Review: Jeesus hyppää metroon
Jesus jumps on the subway
Helsinki City Theatre’s Studio Pasila’s play Jesus Jumps on the Metro deals with topics that are particularly familiar to Amnesty: prison conditions and the death penalty. The play is set in Riker’s Island Prison in New York, where Latino man Angel Cruz is in pretrial detention awaiting trial. He is accompanied by a well-meaning lawyer, a death row serial killer awaiting transfer to Florida death row, and two prison guards, complete opposites.
The protagonist, Cruz, delves from the stupid and impulsive evildoer at the beginning to the one who poses the ultimate questions, and as the story progresses in jerks, the story really touches at least those sympathetic viewers who are close to the subject. The wise, cynical-critical viewer may have a harder time. Watching the play at its best moments is like watching a good American police series and courtroom drama – and really being there. At the same time, however, it is also much deeper and more long-lasting than that of American mainstream entertainment
Weekly entertainment package.
It is very difficult for America to turn to the Finnish stage, both on the level of ideas and linguistically. And no wonder, the United States is absolute on so many levels: it rotates around its own axis without caring about others and without noticing others, with its own customs and jargon, like a locomotive that
pushes forward on its rails. The same absoluteness manifests itself more broadly, for example, in a selective attitude towards international law and its binding nature.
Jesus jumps on the subway embodies this side of Americanism, for better or for worse. At worst, it is a failure to interpret Americanism in the play’s dialogue. One of the food and tobacco giant RJR Nabisco’s best-known brands, the Oreo biscuit, sparks dialogue
as a general term, the viewer is unintentionally hilarious because, despite its large market share in America, it does not enjoy any greater fame here in the Nordic countries than the LU Group’s homely Domino biscuit in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. There are other examples, and in general, the play could have been “translated into Finnish” more freely – to bring it closer to a person who has not necessarily been on a TV trip closer to the United States.
It would be difficult to bring the New York prison environment to life on a minimalist Helsinki stage if the themes of the play itself were not so universal and location-independent. Is a person less human than others after murdering? And is a person who has not killed a good
compared to someone who is? Up to what point?
The play succeeds in bringing out what everyone who defends the death penalty wants to forget – even the worst criminals are human beings and they too have rights. The play’s screenwriter, Stephen Adly Guirgis, turns the serial killer sentenced to death into a human being he doesn’t want to see killed. According to Guirgis, plays can have evil and dark characters who, when they make the audience laugh, become close and likeable. The same mechanism applies in reality, it is actually closer to the essence of the death penalty than one might think. When defending the death penalty, the person sentenced to death is always made into a creature, an inhuman monster without human dignity. It is the only way to get a normal person to accept the planned killing of another person. In the death penalty system, beasts are killed, people survive. All in all, the play fulfills its basic mission, and for example, the criticism of Lauri Meri’s crush in Helsingin Sanomat (HS 30.8.2002) does not do it any justice. A person who wants to expose themselves to a situation where there are more questions than ready-made answers will get plenty of fodder for brain cells from the play. At the end, the spectator leaves the theatre, with thoughts of right and wrong, humanity and facing death. According to Hesari, who says that the play “slumps tiredly into the void between the characters”, it is probably the fault that only a handful of people have come to see this bold, different and, above all, thought-provoking theatrical art.
The writer is the U.S. coordinator of the Finnish section