“They’re all very passionate defenders of their beliefs—but each in his own way is a failed human,” says Carmen Borgia. The failed humans Borgia is referring to are the protagonists of “The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord,” a play he is directing at Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill this month.
The characters appear in chronological order: Jefferson (born 1743), Dickens (born 1812), Tolstoy (born 1828). Their chronology also defines their knowledge of each other. Dickens knows of Jefferson, Tolstoy has read the other two, but Jefferson has never heard of the later-born writers.
They find themselves in a small room—described by the playwright, Scott Carter, as an “interrogation room”—with a metal table, three metal chairs, and a two-way mirror (which is, in fact, the “fourth wall” facing the audience). At first, the three try to understand where they are. Jefferson asks: “Might we be in the place where the wicked are sent to start over?” to which Dickens responds: “Australia?”
Their differing temperaments affect their responses. “Jefferson is trying to find this rational solution, Dickens is trying to put on a show, and Tolstoy’s just exasperated,” Borgia remarks. The play may be seen as a variant of the old joke: “A rabbi, a priest, and a Frenchman walk into a bar…”
The play’s title is, in fact, quite literal. All three characters wrote their own version of the Bible—as Dickens says in the play: “So we three were gospelists!” Jefferson, a hero of the Age of Enlightenment, removed all the miracles from his Bible, because they violated reason. Dickens, the ultimate Victorian sentimentalist, loved the dramatic and the miraculous. Tolstoy, a Russian mystic, centered his version on the Sermon on the Mount. To rewrite the Bible is, in a sense, to play God—and each of these authors has that bravado. “Three Jonahs in a whale’s belly. May God soon expel us,” Tolstoy remarks.
Disagreements emerge between the three. Jefferson declared a war; Tolstoy was a pacifist. “Tolstoy tells Dickens he was one of his favorite writers, and then Dickens just proceeds to be a total, well, dick,” Borgia observes. There is also a lively argument about Shakespeare. “It is a great evil that the world thinks Shakespeare a genius,” Tolstoy pontificates. (He gets a lot of the best lines, being the biggest cynic of the three.)
For years, Carter was writer and executive producer of “Politically Incorrect,” Bill Maher’s talk show, for which he received eight Emmy nominations. One feature of the program is a roundtable where pundits with opposing viewpoints argue about an issue. In “The Gospel According to…” Carter takes this idea one step further, into the realm of intellectual history. The play was first produced in 2014.
None of us live up to our ideals, but most of us don’t write our ideals down for all time. Jefferson composed the line “All men are created equal,” yet freed only two of his 600-plus slaves. Dickens was a champion of the oppressed, but became so alienated from his wife that he had a brick wall built in the middle of their bedroom. Tolstoy, at the age of 80, decided to leave his wife of 48 years because he found her looking through his papers.
Borgia compares this play to “No Exit,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 drama where three strangers meet in the afterworld, inside a sealed room. The famous line from that play: “Hell is other people.”
This article appears in November 2024.
