“The Testament of Ann Lee” shows March 18-19 at The Eclipse in Breck.
Pilgrims are ingrained in our history. As a kid growing up in Denver, I fondly remember construction paper hats and turkeys. Names like Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower were as common as George Washington and Abe Lincoln. So was the sanitized story of Thanksgiving, where facts and legends were dressed all the same.
Not so common in Denver schools was the history of the Quakers, the Christian sect known for radical piety and industriousness. Even lesser known to me were their most famous figures, unless you count the guy from Quaker Oats.
“The Testament of Ann Lee,” about a woman preacher with radical ideas about race and sex, tells a story buried even deeper – so deep it is barely a footnote. Like most pilgrims she left Europe to escape religious persecution, and not only because her followers considered her the second coming of Christ.
No, according to the film, which is based on biographies like “Mother Ann Lee,” Ann Lee made friends and enemies on both sides of the Atlantic because of HOW she worshipped. Her sect, known as the Shakers, showed their devotion through ritualistic wailing, screaming, screeching and dancing.
Filmmaker Mona Fastvold imagines Shaker worship as a cross between the Maori haka and a seizure. Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall tells The Guardian, “It felt feral.” I couldn’t help but think of rural preachers pulling demons from hyperventilating converts in sticky, humid churches. The Shakers would make a southern Baptist blush.
But Shaker worship is only window dressing for the story of a woman who preached racial and gender equality, environmentalism, servitude and, most radically, complete celibacy. Her revulsion grows early, when young Ann Lee watches her father and mother have sex. To a child, and the viewer, it is painfully violent. So is the whipping she receives from her father. We watch as a teenage Ann Lee tries and fails to have four children, each of them dying, we’re told, before they turn one year old.
This early sequence of childbirth and death is harrowing. We understand why Ann Lee believes fornication is the original sin, and why celibacy is the only remedy. We also understand why her followers considered her the second coming of Christ. Like Jesus, she turned suffering into evangelism.
Playing the adult Ann Lee is triple-threat Amanda Seyfried. She can sing, dance and act, and she revels in all three as the long-forgotten leader of a doomed sect. (When sex is forbidden, your religion has an expiration date.) Or should we call it a cult? Most Christian pilgrims certainly would. So would early political leaders. In a fiery scene near the end of the film, she and her followers, including her faithful brother (Lewis Pullman of TV’s Outer Range), are hunted down for refusing to fight the British. This seems to suggest that, in the United States, the only thing worse than witchcraft is failing to pick a side.
Some descriptions call “The Testament of Ann Lee” a musical biopic. That is misleading, like calling the Bible a book of prayers. The songs are adapted from 17th Century Quaker hymns, and so they all have the same hypnotic rhythm. I doubt this will ever be adapted for Broadway.
I left “A Testament of Ann Lee” with a second childhood memory. It reminded me of going to Catholic mass as a boy: powerful at times, repetitive at others, and the rest of the time, well, sort of boring. I don’t think Ann Lee would mind the comparison. She’d simply invite me to come back again.