by AMY BARRATT

Stephen Schecter wants to entertain you with tales of sex, violence and family dysfunction. In other words, he wants to talk to you about the Bible.

There Was Darkness on the Face of the Earth is poet-professor Schecter's one-man show, scheduled for a four-night run at the Saidye next week. Schecter teaches the Bible as literature and has lectured extensively on the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, which are the raw material of There Was Darkness. And he has news for those who think this sounds like it would be boring or sermon-like. "These are brutal stories. It's 3,000 pages of sex and gore."

Those who look to these stories for examples of how to live a good life have got it all wrong, says Schecter. "When you read this stuff, you wonder where did we get the idea of a functional family." He points out that in the Torah, or Pentateuch, sons deceive their fathers, daughters sleep with their fathers, and Abraham, the patriarch, pimps for his own wife. "Often, when I'm giving a lecture, people will say, ‘It's not possible. They never did that,'" says Schecter. "I say, open up your Bible. People think they know these stories, but they don't."

Shecter's title is a play on the Genesis passage that reads, "There was darkness on the face of the deep." Right afterwards, God says, "Let there be light," and there is light. The irony is that in the subsequent stories, so many are living in darkness, both figurative and literal.

Blindness is a recurring theme, Schecter notes. For instance, Jacob uses his father Isaac's blindness to deceive him and steal the blessing meant for his brother Esau.

"It makes me ask myself, ‘How does a father go blind? Where am I blind with my kids? Where was my father blind with me?'" says Schecter.

The people in the Bible act like ordinary, flawed individuals, and that is exactly the strength of the material. "If you can't see yourself in these stories," Schecter says, "then they're not working."

These stories have the power to move us to tears and anger, but they can make us laugh as well. Schecter, who has been told he's like a cross between Jackie Mason and a poet, says that when you read the Torah, you understand where Jewish humour comes from. "There's so much irony in it. The author often gives you the double- and the triple-take on what's going on."

Schecter is renting the main stage at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for what can be seen either as a dressed-up lecture or a pared-down theatre piece. The show consists of "lighting, me and the text," he says, a look that seems well-suited to the material, especially the book of Genesis.

Talking and writing about the Bible is "the thing I do best in life," says the author of the epic poem David and Jonathan, based on events in the first book of Samuel. Of his material behind There Was Darkness, Schecter says, "These stories give people a mirror to see themselves, and from that can come a little catharsis."

Not a bad payoff from summer theatre.

There Was Darkness on the Face of the Earth, Aug. 13–14, 8 pm; Aug. 16, 9pm; Aug. 17, 8pm, at the Saidye (5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine), $20, 737-6537

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