Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour. Photo supplied.

Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Edmonton, are you ready to be saved!?” asks Brother Love, travelling salvation salesman  — and purveyor of such spiritual aides as his ‘dirty preacher wives’ video series, and “Christian poppers” and other recreational enhancers. And the answer apparently is Yes.

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Brother Love (Noam Osband) and his cheery assistant Sister Alice (Edna Mira Raia) are here, along with his glum band and the Gospelettes back-up tambourine rattlers, to wrest our souls from the damnation of “secular pornography,” which is A SIN. His mission is to divert our spiritual path from the sinful competition to “Christian porn,” which is not only righteous, but for sale. Salvation, we will learn, has much to do with body orifices, created as they are by the Lord. “My god is a sexy god.”

“Someone will get touched tonight,” he and Sister Alice assure us. And there’s a catchy join-in song that pursues the thought in numerous reprises of  “glory glory glory somebody touched me,” the Stanley Brothers classic repurposed for this special occasion.

Fifteen minutes into this raucous show Brother Love and co are displeased that there have been no donations yet. The urgency of the mission on behalf of Christian porn has been upped, as Brother Love reveals, by the bad behavior of his latest ex-wife, Mrs. Love IV, who “cleared me out.” Poor woman, she just didn’t understand a preacher has to be on call 24/7 for in-person visits to troubled female members of the flock. But it’s not the money, Sister Alice hastens to add. Lack of donation shows such a lack of respect for “the Lord’s conduit.”

As you will glean, no one would accuse this satire of Christian evangelism of being in any way subtle. It has a fearless sense of humour; it identifies its satirical target early (instantly), and hammers it relentlessly for an hour. This is, of course, exactly how televangelist infomercials work, by endless repetition, in thundering demonstrations of greed and crassness that wear you down. And Brother Love does set the bar impressively high. Theatre, however, does stall under such high-pitched repetitions (even if you’re supplied with tambourines and paper money to join in).

The Lord’s conduit is a spirited, fearless performer, and his defence of Christian porn and ‘cocaine for Christ’ is unwavering. All good unclean fun, and the audience did dig in. In the end it kind of erodes your cringe threshold, and you may find it takes you a while to get it back. If audience participation tends to make you avoid eye contact, this might be a show to actively avoid.