‘The road to hell starts with good intentions’: New opera tells the story of Northampton’s notorious revivalist preacher, Jonathan Edwards

By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer

Jonathan Edwards, one of Northampton’s most famous residents, was a revolutionary preacher whose legacy has endured through centuries. He was the first minister in Northampton to baptize African Americans, yet he did not free those he enslaved. He was a loving husband, yet he supported complementarianism, a theological belief that gender roles are ordained by God. And his work inspired several suicides.

A new folk opera, “The Surprizing Work of God,” named after an essay by Edwards (with the original spelling) and written by Jeff Olmsted, wants to show Edwards in all of his contradictions. The 75-minute show will be at Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity on Sunday, Jan. 26, at 4 p.m., with a talkback afterwards.

Jonathan Edwards was a pastor in Northampton who was a key figure in the First Great Awakening, a religious revival that swept the early American colonies. His most famous sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which warned listeners about the wrath of God and impending punishments for sin.

Olmsted, a Northampton native, grew up knowing about Edwards and his work, but he got the idea to write a show about him when he read a dramatized account of the conversion of a young woman named Abigail Hutchinson. (“Young woman sings herself to death — that sounds like an opera!” he said.) Her story became part of the show, which is not structured as a traditional narrative, but, instead, as a collection of scenes that showcase Edwards and important figures in his life.

“The more I came to find out about Edwards,” Olmsted said, “the more interesting he became.” Olmsted himself is a church musician, and his wife is a minister. Edwards, he said, is “not a fire-and-brimstone scold, but, in fact, he’s a very interesting character and thinker.”

All of Edwards’ dialogue in the show comes from his own writing, and the music is period-inspired, too. “Surprizing Work” is original, but its text is much more period-accurate than, for example, “Hamilton,” also a show about another important but little-understood American figure full of contradictions.

Incidentally, “Hamilton” actually has a connection to “Surprizing Work”: In the “Hamilton” song “Wait for It,” Aaron Burr sings, “My grandfather was a fire and brimstone preacher / But there are things that the homilies and hymns won’t teach ya.” That grandfather? None other than Jonathan Edwards, who took a job as the third president of the college we now know as Princeton University after his son-in-law died, leaving Edwards’ daughter Esther a widow (with a toddler Aaron Burr).

Only 35 days into his term, Edwards died after receiving a variolation (an early method of inoculation) against smallpox, intending to keep other people, including his family, safe from the disease — but it backfired.

“You might say that not only did Aaron Burr kill Hamilton, he also killed Jonathan Edwards,” Olmsted joked.

Much of the show may seem, on its face, unrelatable to modern audiences. As Olmsted put it: “We don’t dread the same things anymore.” Most Americans no longer fear the diseases that killed untold numbers of children in Edwards’ time, nor do they have an overpowering, persistent fear of a literal hell. (A modern-day parallel, though it’s only hinted at in the show, might be a dread of climate change, Olmsted said, of “getting burned up on account of our sins”: “Are we sinners in the hands of an angry climate?”)

But what if they did?

“What if you believed in hell?” asks the very first line of the show, addressing the audience. “Not like a metaphor / but a real place you might go someday / like China or the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. / What if you believed in sin? / Not like a state of mind, but a crime for which you’d have to pay / like false witness, or the kidnap of a child.”

“Who would you have to tell,” it asks, “if you believed in hell? Whose soul would you have to win, if you believed in sin?”

That mention of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame isn’t the only modern reference in the “Surprizing Work.” In Scene 4, which brings to mind parts of the musical “Hair,” a group of young people sings about the pleasures of “frolicking,” defined by Edwards as “the most frequent breakings out of gross sins; fornication in particular.” The group, bored by Edwards’ preaching, says:

We got no radio, we got no TV / We got no Facebook, / but we got lots of energy / Don’t be all melancholic, / Come on, join the frolic / Let’s get a little alcoholic / We gotta have some fun

Eventually, one of the young people — a woman named in the script as “Party Girl” — converts, kneeling in front of Edwards as he warns: “You are under the most extreme necessity of embracing the ways of virtue and religion. If you don’t, God will be your eternal enemy, and you will perish forever and ever.”

Another woman Edwards converted — Leah, an enslaved woman — introduces many of the scenes. Edwards taught her to read alongside his own daughters, and she joined his congregation. What became of her?

“Friends, nobody knows,” Leah, played by Samirah Evans, says in the show’s final scene. “Nobody knows but Jesus.”

Edwards did, however, write at length about another convert, a sickly young woman named Abigail Hutchinson, who features prominently in Scene 5. Her story includes what modern audiences might recognize as fits of scrupulosity (religious OCD): in only a short span of time, she goes from being “still, quiet, reserved,” never “notional or fanciful,” to a woman struck by a “great terror,” with a distress that “grew more and more for three days; until she saw nothing but blackness of darkness before her, and her very flesh trembled for fear of God’s wrath.” As she neared death, she rejoiced that her body would feed worms.

No spoilers, but Hutchinson isn’t the only character in the show who dies. It makes sense, of course — Edwards’ preaching was so often about death and what comes after it. Natan Chalem, who plays Jonathan Edwards, said, “Looking at the whole of the show, I see more of a man who’s scared by his own mortality, trying to make sense of his own mortality, and desperately afraid of what comes next.”

Taking on the role gave Chalem a twofold learning experience — he’s from France originally, where Edwards isn’t well-known, and he has a background performing in traditional operas, not contemporary ones like this. In delving into his role, he came to understand not only who Edwards was as a person, but also how much of an influence he continues to have in New England and beyond.

“His specter hangs over education, culture, and the history of this region,” Chalem said. “Knowing exactly what those words are from is useful.”

Edwards, himself a “sea of contradictions,” seemed to Chalem like “an interesting canvas to tell the contradictions about this country.” Many people associate slavery only with the American South, which is historically inaccurate. (The Princeton & Slavery Project noted, “For New Englanders of their elite status, the [Edwards family’s] participation in the slave trade and slave ownership was unexceptional.”) Even with the knowledge that Edwards taught Leah to read, Chalem pointed out, we don’t know much about how his family treated her. His son Jonathan Edwards, Jr. later spoke out against slavery, but did that help Leah?

On another level, of course, Edwards is mostly known today as a morose man: one of Chalem’s takeaways is, “My understanding of Edwards is that, while certainly a complicated figure, he isn’t necessarily the kind of person I want to share a beer with.” If nothing else, he said, “There’s nuance to him, and I think those contradictions are what humanizes the character.”

“I’d like to be charitable and think he was trying his best, as it were,” said Chalem. “But — how’s that expression go? — the road to hell starts with good intentions.”

Tickets are $20 to $25 in advance via bombyx.live or $30 to $35 at the door.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.