Saved
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What a boon to Chicago theatergoers that he’s resettled here (working as a temp paralegal!), and that his exquisite artistry is currently on display once a week at Cafe Voltaire in Frederik Norberg’s one-man play Saved. Thorn plays Dr. Ignatius Lodge, a junior theologian addressing the World Symposium on Metaphysics and Religion. Unfortunately his address–“Belief in the Divine”–has been scheduled at the same time as the conference’s main-draw lecture, “Adam and the Black Hole,” resulting in a decidedly poor turnout for Lodge. Undaunted, he tells us that we will experience epiphany through him. “This is not a place for dry statistics and hair spray,” he boasts.
It seems that Dr. Lodge has found Jesus Christ. “Literally,” he adds. Lodge, a jocular stuffed shirt of a lecturer, had a vision of Christ after his first hump in an Iowa cornfield. (“I felt a need to put my hands on her hips and move them in a vaguely circular motion,” he confesses.) After a second vision, he claims, “Jesus has to be real because he appeared in my bathroom.” For those in the audience still dubious, he shouts, “You can run from me, but you can’t run from Jesus, and he lives in Ohio!”
