The Temptation of St. Anthony

Gustave Flaubert’s nineteenth-century account of St. Anthony’s spiritual torment finds 21st-century dramatic expression in an electrifying score by Sweet Honey in the Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagon and the hallucinatory stage tableaux of visionary director Robert Wilson. An inspiring music-theater work, The Temptation of St. Anthony pares Flaubert’s novel to its essential themes of doubt and faith.

Brooklyn-based poet / performer Carl Hancock Rux leads an all-African-American cast as a poignant Anthony. Bound to God by years of self-imposed solitude and asceticism, he begins to question his path. So, courtesy of the devil, temptations arrive–luscious food, a shower of gold, a beautiful woman and man. Anthony struggles, but his will prevails. Buttressed by a rousing fourteen-member choir, his circumscribed existence undergoes further ripples when his disciple Hilarion (Helga Davis) takes him on an often-terrifying but ultimately redemptive search for truth.