It's been fourteen years since Terence McNally's play "Corpus Christi" debuted in New York, off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club in 1998, and because this country of ours is really slow to grow up, conservatives are still bitching about it. A documentary about a touring production of the play called Corpus Christi: Playing With Redemption is having a preview screening at the Castro Theatre this weekend (2 p.m. on Sunday), and the film is now pissing off a religious group based in Pennsylvania called America Needs Fatima.

The play portrays Jesus as a gay man living in Texas in the 1950s, and the most controversial aspect of it is that there is a suggestion of Jesus having sex with some of the Apostles. McNally says in the documentery that he thought the play "would vanish" after its initial productions (it's original New York reviews included comments on its "teeth-grinding earnestness" and one called it "a predictable play with little beyond the obvious on its intellectual plate"). But it saw a revival by an LA-based theater troupe in 2006 who went on to perform it in Europe and across the United States over five years, which forms the subject of the documentary.

It's unclear whether anyone will show up at the Castro to protest. (You want to take any bets? We'd wager ten zealots or fewer.) But in conjunction with the documentary screening, there will be a production of the play itself happening at the Fort Mason Center on Saturday. Anyone who enjoys seeing shirtless, hunky Jesuses making out with men in Dolores Park on Easter should be sure and catch this one.

[Examiner]