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COUNTER-PROTEST
Jesus Has Two Mommies draws fire from Catholics
BY ADRIAN BRUNE

Faith Soloway is probably the last person you’d expect to find right smack in the middle of a Catholic controversy. First of all, she’s Jewish. Second, she’s about as mellow as they come, just going about her life, writing folk songs, singing with her band — the Faith Soloway Crisis — and caring for her eight-month-old daughter, Betsy Grace. But the five-foot-four, 120-pound, bespectacled, self-described Queen of Schlock has earned the ire of Catholic groups all over the country, and one particularly powerful one — the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) — which was behind the boycott of Martin Scorsese’s 1988 Last Temptation of Christ and Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier’s 1999 Dogma.

How did she do it? Soloway wrote a small-scale musical comedy called Jesus Has Two Mommies, a parody of the story of the birth of Christ, with Jesus being raised by two lesbians, and released it during the beginning of the Christmas season (see "Rock Opera," 8 Days a Week). Scripting the lesbian pair’s meeting at a bar called the Burning Bush didn’t help matters, either.

"The satire in a Faith Soloway show is always aimed inward, and the butt of a joke is always myself and the communities I am a part of — lesbians, folk singers, left-leaning Birkenstock types who might take themselves a little too seriously," Soloway says, between filming the video segments of the show. "In Jesus Has Two Mommies, I am being mocked, not Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or religion in general. Anyone who has seen the show would know this."

That’s the thing. The TFP doesn’t want anyone to see the show, and its members don’t get the joke, either. To that end, it has organized a protest scheduled for the Saturday, December 7 production to deter good Catholics and any other religious people, for that matter, from witnessing what the TFP calls "blasphemy." The group has made protesting the show an "urgent action item" on its Web site (www.tfp.org). It has also sent more than 200,000 postcards to the theater. "I hope that we can encourage our subscribers to participate by sending a protest e-mail to the Somerville Theatre’s parent company, FEI Theaters," says TFP webmaster John Horvat. "These e-mails, together with the protest postcards, will send a big message to the Somerville Theatre that American Catholics have a voice and will not tolerate this offense."

Because of the need for extra security and the reduced ticket sales resulting from the TFP’s campaign to quash Jesus Has Two Mommies, Soloway and producer Ian Brownell were forced to cancel the Friday-night show — their headliner. The two are asking patrons to show their support simply by turning up at the Somerville Theatre, where Jesus Has Two Mommies is playing, buying a ticket, and attending the show. "The TFP has called for a completely nonviolent protest, and we are asking our fans to be respectful of this," Brownell says. "Counter-protesting would not be helpful, and cheap jokes about the current scandals in the Catholic Church help no one. These folks, of course, have as much right to protest our show as we have to present it."

Although the TFP has been at this for months, all the hubbub about the show came as a complete surprise to Soloway. She raised some eyebrows when Jesus Has Two Mommies debuted last December, and even appeared on Fox News’s conservative-leaning show Hannity & Colmes to talk about it. But Soloway says she thought the worst was over when she planned for this year’s production — a revised version of the original.

Jesus Has Two Mommies, which stars Catie Curtis as Josephine and includes a cameo appearance by Melissa Ferrick, depicts Jesus Christ as having been raised by two women, Mary and Josephine. Soloway calls it a tongue-in-cheek fantasy about God coming to a woman — played by Soloway herself — in the midst of a life crisis and telling her an alternative version of the nativity in order to help her along her own spiritual path. She wrote the story while she and her partner of nine years were having a baby.

Soloway is trying to keep a sense of humor about the whole ordeal. "If people of faith just can’t understand how a show can be pro-God and pro-gay at the same time, well then, they’ll just have to pray for our souls," she says.

Jesus Has Two Mommies will be staged at 4 and 8 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square, Somerville. Tickets are $19 to $26. Call (617) 628-3390.

Issue Date: December 5 - 12, 2002
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