The People's Temple

When more than 900 American citizens died at a South American compound in 1978 in an apparent mass suicide, journalists scrambled to figure out just what had been going on there. With three decades’ hindsight, Fondakowski reconstructs from the inside out the Jim Jones–led religious group that established the Guyana outpost.

Using the research and interview skills she developed as part of the team behind The Laramie Project, Fondakowski gets the personal history of the People’s Temple from former members, relatives, reporters and Jonestown survivors. Her production more than does justice to the saga, owing largely to its near-ideal cast of shape-shifters; each plays multiple roles, simultaneously narrating and reenacting an oral history of the group’s evolution, from rural California commune to political power to separatist cult. She makes astute use of longtime ATC ensemble members such as Cheryl Graeff and Suzanne Petri; wiry chameleon Patrick Andrews is impossible not to watch—except when Darrell W. Cox uncannily channels the charismatic, egomaniacal and increasingly dangerous Jim Jones.

Fondakowski’s ever-inventive use of scenic designer Sarah Lambert’s endless stacks of white banker’s boxes suggests exactly what her ultimately moving and even hopeful play is: a container of records. Comparisons to Laramie and to the documentary-style plays of Emily Mann, such as Greensboro: A Requiem, are inevitable. But unlike those works, People’s Temple doesn’t insert the author and her fellow interviewers into the action. Fondakowski simply constructs this larger-than-life story by letting its characters tell us the life-size way they lived it. It’s a devastatingly humane view of inhumane events.