When theater is a religious experience

He was there, on a Sunday evening in late June, to perform his version of the Gospel of John — not as a sendup or radical rethink, but as an act of testament, the religious text edited down to 90 minutes.

“I memorized this first as a prayer, not as a play,” he told the audience. Then Jennings, whose Broadway credits include “Urinetown” and “Side Show,” made the sign of the cross, folded his hands for a flickering instant and began his energetic recitation.

It was an embodiment of the idea, much beloved among theater people, that attending the theater is a lot like going to church — perhaps especially if, as one of the drama-loving faithful, you’re seeking some kind of succor from the experience.

“The Gospel of John,” at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, was the finale of the four-day Sheen Center Theater Festival of Catholic Playwrights, a showcase founded to expand the notion of what Catholic playwriting can be.

In two off-Broadway musicals right now, too, worship plays a significant role: Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop,” at Playwrights Horizons, in which homophobia cloaked in Christian righteousness wounds a young gay man raised in the faith; and the Lynn Nottage-Duncan Sheik-Susan Birkenhead adaptation “The Secret Life of Bees,” at the Atlantic Theater Company, in which a carved wooden statue of a black Virgin Mary is both object of veneration and source of comfort for a group of black women in 1960s South Carolina.

“Mary ain’t magical,” one of them tells a quizzical visitor, “but she’s more than just a piece of driftwood. She’s something inside of us.”

Whether the religious creeds of our childhoods helped or harmed us, whether we retain or reject them as adults, “something inside of us” is what those teachings remain: a language we’ll always speak, because it was one of the first that we learned. Echoed in a playwright’s work, it’s instantly, almost instinctively, recognizable.

When I was little, my brothers and I would pile each night onto our parents’ bed, where our mom would read to us. In the same way that “James and the Giant Peach” is etched faintly into my memory in her voice, the biblical stories I heard at our Roman Catholic church on the weekends — and the rest of the week at parochial school — are inscribed indelibly in the earliest layers of me. That goes for the Catholic morals and ethics that shaped me, too.

I was a teenager when I left the church, but it still has a hold on the way I look at the world. I know it’s one of the reasons I’m so drawn to the piercing and profane, wildly funny and very Catholic plays of Stephen Adly Guirgis, with their bare-knuckle brawls between good and evil.

Likewise my fascination with medieval mystery plays, which dramatized the Old and New Testaments, the production of each biblical tale sponsored by a different guild: the guys who made nails, say, taking charge of staging Jesus’ crucifixion.

My upbringing is also part of my affinity for the Sheen Center, which is a project of the Archdiocese of New York. Much of the center’s theater programming — like “Little Rock,” which was about the fight for racial integration; “Hold These Truths,” about the disgrace of American internment camps during World War II; or Tectonic Theater Project’s “Uncommon Sense,” about people on the autism spectrum, and by extension about the sanctity of life — examines questions of morality and social justice.

So did the staged readings in its playwrights festival, raising issues like the squeezing of the working class (Caridad Svich’s “Red Bike”) and the ugly history of eugenics in the United States (William Baer’s “Three Generations of Imbeciles”). In another play, Erik Ehn’s scripturally inspired “The Weak and the Strong,” an aging rodeo rider deteriorates in body and mind. But religion is not the top note to any of these.

Faith is more prominent in Nathan Yungerberg’s “Thea,” a comic-surrealist meditation that glides on wings of gospel music. Performed at the festival by an A-plus cast (Brenda Braxton, Tina Fabrique, Monroe Kent III, Zonya Love, Matthew Sims Jr. and Mirirai Sithole), it straddles earthly existence and the afterlife in the waning days of Sister Thea Bowman, a Catholic nun and historical figure whose grandparents were enslaved. As she lies ravaged by cancer, a gaggle of ancestors awaits her arrival.

There’s no benevolence to the religion, though, in “A Strange Loop.” It’s ferocious and toxic: a weapon wielded unquestioningly by the faithful to shame and shun, in conflict with the Christian edict to love one another.

That show’s heartbreakingly potent church scene finds a flip side in “The Secret Life of Bees,” with the Atlantic’s building, a former church parish house, amplifying the sense of worship. The characters’ devotion to the Virgin Mary — whom they call Our Lady of Chains, for the consolation she’s given to generations since the days of slavery — is ecstatic, kinetic, even transcendent.

The mingling of worship and drama, of course, is older than Christianity; in ancient Greece, the Athenians paid tribute to the dissolute god Dionysus by holding theater festivals. These days, we often think of drama as providing a kind of secular communion. “Hadestown,” on Broadway, takes that idea literally, building it movingly into the action of the show.

But the secular can also be spiritual, the habit of worship transformed into the habit of theatergoing.

A couple of months ago, returning from a visit to my mom as she was dying, I found myself viscerally needing to see a show immediately. Going to plays is what I do for a living, but this had nothing to do with work; it was about assuaging my own pain. I bought a ticket to Dave Malloy’s “Octet” at Signature Theater Company, conscious that what I wanted was the solace that church might provide, if I were still religious.

That’s not a fair thing to ask of any work of art, I realize.

Yet the moment the music started, rich and choral and enveloping, I could feel it soothing my soul. The ritual of theater, too, was a comfort: a group of strangers, sitting together in what I think of as a sacred space, breathing the same air as the actors, listening as they told us a story.

It had nothing to do with religion, or faith. But that was church to me.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.