Every evening at 8, at a drab brick building in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, the stage is set for the American Place Theater production of Poet Robert Lowell's The Old Glory. Every Sunday at noon, with the addition of an altar, the same building is ready for the Holy Communion services of St. Clement's Episcopal Church, an off-Broadway mission parish serving the theater community. Running both shows is the Rev. Sidney Lanier, 41, a lively, loquacious priest who as president of the theater and vicar of St. Clement's is trying to bridge the gap between church and stage.
In the City Jungle. Lanier is one of many experiment-minded clergymen who are trying to find more effective ways of communicating the Gospel in the jungles of the deChristianized city. A descendant of his namesake the poet, and a distant cousin of Playwright Tennessee Williams, Lanier was raised as a Baptist in Florida, spent an adult decade of "militant agnosticism" before deciding, in 1950, to study for the Episcopal priesthood. After a tour of clerical duty in the Virgin Islands and at Manhattan's fashionable St. Thomas' church he became convinced that "the church in its parochial form is just not part of what's going on."
Two years ago, Lanier got permission from his bishop to take over moribund St. Clement's and turn it into a mission church aimed at Broadway, three blocks to the east. In collaboration with Director Wynn Handman, Actors Michael Tolan and Richard Shepard, he also formed the American Place Theater, which provides a platform where such writers as Poet Lowell and Novelists Niccolo Tucci and Philip Roth can experiment with the craft of drama.
A Sense of Community. Although Lanier regards the theater and his mission as separate—actors are chosen for their professional skills and not because they are on the parish roster—he believes that the church can learn from the contemporary stage. "The real experienced truth about man himself" is often better expressed in the "theater of the absurd" than in the Prayer Book, he says, and he puts drama into his unconventional Sunday services. Instead of a sermon, St. Clement's may feature a scene from Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In addition to readings from the Epistles and Gospels, the service has a "contemporary epistle"; last Sunday it was a passage from John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Actors are not the only ones who find a sense of community at St. Clement's; the congregation of 125 also has doctors, lawyers, writers, and a sprinkling of neighborhood slum dwellers.
Eventually Lanier hopes to become selfsupporting, a worker-priest living off his earnings in the theater and television. He also hopes that ecclesiastical experiments, such as his theater mission, will lead to a revitalization of the church. "I think that the church as we know it has to disappear," he says. "We have to take seriously the New Testament, where it says that the leaven must be lost in the dough."