A Vaudevillian Theology
Vaudevillian Theology
Caleb Westbrook
Entering the Chateau Theater in Rochester, Minnesota was like “stepping into a story,” a trite and oft-used phrase that normally refers to the awe you experience upon entering an enchanting place that could be plucked from the pages of a fairytale. But the Chateau Theater was more like the real thing, truly stepping into a story.
I visited the Chateau Theate in October of 2010. At the time of my visit, the theater building was a Barnes & Noble, having converted into a bookstore in 1994 after a long and illustrious life of hosting theater productions, including cinema and vaudeville. It sits just down the street from the world-renowned Mayo Clinic—the other reason I found myself in this part of town.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was a cruel joke that a vaudeville theater opened within walking distance from a hospital—as though comedy could cure the maladies suffered down the street.
I approached the entrance with anticipation but did not expect the magnitude of the interior’s flourishes. The historic brownish-orange brick facade built in the Art Deco style was capped with the green patina of an oxidized copper roof, out of place amidst the myriad of other modern buildings around it. I was stepping not only into a story, but also back in time.
Like many downtown theaters, an expansive roof jutted out over the entrance. Three lighted suns climbed up out of different angles of the roof with the word Chateau emblazoned prominently, spread out just below each sun’s wiggly rays. Barnes & Noble wrapped around the marquee where once was posted the titles of upcoming productions.
I entered and found myself in a vestibule of sorts. I was stunned by the intricacy of detail, my gaze invited upward to the cross-hatch of wooden beams on the ceiling, peppered with various medieval-looking symbols and designs. I also noticed a small terrace where years ago theater-goers could exit their balcony seating and visit during intermissions.
As I arrived on the second floor, I found an imposing structure directly in front of me: the theater set of a 10th century French chateau. Wrapping around the walls of this second floor were other buildings, forming a small village. I was about twenty-three years old at the time, but I stood there like I was a child. I was enthralled, and as customers milled about among the bookshelves, I remained rooted in place for a time, mesmerized by the magic I had found in a small corner of a city known for its medical services rather than its imagination.
*
I knew why I was there, and that reality jarred me back to an all-too-painful truth: My mom was sick. And in less than 24 hours she would be in an operating room at the Mayo Clinic, undergoing an invasive brain surgery. She and my father were standing beside me in the Chateau Theater. In fact, it was they who had invited me, having visited a while before on a pre-op trip.
I love books. My mom knows that. She would be in surgery the next day, but she was genuinely happy that I was happy, still taking care of her adult son.
We stepped back outside. The popping, explosive colors of fall walked beside us as we grabbed gelato at a nearby gelateria before making our way back to the hotel. My mind drifted to the long chain of events that had led us to Rochester.
Mom had been sick for a long time. In the Bible there’s a story about a woman who suffered from bleeding for twelve years. Apparently all her money had been eaten away by medical expenses, trying to find a cure. The story found a fit in our own narrative; my mom was bleeding too, in her brain.
When the numbness and pain first began, I was just a kid. I couldn’t really understand what was happening to my mom. In a long, city-spanning search, she visited doctors at both St. Luke’s and Barnes-Jewish hospitals in St. Louis, Missouri.
“Maybe it’s lupus.”
“Maybe multiple sclerosis.”
She was poked, pierced, and prodded over the course of thirteen years. Before the Mayo Clinic, it was getting worse. She’d have “episodes” nearly once a week, and she’d shut down—too weak to really contribute to her environment. She had lost her quality of life.
Finally the doctors spotted what they hadn’t seen before: My mom had a lesion on her brain that, over the years, had bled occasionally. It was called a cavernous angioma, and it was responsible for the back and forth numbness and shooting pain along her nerves.
There was some satisfaction when we learned the true source of her malady: better to face something knowable than to be fighting in the dark with a mystery. It’s like in the horror movies when you finally get to see the monster. There’s still, of course, the final confrontation that awaits, but at least you know your enemy.
But for now, before the hospital, we needed an escape.
*
The Chateau Theater opened in 1927 as a vaudeville theater house. Vaudeville, a form of variety entertainment with shows ranging from magic, music, and dance to animal performances and comedy routines, became wildly popular in post-Civil War America. Though some of its earlier history could be associated with the more risque world of burlesque, it was quickly adapted to appeal to a growing middle-class with more conservative moral sensibilities. Its popularity did not really wane in demand until the advent of cinema.
