Reverend Billy

Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is a radical performance community with an Elvis-like preacher based in New York City. Protest performances are rehearsed like a stage show. The troupe is guided by a theatrical director, Savitri D. The singers interrupt the operations of banks or corporations that the community deems to be racist or damaging to the Earth. The music director is Nehemiah Luckett.

The pre-choir church of the late 1990s, was the project of William Talen (born May 25, 1950), a theatrical producer and playwright originally from Minnesota and South Dakota. He adopted the persona "Reverend Billy" and studied Pentecostal preachers in the south and west. He grew up in a series of small towns: Eyota, Minnesota, Menomonie Wisconsin, Watertown. South Dakota. His parents, Bill Talen and June Sieswerda were Dutch Calvinists of the Christian Reformed Church, a conservative sect centered in Holland, Michigan. The character he invented may have been created as a satirical defense against the rightwing culture of his boyhood.

Talen is an American radio show host, stage performer, composer and author. Talen was born in Northfield, Minnesota into a Dutch Calvinist family, and received his BA at Franconia College in New Hampshire. While working as a theater manager in San Francisco during the early 1990s, Talen created a character that was a hybrid of street preacher and televangelist called Reverend Billy. This character was performed in various San Francisco alternative theater venues, where Talen had earned a considerable reputation as both a performer and a producer (Life on the Water theater, the Solo Mio Festival, Writers Who Act, etc.) After moving to New York City, he branded his act as a "new kind of American preacher". It debuted on the sidewalk at Times Square in 1998, in front of the Disney Store and Mickey Mouse, the anti-Christ. Talen noticed that when he was preaching people nearby would begin to clap, and The Stop Shopping Choir was born. Reverend Billy's sermons focused on the evils of consumerism and advertising—and on what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit and cultural authenticity in Rudolph Giuliani's New York.

Talen's chief collaborator in developing the Reverend Billy character was the Reverend Sidney Lanier. A cousin of Tennessee Williams with an interest in avant-garde theater, Lanier was then the vicar of St. Clement's, an Episcopal church in Hell's Kitchen that doubled as a theatrical space, where Talen was working as house manager. Lanier encouraged Talen, who was suspicious of religious figures after rejecting the conservative Protestantism of his youth, to study radical theologians and performers; of these, Talen credits Elaine Pagels and Lenny Bruce as particularly strong influences. Though Talen does not call himself a Christian, he says that Reverend Billy is not a parody of a preacher, but a real preacher; he describes his church's spiritual message as "put the Odd back in God".

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