What does it take to make a “good person” do a bad thing?
In “Hide,” the one-man play written and performed by Germantown-based actor Jeffrey Doornbos, the answer is not madness, exactly. It’s pressure—moral, social, psychological—applied slowly over time, until something gives.
The play, which comes to the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon on April 4 at 7pm, unfolds inside a church during a hostage situation. Christian Kruis, a therapist and lifelong member of the congregation, has locked the doors and is holding his fellow parishioners inside—not to harm them, but to force a reckoning.
For Doornbos, the spark came from a convergence of forces involving the current political moment and his upbringing. That political moment centered on immigration enforcement. “I found it particularly distressing what was happening with people who are being deported—and not even necessarily who they were, but how it was going down,” he says. Layered onto that was his upbringing in a Dutch Reformed community in the Midwest, where the church once functioned as a moral anchor. “There was this feeling of, wait—this is not how I was raised,” Doornbos says. The resulting tension—with family, with friends, with a shared value system that now felt out of alignment—proved harder to ignore.
“It didn’t feel like we were dealing with issues about tax rates or military budgets,” he says. “It felt like civil rights issues, human rights, constitutional rights—things that feel bigger and more fundamental were not discussed.”
Out of that friction came the image that drives “Hide”: “This guy who goes in front of his congregation and just says, ‘Enough is enough—why are we not doing more?’”
The play has evolved from a short piece written for a Hudson theater project into a full-length solo work. What began as a pointed response to a specific moment has broadened into something more universal. “I’ve really worked hard at trying to deal with a person who has something to say and wants to create change, but doesn’t know how to do that,” Doornbos says.
That uncertainty is central to Christian Kruis. He insists he is thinking clearly, even as his actions escalate. Doornbos resists the idea that the character can be dismissed as unstable. “It’s easy to write off someone who’s crazy,” he says. “I didn’t want to do that.”
Instead, the play operates in a more uncomfortable register—one where the audience is asked to engage with a man whose logic may be extreme, but not entirely unfamiliar. “It’s not about wanting the audience to like the character,” Doornbos says. “It’s about the audience being willing to engage with the character.”
That engagement is what he’s seen in early performances. Rather than debating the play’s politics, audiences have responded with recognition. “People have said, ‘This makes me think of something I saw happening years ago that I didn’t say anything about—and I’m rethinking that now,’” he says.
The play’s central provocation—that silence is itself a form of action—draws on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but Doornbos is careful not to prescribe a single response. “I’m not a leader of any activist groups,” he says. “I don’t organize marches.”
Instead, he frames “speaking up” in expansive, accessible terms. “It can be one neighbor saying to another neighbor, ‘This doesn’t feel right,’” he says. “It can be sharing something, amplifying a message. It can be anything.” The point is less about scale than about refusing disengagement. “It’s more about not sitting back in this moment,” he says.
For Doornbos, the play itself is a form of that engagement. “It’s kind of become my way of trying to do something,” he says.
That sense of urgency carries into the performance. “Hide” moves between sermon, confession, and breakdown, with Doornbos alone onstage navigating the character’s escalating emotional state. The challenge, he says, is restraint. “It’s so easy to yell,” he says. His aim is to hold that tension as long as possible. “My goal is to hold back until I can’t hold it back anymore.”
If the play resists easy answers, that’s by design. Doornbos has little interest in didactic theater. “I don’t know that it answers the question of what should be done,” he says. “Nor do I believe it’s my job to answer it—otherwise it would be a sermon.”
Instead, “Hide” leaves the question hanging in the room—less about what Christian has done than about what anyone else might do under similar pressure. “It’s a very difficult thing,” Doornbos says, “to get out of the stream—or try to swim up it.”
Jeffrey Doornbos perfroms “Hide” at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon on April 4 at 8pm. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door.