Nonetheless, the Chateau Theater’s original purposes were clearly short lived, as it was built during the decline of vaudeville’s popularity—but like other theater halls, it was able to begin offering cinema and other entertainment options to bridge the revenue gap from the increasingly limited vaudeville shows.
However, what is perhaps most interesting and unique about the Chateau Theater is its close relationship with the Mayo Clinic. Founded in 1864 by William Worrall Mayo, only ten years after Rochester’s founding, the clinic’s early success can largely be attributed to the work of his two sons, informally known as Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie. It was Dr. Charlie who, in 1927, laid the cornerstone for the Chateau Theater, cementing in stone (quite literally) a lasting heritage between both the globally-recognized hospital and the local theater house down the road. To prove this tie, the hospital contributed half a million dollars when the city of Rochester bought the theater from Barnes & Noble in 2015 (five years after I visited). Their purchase and the Mayo Clinic’s assistance was part of a plan known as Destination Medical Center, an effort to wed both leading healthcare and medical research with a more robust social experience that increases wellness and quality of life in Rochester overall. Which brings me back to the paradox of my situation and the confusing legacy of hospital and comedy in juxtaposition.
As I stood surveying the antique theater set of a medieval French village, I was not only breathing in that moment; I was surrounded by years of memories; of laughs; of thespian, cinematic, and vaudeville magic.
But the moment didn’t last.
It couldn’t.
*
My mom eventually made the drive with my dad to meet with a specialist. There was a successful doctor there who had experience with cavernous angiomas, and they discussed the possibility of surgically removing it. He said that, at best, the symptoms would grow no worse, perhaps even be reduced slightly. However, my mom would always live with her occasional episodes of incapacitating pain. Additionally, there was always risk involved with brain surgery. One can die, of course. Or be paralyzed. The chances are small, but that’s where our minds go.
She decided to have the surgery.
So there I was: in Rochester, awaiting mom’s brain surgery. As we walked back to the hotel, gelato in hand, we had light-hearted conversation, made some jokes, laughed a little. But I can’t remember a time when my cheerfulness was so self-conscious, painfully cognizant of what lay ahead the next day.
*
I’ve had some time to distance myself from that trip to Rochester, but I’ve never been able to dispel the strange paradox that sat inside of me: a significant moment of imaginative wonder hand-in-hand with the experience of supporting my mother through one of the most traumatic events of her life.
I am once again faced with the lingering question: is it not a cruel joke, or at least empty escapism, that a vaudeville theater opened just a few blocks from where people are battling health crises or even fighting for life itself? As a Christian, what do I do with that? How does the Christian narrative frame such a strange juxtaposition?
Entertainment in its various forms is often taken for granted. It is so ubiquitous as a facet of life that it is rarely questioned—its presence is merely assumed. While some might quibble over the amount of entertainment that is good for an individual, entertainment in general is, by and large, considered good, a healthy pastime. So why not build a vaudeville house down the road from a hospital?
To be honest, I would not question the presence of a fabulous theater in nearly any other setting. But in the context of my mom’s brain surgery, the Chateau Theater presented itself more as an existential crisis. What is the purpose of such frivolities when all of our lives are, after all, merely trending towards the hospital down the street?
It’s a distraction. I can’t deny that. Standing in that bookstore, I briefly forgot about my mom’s brain surgery. And the happiness that appeared on her face for a moment told me that she, too, had forgotten temporarily about the next day.
So is that, then, what entertainment is for? To distract us until we die? Or should “entertainment,” the arts, only be used in its more somber forms, reminding us of our own mortality and preparing us for our inevitable decay?
For an moment, I’m tempted to answer in the affirmative. But as I reflect on my life, example after example comes to my mind when entertainment was either the cause or the context of something more than mindless diversion. Fun, a word so common as to border upon banality, has, time and time again, been the source of wholeness. Of life. An almost unconscious state of rightness. Merriment in the community of friends, of family, of strangers-turned-friends. Joy in the hilarious simultaneous recitation of a line from The Office, a shared joke. It’s not a distraction from death; it's a reminder of life.
