Rev Billy

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is a radical performance community based in New York City. The Stop Shopping Choir is accompanied by a comic preacher, Reverend Billy. The philosophy of the Church of Stop Shopping surrounds the imminent "Shopocalypse", which assumes the end of humanity will come about through manic consumerism.

The Stop Shopping Choir accompanies Reverend Billy and stages guerrilla theater style actions, singing on the property of the Disney stores,Monsanto facilities, and Trump Tower, among others. They are often considered part of the Culture Jamming movement.

The group uses the content from their direct actions to create songs that are performed on concert stages and in cabarets. The director of these shows is church co-founder Savitri D. The music director is Nehemiah Luckett. Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir routinely perform at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater in New York City.

The character of Reverend Billy was developed in the early 1990s by actor and playwright, William Talen. His family was Dutch Calvinist, from the Christian Reformed Church, a conservative sect concentrated in Holland and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The precepts of this kind of Christianity were the basis for Dutch Afrikaners system of Apartheid in South Africa.

Talen grew up in small towns throughout Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. He left home at 16, moving east with Charles and Patricia Gaines, a writer and painter who encouraged him as an artist. Talen began to perform his poems and stories, hitch-hiking from Philadelphia to New York to San Francisco.

Talen's chief collaborator in developing the Reverend Billy character was the Reverend Sidney Lanier, a cousin of Tennessee Williams. Lanier was vicar of The St. Clement's in the 1960s, an Episcopal Church in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. In an effort to increase attendance at St. Clement's, Lanier had torn out the altar and pews, inviting actors to perform scenes from plays by Tennessee Williams and Terrence McNally, and founding founding the American Place Theater. Lanier described Talen as "more of a preacher with a gift for social prophecy than an actor.'' In the early 1990s Talen moved with Lanier to New York City from the San Francisco Bay Area, branding his act as a "new kind of American preacher"

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