Spirit And Conscience
February 2002

The Rough and the Holy

by Elaine Klaassen

Jesus—the one they started calling Christ shortly after he was crucified—has been around for a couple of millenia. What's that all about? People love him and people hate him—the latter owing to not a few evils perpetuated in his name—but people haven’t forgotten about him.
Jeremiah Gamble is an actor whose passion it is to “get people to lay down their preconceived ideas and just hear the story,” separated from the religious institutions that represent it. Gamble believes that Jesus Christ still does today what the stories say he did in his time: “He set people free, and healed, restored and loved them.”
A 1995 graduate of Bethel College in St. Paul, Gamble doesn’t preach, but if he did, he wouldn’t be preaching to the choir; he performs in secular venues. An invitation to fill out the roster of the upcoming Intermedia Arts “Absolute Originals” series came out of his performance at the fringe festival last summer.
In his new show,”The Rough and the Holy” (the title of which calls to my mind “The Young and the Restless”) Gamble introduces us to 13 characters who, according to the Bible, came face to face with Jesus Christ during his controversial life. (Since there’s no Jesus character in his show, he didn’t have to cast “the guy with the flowing hair.” )
Using a spare set, essentially one prop, and eschewing costume changes, Gamble relies on body language, verbal language, vocal sounds, facial expressions to create the drama. A critic wrote: “Gamble is an intensely physical actor with facial muscles that seemingly have no limit.”
Explains Gamble, “My aesthetic is simple: ‘The word became flesh.’ . . . . .It’s the actor and the content.” Some chunks of the text comes straight out of the Bible and a large portion is original. Moments of levity are threaded throughout the scenes that acquaint us with Judas Iscariot, Simeon, Pontius Pilate, Mary Magdalen, and unnamed Saducees and Pharisees as well as people who were healed of blindness and leprosy.
The work is a blend of personal faith, scholarship, imagination and professional theatre experience.
Gamble’s faith in Jesus as the “source of life now” and not as a “ticket to heaven” is the inspiration for his work and his life. Although Gamble and his wife read the Bible in a disciplined way, attend church regularly and are committed to sharing their time and money, Gamble doesn’t believe you get faith by trying, or by “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” Believing that peace, love and justice are ideals worth pursuing isn’t enough. He says humans have a limited capacity to do forgiveness and kindness and Jesus is the one who gives the capacity “to forgive, have peace beyond one’s experience and change one’s motivations.”
Underlying the show is a serious study of history and biblical commentary. Reviewing the historical setting in our conversation, Gamble described the Jews as living in occupied territory, oppressed not only by the Roman army but by their own rich and powerful religious leaders as well. Against the backdrop of a culture—with a strong sense of people-ness, a strong faith and complex customs about holy and secular life—clashing with its oppressors, Simeon is a character who believed Jesus would be the “salvation of the Jews and a light to the gentiles”; and Pontius Pilate “hated the Jews (they were so hard to govern), and wanted to free Jesus just to make the powerful ones mad”; and Judas Iscariot, most likely a political revolutionary, believed Jesus was too powerful to be captured, and was heartbroken to learn that Jesus was not the Messiah that he wanted.
Gamble’s imagination comes out of his total immersion in the story. He can picture Jesus’ relationship to the Pharisees and Saducees and the way Jesus “challenged them so much because he loved them,” and the way Jesus was “so frustrated at their bad choices that affected not just themselves but other people as well.”
For Gamble, Jesus is alive and real—he affects people today as he affected the folks portrayed in this show.
Lots of thespian experience puts Gamble at ease on stage. From his college major in theater to productions with four Twin Cities theater companies to his six-man a cappella singing group, Gamble likes to be in front of a crowd.

“The Rough and the Holy” plays at 7:30 p.m., Sun., Feb. 10; Thu., Feb. 14; and Mon., Feb. 18, at Intermedia Arts “Absolute Originals” series (2822 Lyndale Ave. S.).