Studio dancing about his head; he came to find the Mecca of his art form. In many ways, it is a classic story, one with which we are all too familiar. Only, in this case, the plot is rife with twists. For Talen had the misfortune to come to Times Square, the heart of Broadway, only to discover that the ambitious theater he had hoped to find was everywhere at siege. Worse still was what had taken its place. "It was terrifying," Talen recalls. "The Mouse showed up in my neighborhood." That mouse would be none other than Mickey Mouse, he of the round horns and slender tail. In the mid-1990s, the Mouse, with more than a little help from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, infested Times Square, transforming it form Talen's sacred temple of ambitious drama into a crowded urban mall. In Talen's new treatise on the joys of not shopping, What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Is In My Store, he writes, "When the sidewalks were cleansed of the 'characters' who supposedly unnerved the tourists, the big Broadway houses were cleansed as well. No one caught on that the theater indoors was related to the theater outdoors." Talen had finally arrived, only to see the object of his pilgrimage packed up and carted away. Sidney Lanier, founder of The American Place Theater, and cousin of the great Tennessee Williams, offered Talen a way out. Lanier, in Talen's words, "argued for this project, this character-a new kind of churchless minister...who begins comically and then gets serious." The idea was daunting. Talen was only just recovering from the trauma of his Dutch Calvinist upbringing. Now Lanier, a man Talen greatly admired, was urging him to abandon the theater for the street. But the specter of the Mouse could not go unanswered, and Talen soon found himself shelling out for a portable pulpit and a white collar. In 1997, armed with these vestments and a bible-sized tape recorder, Talen planted himself across from the Disney Store, near an entrance to the N and R trains. It was a portentous beginning, for Reverend Billy's arrival marked nothing less than the inauguration of an alternative theology, a theology built around the notion that Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist.
At times, Reverend Billy's ironic persona walks a fine line between humanizing the causes he espouses and neutralizing them a priori. There is a difference between speaking earnestly and speaking from behind a self-conscious disguise, one that makes it easy to enjoy a quick chuckle and remain oblivious to the sincerity of the politics. Indeed, Talen recently confessed to me that even some of his close friends still cannot see beyond the basic pretense of the Reverend Billy character. "They can't get past the first level," he woefully remarked. But Talen is not a man who is content to simply preach to the converted. He diligently sizes up his performances, all the while working to devise new means by which to reach his audiences, be they church attendees or unsuspecting latte sippers spontaneously confronted with the collar. "I'm constantly trying...to find new ways for people to discover things, and I'm failing a lot. But I'm lucky because now that I'm not waiting tables anymore, I have enough live shows that I can test my language a lot." Talen and his wife, Savitri Durkee, the Church of Stop Shopping's theatrical director, ritually discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the performances. "You can never know for sure what effect your action has. When people stop, are moved, giggle, shout at you, stomp out, put their product back on the shelf, accept your research sheet...It's a complicated tapestry of responses that audiences give you."
The most effective weapon in Reverend Billy's evangelical arsenal is his surreal, yet provocative wit. He speaks of putting "the odd back in God." He has been known to call super-models "state terrorism." He has waged an ongoing campaign to reattach nipples to the Starbucks mermaid, which serves as the company's logo. Apparently the mermaid, in her original incarnation, was a lasciviously topless wench with a suggestively split tail. In his book about the company's founding, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote, "That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as the coffee itself." But, as the ambition of the mermaid's employers grew, so did the company's uncertainty about how well the nipples would travel in the heartland and overseas. Her seductiveness became a liability. Her nipples disappeared behind six benign locks of hair. Talen uses this story as a parable of sorts, mining both its oddness and its potential political leverage. "I'm a fool," Talen says, emphatically, as if to draw a sharp distinction between himself and those of the left who often come across as would-be academics. Foolish though he may be, it is a tactical foolishness. "There's been an insertion between ourselves and language," Talen contends. "The corporate language invasion has actually inserted itself between ourselves and the words we use. So I'm always staring at phrases and trying to figure out ways to...make language foolish again."
In early February, I met up with Talen at his new apartment in Greenwood Heights, bare except for a kitchen table, a futon mattress spread across the floor, and, in what appeared to be the makings of study, a large wooden desk supporting an iMac. His wife, Savitri, was practicing yoga in one of the empty rooms. We crept into the would-be study on near tiptoe, so as not to disturb her meditation. Talen had been rubbing sleep form his eyes when he answered the door, but by the time he sat down behind the desk he was percolating with energy. Talen read to me from the new play he has been writing, Death by Latte, a Tragedy. He draws most of his inspiration from relatively mainstream theater artists like Tony Kushner, the author of Angels in America, and Eve Ensler, writer and performer of The Vagina Monologues. These artists, as far as Talen is concerned, "walked away from the longtime dominance of art as psychological painting, nuanced, objective, decorative [and] ended the notion that theater is per se depoliticized." If Kushner and Ensler brought, in Talen's view, "storytelling to matters of conscience," then Reverend Billy takes such storytelling out of the theater and into the superstore. Accordingly, Death By Latte takes place inside of a Starbucks cafe. In the play, groups of three "conversationalists" enter the Starbucks one by one and assume positions throughout the cafe. Casually, these groups begin impromptu discussions of various issues relating to Starbucks corporate policy, such as the use of genetically modified dairy products, or union-busting. One member of each group acts as the proponent of such criticisms, one the skeptic, the third resting somewhere in between. "We will talk across, talk behind, and talk in front of Starbucks consumers," Talen says, reading from his script. "It will seem to the consumers as if the building itself is whispering its conscience." Talen went on, "The placement of the rebel talk must be within these colonized environments. We must take them up on their 'revolutionary' graphics and Muzak-ized Bob Marley."
Even Talen's guerilla pulpit must be supported by a private life of food, shelter, and personal effects, a life ruled by the laws of supply and demand. "Of course we have to shop," Talen remarked. "I shop. But we have a world-killing addiction here and when will somebody, anybody-how about a politician-talk about American consumption?" Talen told he told me it was difficult for him to encourage his friends and followers to buy his book. He suggested that I steal a copy.