The Peoples Temple

On Sunday night, I went to see a play about Jim Jones and the Jonestown tragedy in Guyana over at the Berkeley Rep. I had a number of interests in this play - The Peoples Temple was based in kooky Northern California, where I live now, and later moved down to kooky Guyana, where I lived for 6 months as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Interestingly, when I lived in Guyana, none of the Guyanese people ever talked about Jonestown. We discussed it briefly in training, but that was it - nobody brought it up except to point out that the Guyananese gave Jones a place in western Guyana because the western third of the country is under dispute with Venezuela (even though there aren't even roads connecting the countries!) and the more people living there under the Guyanese flag (which is a sweet-looking flag) the better for their territorial claims.

And, ironically, the play had little to do with Guyana. Instead, it focused on the cult itself, which, like most cults I guess, was very weird and had lots of rules that only the head honcho was allowed to break and involved lots of strange sexual behavior, etc. Contact Steve Gibbons for more on that. I still find it interesting that all of this went down in Guyana, but the story itself is uniquely American. Jonestown is the only thing most Americans know about Guyana (assuming they can distinguish it from Guinea or Ghana), and while the country is not exactly a great place to go visit, it's regrettable that Guyana is known for a mass suicide instead of other attractions.

Anyway, as expected, the most moving part of the play was about the mass suicide. The dialogue in the play came exclusively from interviews, documents and recordings of Jim Jones and cult members, which made everything a little more moving (and also excused bad writing). I had no idea that Jones had run all his cultists through PRACTICE runs of drinking Kool-Aid before, just as a blind allegiance test. Of course in the end, when everbody starting dying, I think they figured out it was for real.

An interesting play. You can read about Jonestown - and actually listen to a tape made during the suicide - here. Also, here is an amazing review of the play (a little too amazing in my opinion, but it was still a good play.)