Decrying shopping is his bag

By Devra First, Globe Staff  |  April 1, 2005

''Our neighborhoods are being destroyed by transnational chain stores, children!
We are drowning in a sea of identical details! Praise the god that is not a
product, the god that swims in the part of the sky not yet covered with
corporate logos!"

Reverend Billy is preaching, via cellphone, as he walks the streets of New
York. He is preaching against Starbucks, against Wal-Mart, against Disney. He is
preaching because what he has termed the Shopocalypse is upon us.

''We face this urgent apocalypse where we're shopping ourselves to death,
whether it's a $4 latte or a B-2 bomber," says the reverend, also known as actor
and activist Bill Talen. ''Lift your hand from the product and back away."

Reverend Billy leads the Church of Stop Shopping, and he is trying to save us
from our consumer culture before it consumes us. Tomorrow and Sunday he brings
his message to Boston, appearing with his 30-person Stop Shopping Gospel Choir
at the Old South Meeting House.

Their performance, ''Who Will Survive the Shopocalypse?," is part revival, part
revue.

''It starts as a church service, then the formal structure of the church service
breaks down," says Savitri D, theatrical director of the Church of Stop Shopping
and Reverend Billy's partner. ''On another level, it's a total Broadway show,
with 30 people singing, dance numbers, bits, comedy, and interactivity with the
audience."

Don't forget the credit-card exorcisms and the laying on of hands. When people
enter the meetinghouse, the logos on their shoes and clothing will be taped
over.

At St. Mark's Church in New York, where the Church of Stop Shopping is in
residence, services like this one bring in crowds. But the church also takes its
cause into the streets, staging ''retail interventions" at chain stores. Members
take over Starbucks, singing and dancing, while Reverend Billy leaps on the
counter to preach about the plight of Guatemalan coffee farmers and the
destruction of New York's neighborhoods. At Disney stores, he sermonizes:
''Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist, children! Hallelujah!"

''Disney is 100 percent a sweatshop company," he says. ''There's not a union
there." If you buy a company's products, he suggests, you are also buying its
business practices.

Reverend Billy wears a white suit and a priest's collar; his blond hair is
styled in an Elvis pompadour. His act can be entertaining, but it's also
effective.

''In a very savvy way, he's appropriating his character and the church format in
a way that is both ironic and serious at the same time," says theater critic
Alisa Solomon, who writes for the Village Voice and teaches at the City
University of New York. ''Within the church frame, he can preach, and in a way
that absolves him oddly and cleverly of the charge that he's preaching to the
converted. Whenever anybody tries to do political playwriting, that's the first
thing anyone says, but nobody ever says that to anybody in an actual church."

''I think it's high time that lefties appropriate righty icons," Reverend Billy
says. ''They've been doing it to us."

Talen, 54, grew up in the Midwest, raised by right-wing Christians, but he calls
himself postreligious. Among his major influences he lists Rosa Parks, Lenny
Bruce, Walt Whitman, and Jane Jacobs, author of ''The Death and Life of Great
American Cities." He was also inspired by the Beats, he says: ''I wanted to know
what America was, so I spent a lot of time on the road, falling in love, getting
fired, not always gainfully employed."

He wound up in California and became a performer, despite a disastrous early
episode involving an interpretive dance of ''Howl" he did for a
less-than-appreciative Allen Ginsberg. (''What doesn't kill me makes me
stranger," he says.) In the '90s he moved to New York, and there he had an
awakening.

''Mickey Mouse was everywhere," he says. ''The Disneyfication of Times Square
was being pushed by Giuliani in a militaristic fashion. I saw the people that I
liked, the interesting people, the powerless people, people of color, they were
just arrested, swept into hospitals, jails. It was cultural cleansing. I was in
the mecca of the theater world, and there was nothing on Broadway. Broadway was
officially dead. . . . I gravitated to the sidewalk preachers. They were
homophobic, apocalyptic, misogynistic creeps, but they commanded this amazing
instrument."

Encouraged by his mentor, a maverick Episcopal priest named Sidney Lanier (a
cousin of Tennessee Williams), Talen adopted that amazing instrument for his own
purposes.

''I got a cheap pulpit out of a dumpster and started preaching," he says. And so
Reverend Billy was born. Five years ago, Talen won an Obie Award for reviving
activism through theater.

''I think what he's doing is really important, both in aesthetic terms and
political terms," says Solomon, an Obie judge. ''He's pushing the envelope in
both areas. He's very thoughtful about what he's doing, and I think it's having
an impact."

But is what he's doing theater, politics, or religion? Reverend Billy prefers
not to make the distinction. ''It's a complicated model, but it's all of a
piece," he says. ''It's not spiritual at one moment, then political at one
moment. . . . We're trying to not respond to labels, trying not to be
consumers. It's a concoction that resists labels."

It's also a concoction that brings him his share of trouble. ''How many times
have I been in jail: 30, 40, 50 -- it's hard to say." He's due in court in New
York April 18, a result of the Church of Stop Shopping's activities on Buy
Nothing Day, on which ''there were doppel-Billies going to Starbucks all over
the city simultaneously," he says.

On April 19, a CD and DVD of Reverend Billy and the choir will be released. His
book ''What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Is in My Store?" (the title comes from
a Starbucks memo) will be available for purchase at the Old South Meeting House.

Even the reverend of the Church of Stop Shopping has to make a living. Billy and
Savitri D also travel and teach at universities; they were recently at
Emerson. It's all part of spreading the word.

''I think lefties have a faith," Reverend Billy says. ''I think progressive
people have a faith. It's just that the saints in my church -- Dorothy Day,
Frederick Douglass -- all spoke at the Old South Meeting House."

"Who Will Survive the Shopocalypse?" is at the Old South Meeting House tomorrow
and Sunday at 8 p.m. Tickets: $10-$12. 617-482-6439;
www.oldsouthmeetinghouse.org