Life, then, is the absolute, not death. Death isn’t the opposite of life, standing beside life as its separate but equal enemy; death is the absence of life. Life is what enters center stage in the Hebrew scriptures, in the Garden of God, life in all its abundance and flourishes, its whimsy and growth. Death is not a co-lead on that stage; it’s a character that enters later, a conflict to be resolved. Life is only jeopardized when humanity defies God by trying to supplant the need for Him with their own godlike knowledge. The biblical narrative, then, is a quest to return to the Garden of God, realized as a future promise in the apocalyptic literature of John’s revelation in the final book of the Bible. The curse of sin, death, and evil is overcome, whatever mysterious reality that equates to. The comic twist when all is set to right, indeed more beautiful somehow than before.
*
In the beginning was comedy.
Within the confines of human history, comedy and tragedy stand side by side, two theatrical genres offered upon the same stage, but fitted within the grand narrative framework of the Judeo-Christian tradition, tragedy is merely a subplot. Comedy, then, is an image of our first state, our best state, our real state.
What if we began viewing diversionary entertainment not as unrealistic but rather as the truest form of our real state of wholeness? Here’s the truth: in the wrong hands, fun will always only ever be escapism. The art of true joy requires mindfulness, a clarity and awareness that I am practicing a good thing.
Thus, the joy of comedy or the joy of a bookish wonderland point to the ultimate Christian consolation: wholeness, restoration. “Wrong will be right when Aslan comes in sight.” The Christian story baptizes hollow escapism and transforms it into the sacred foreshadowing of a new heaven and new earth. The curse is reversed. Here is Tolkien’s “eucatastrophe,” the sudden turn of events that resolves the dark plot and leads to the happy ending. Mayo Clinic becomes a symbol of temporary answers to the tragedy of sickness, pain, and death while the Chateau is a symbol of Christian mirth, grounded not in ignorant escapism but rather in eternal hope.
Additionally, not only does the Chateau Theater become emblematic of Christian joy on a figurative level, many theologians have advocated the very literal reception of cultural artifacts—Christian and non-Christian alike—into the future kingdom of God. While it might be counter-intuitive to consider non-Christian artifacts as having a place in the new heavens and new earth (surely these are only temporary and, by extension, probably not very necessary to Christians after all, right?), Richard Mouw points to texts like Isaiah 60:5 and Revelation 21:26 in which “the wealth of nations” and “the glory and the honor of the nations” are brought into the Holy City, as noted in his book When the Kings Coming Marching In. Mouw comments on the strange reality of pagan artifacts in the new kingdom of God (he discusses the ships of Tarshish at length). Because “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” cultural items will be gathered into the new city, though they will be transformed: “The earth,” Mouw says, “including the American military and French art and Chinese medicine and Nigerian agriculture—belongs to the Lord. And he will reclaim all of these things, harnessing them for service in the City.”
Let’s add to that list vaudeville theater. I truly believe that comedy entertainment will have a place in the new heavens and new earth. Might it look different? Must it be redeemed, purified? Of course. But I believe the Chateau Theater, in some fashion, has more than a temporary purpose and, therefore, belongs down the street from Mayo Clinic. In fact, perhaps it is the more substantial of the two since “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
*
In most Christian circles I’ve been around, believers either take themselves too seriously or don’t know how to reconcile their faith with fun. G.K. Chesterton noted this as well and famously ends his enduring classic Orthodoxy with the following:
“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”
*
Back at the hotel, my mom put in headphones as she lay fitfully and played a worship song on repeat the whole night. That night, mom joined all of Rochester’s fitful, teary sleepers; her own restlessness a prayer.
More than ten years have now passed, though, since my mom’s surgery. She has been symptom-free since her operation. The doctor had no explanation besides that medical anomalies happen. In other words, the miraculous. My mom’s thirteen years of captivity are now a dissipating memory. But when I do remember, once again I’m on the frigid October streets of Rochester, somewhere between a vaudeville house-turned-bookstore and a hospital, a peculiar state between laughter and tears, walking the fitful prayer, once meant for my mom, now for all the souls in all their beds, hoping that their light and momentary troubles will be transformed to a joy and merriment that the Chateau Theater represents but can never fully articulate.
Caleb Westbrook
Writer & Teacher
Caleb is a high school English teacher with undergraduate degrees both in religion and in English language and literature and with graduate degrees both in religion (Covenant Theological Seminary) and in English (Gardner Webb University). His poetry has been published in Havik, Nassau Review, Glass Mountain, and Time of Singing.
Photography by Benjamin Suter