New Play Humanizes Survivors of 1978 Mass Suicide in Jonestown

c. 2005 Religion News Service BERKELEY, Calif. _ Night after night, it is the moment when the 600-seat theater falls as still as a cemetery. “And I started walking up to the back of the pavilion and I got up to where the swings were and I saw bodies,” says James Carpenter, an actor portraying […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

BERKELEY, Calif. _ Night after night, it is the moment when the 600-seat theater falls as still as a cemetery.

“And I started walking up to the back of the pavilion and I got up to where the swings were and I saw bodies,” says James Carpenter, an actor portraying Tim Carter, a survivor of Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones were poisoned in 1978. “Children’s bodies … And I turned to my right and at that exact second they were squirting poison into my baby son Malcolm’s mouth.”


For the real Tim Carter, sitting in the audience at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of “The People’s Temple,” a recounting of Jones’ failed utopian movement, it was a moment of horror and healing.

“I felt a sense of completion,” Carter said. “Finally, the people of Jonestown had a voice. We’ve never had a voice before.”

That feeling is echoed by other former Peoples Temple members who have seen the play, a documentary drama drawn entirely from survivor and eyewitness interviews and thousands of historical documents, including letters and diaries. The play runs through June 5, with a Broadway run under consideration.

While the story of Jones and those who died with him in the South American jungle has been told in made-for-TV movies, tell-all books and scholarly papers, this is the first time survivors say they are not shown as mindless cultists, but as human beings.

“It is a long way from subhuman cretins to human beings,” said Carter, who escaped Jonestown on that day, Nov. 18, 1978, but whose wife, son and five other family members did not. “That is what the play did.”

The play is the fruit of three years of work by writers Leigh Fondakowski, Greg Pierotti and Stephen Wangh, the team behind “The Laramie Project,” the highly lauded docudrama about the murder of Matthew Shepard. They were joined in the writing by Margo Hall, a Bay Area actress. Fondakowski directed, and Pierotti and Hall are in the cast of 12 who play more than 40 roles in the three-hour play.

While news reports of the tragedy focused on images of bloated bodies on the jungle floor, the play goes beyond that by examining what led so many ordinary people to go there. For some, like Carter, the lure was Jones’ politics, a socialism based on racial and economic equality. Jonestown, a farm community carved from the Guyanese jungle, would be the proving ground.


For others, it was religion. Many people, especially older African-Americans who made up a large chunk of Temple membership, came for Jones’ fiery sermons and his promise that they, too, held God within themselves.

“I have always wished I could walk with the Christ, but you proved to be greater than the one I thought about,” wrote Zipporah Edwards, an elderly African-American woman, in a letter to Jones that is in the play. Hall, playing Edwards, declares, “I have found my church!” when she first hears Jones preach in Indiana. She and her sister, Hyacinth Thrash, followed Jones when he moved to Northern California and then to Guyana. Edwards died in the jungle, but Thrash survived by hiding under her bed.

Hall, who grew up with people who eventually perished in Jonestown, said delving into the legacy of Peoples Temple touched her own religious beliefs. A longtime churchgoer, during the writing process she felt skeptical about organized religion and, for a time, stayed home Sundays with her husband and son, listening to music and reading the Bible together.

“I get really scared when people say they are following someone,” she said. “But what I missed was community and I said this isn’t right either. So how do you go into the church, be involved in the community and know who you are and keep a sound footing on what you believe? I am still struggling a little right now with that.”

In the play, Temple members wrestle with the same questions. Some left, disgusted with Jones’ corruption, and some stayed, figuring the good the community accomplished outweighed everything else. The play makes clear there were as many reasons for joining and staying in the Temple as there were Temple members.

As Jones and his movement came under increasing governmental and media scrutiny, he grew more erratic. On Nov. 17, 1978, Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., visited Jonestown to check on constituents’ complaints. The next day, while attempting to leave with a group of Temple members who wanted out, armed Temple members killed the congressman and three journalists traveling with him. By the end of that day, Jones and 913 of his followers were dead. Some swallowed cyanide, some were injected with it. Only two _ Jones and Annie Moore _ were found with gunshot wounds.


Rebecca Moore is Annie Moore’s older sister. She lost two sisters and a nephew in Jonestown. Her mother and father were involved in the drive to investigate the deaths, which they _ and many others _ considered homicides, not suicides. Moore, her mother and father were interviewed for the play, and her parents and sister Annie appear as characters.

“I just felt at long last the story is being told in all its complexity,” said Moore, a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University, where she has taught about new religious movements, including Jonestown. “It presented the ambiguity of people who were wonderful and yet were capable of these incredible deeds _ acts of nobility and self-sacrifice and acts of horror and murder.”

Moore, who maintains a Web site, Alternative Considerations of Peoples Temple and Jonestown (jonestown.sdsu.edu), said that kind of treatment breaks down the wall between “us” and “them.”

“The story becomes more relevant for everyone,” she said. “You can no longer divorce yourself from them. You might find yourself agreeing with Jones’ politics or tapping your feet to the gospel music or feeling part of this incredible energy. As soon as we can make that empathetic leap, then Jonestown becomes more tragic. Then we really experience the incredible loss of these people.”

Depicting the humanity of Peoples Temple members _ both the living and the dead _ was among the creative team’s chief concerns from the very start.

“I never believed they were crazy,” said Fondakowski. “When you meet them one on one and sit across the kitchen table from them, their humanity was apparent.”


At first, some survivors were reluctant to speak to the writers. They had not been treated well by the media before, why should this be different? But as a few opened up, they spoke to others of the writers’ sensitivity, and the process began.

Eugene Smith was initially reluctant. On Nov. 18, 1978, Smith was in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital. His 19-year-old wife, their 6-month-old son and his 72-year-old mother were back in Jonestown; they died.

For 27 years, Smith spoke of what he saw to no one. Then he sat down for a four-hour session with Fondakowski and Hall.

“What it has done for me is it has allowed me to raise my head,” he said after seeing the play, in which both he and his pregnant wife are characters. “And I think it has done that for a lot of people.”

Smith was uncertain in the beginning whether he even wanted to see the play. When he did finally go, seeing an actress play his pregnant wife was “difficult to absorb,” he said. But when it was over, he felt the dead had been honored.

“Now they finally have a voice,” he said. “That is respectful, that is honorable, that is the right thing to do for the dead and for those who are alive. I am glad I was around to see this. It will make the second half of my life a lot easier because now there is nothing to hide.”


Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for historical photos and a photo of the play.

Note: There are two uses of “Peoples Temple.” With an apostrophe, it refers to the play, as in “The People’s Temple.” Without the apostrophe it refers to the church of Jim Jones, as in “Peoples Temple.”

MO/PH END RNS

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