At Fringe Fest’s Cannonball, ‘The Holy Church of Jeff Bezos’ worships the billionaire overlords
“A place where people can both be like, ‘I can come here and be virtuosic, but I also can come and make really exciting, poor choices.’”
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The Holy Church of Jeff Bezos, a church service-cum-performance piece playing this weekend as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, arose out of what writer Ernest Hemmings described as the trauma bonding of “folks that hate being employed but desire it so much because that’s the only way we can survive.”
The 45-minute piece, one of hundreds of experimental shows playing this month at the Icebox Project Space Gallery, is in some ways classic Fringe. It wasn’t completely clear if it was a play or a pop-up or an interactive experience, and no one was quite sure when to clap. The two performers, Hemmings and Thom Chrastka, wore black balaclavas with eye holes and mouth holes cut out, and chanted rites like “Amazon have mercy on us.”
Communion, to the tune of Cisco’s royalty-free hold music, involved Dunkin’ coffee and doughnut holes. A hymnal passed out to audience members had the spirit of a zine, full of cheeky prayers: “Bonus, I am not worthy to receive you. But payday loans will work just fine until a bonus can actually happen. Amen.”
The piece was put on with the help of Cannonball, one of the subgroups organizing shows within the Fringe Festival. Cannonball describes itself as wild and loose, with an emphasis on risky and unconventional works.
“They really want this to be a place where people can both be like, ‘I can come here and be virtuosic, but I also can come and make really exciting, poor choices,’” said Maya Jackson, who is on the marketing team at Cannonball, with a laugh.
Other Cannonball shows include A Funeral for Death Machines, an immersive musical told from the perspective of the gun and the bullet on their last night on Earth; Blue Silk, a puppet fairy tale, and Black Joy, “a multidisciplinary ancestral journey through Blackness” that incorporates circus, poetry, dance, and mask work.
Part of the thrill of the festival-within-a-festival is not knowing exactly what you’ll see.
“It’s really cool to feel curious again. Like, wow, I didn’t realize we could make a show about that,” said Jackson. “To feel — as someone who’s been seeing theater for a good portion of my life — there’s newness still out there.”
Hemmings, 50, is the founder of TSTMRKT, an experimental theater group based in Las Vegas, who also performed in the Fringe Festival last year. While working this year on a group art show called “You’re Fired,” he and the other artists started spitballing about how the stations of the Cross were similar to the stations of HR. He decided to make a performance piece out of it; once Chrastka agreed, he purchased a priest costume for him and the two got to work creating The Holy Church of Bezos.
“The old Gods are dead,” Hemmings said after the show. “The worship is to billionaires.”
The Holy Church of Bezos will be performed alongside five other shows at the Icebox on Saturday Sept. 7 at 9:30 p.m. and alongside six others on Sunday Sept. 8 at 5 p.m. Tickets to all Cannonball shows are available at phillyfringe.org.