To examine “the complicity of the Church’s hierarchy in protecting and perpetuating the sick and sinful actions” of recent sex-abuse scandals is the author’s/actor’s stated point of the new Old Globe play “Prince of L.A.” Probing the corruption of the most powerful religious institution in Western civilization sounds like potentially great material for a play that could stir up some world-shaking thought. So when arriving at the theater to find the “investigation of corruption” less like a fresh contemplation and more like listening to grandpa’s views on life at the dinner table in between “kids these days” and “pass the mashed potatoes,” this writer was quite disappointed.
Sins of the father:
In fact, about 90 percent of the audience seemed to be over 65, complete with a snoring Grandpa Yankel type next to me who had to be gently woken by the usher. Now, of course the aged are full of earned wisdom — which youth like myself must always appreciate. But in this case, the sagacity behind the production of “Prince of L.A.” was not the tool needed to slice open and shed light on the corruptions of the Catholic Church.
Dakin Matthews, the author, who also plays Matthew Cardinal John in the show, is an aging associate artist for the Old Globe who also happened to study to be a priest years ago. The closeness of the author/actor to the material brings in an intimate knowledge of the working of the Catholic Church — however, it’s probably this closeness that makes the play so stale. Most of the time is spent showing the human side of the different people involved in a fictionalized sex-abuse scandal. At multiple moments, Cardinal John shows his confusion and iterates, “How could this have happened?” Despite lukewarm diatribes about women in the clergy, the disparity between concepts of “truth,” and how no scriptures ever mention “legalized abortion,” the end of the play leaves us with the creeping realization that Matthews himself really just can’t figure out “how this could have happened” either.
A lot of attention (and humorous interlude) is given to the foibles of clergy dealing with the inevitable presence of gay clergy, so much so that Matthews seems to argue that the repression of homosexuality in the Church is to blame for all the pedophilia scandals, perhaps forgetting the scandals were about sexual abuse of children, not the prevalence of gay clergy. Matthews would have done us more justice if he addressed, for example, the role of the Church in today’s society and how it fostered the shielding of criminal priests from authorities (perhaps as part of the long history of the Catholic Church being “above the law,” starting as far back as emperor Constantine’s legalization of Christianity, linking it intrinsically to the political power structure).
However, Matthews ends the play with a four-bullet list of essential qualities, the last being “faith” — seeming to reaffirm the place of the Catholic Church, whatever the haziness of its current state. The ending seems to fit with the show tagline that it’s “achingly funny and deeply moving” — that is, it’s deeply moving insofar as you’re a figurative old fart, with indigestion over the abuse scandals and in need of something to reassure you that the Church is still a viable way to find God.
