Mathew Drake, a 33-year old man who has died and risen from the dead
Simon Taub, his boyfriend
Judith Valere, a psychologist
Claire Essex, a doctor
Brian Haylee, a liberal Methodist minister with a magazine
Ruth Prescott, a conservative Christian radio and television personality

story:

Mathew Drake falls off the house one day while attempting to clean his gutters and is rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life-threatening internal bleeding. Three days later he dies, mysteriously, but three days after that, while awaiting embalming at the funeral parlor, comes back to life, mysteriously healed and without any scars, witnessed only by his boyfriend, Simon, who promptly faints. Subjected to constant medical observation by his doctor, Claire, and a slew of media attention helmed on one end by liberal but shifty Brian Haylee and straight-forward but conservative Ruth Prescott, Mathew returns home and attempts to preserve his sanity and his relationship with Simon but as the year progresses things fragment on the romantic angle even as Mathew is able to come to grips with his experience, thanks for a psychologist, Judith, whose focus is on people with near-death experiences. Ultimately the center of a nation-wide debate that can have no definitive answer, Mathew begins to move into his new role even as Simon works to accept the loss of the man he loved and life with the man who he has become.

author's comments:

Judith came first. She was born in a play called The Feast of Fog that contained her, an excellent speech in the final scene that found its way into later drafts of The Exiled, and nothing else worth saving. I scraped it the moment I finished the first draft back in 2003, and have never thought of it since. But Judith refused to be forgotten, and when the idea for this play first came to shuddering life with alarming speed back in January of 2006 she shoved her way to the front of my line of alternate personas and took her rightful place as the narrative filter for Mathew, the latest in a long line of characters I’ve come to see as frequent inhabitants of my work: reluctant visionaries, albeit, in this case, a more modest and soft-spoken version of the earlier more out-spoken (and neurotic) models (Dylan, Adam, Vincent). Over the course of three days, including two full work-days which my then boss, Tracy Rapplin, graciously allowed me to spend working on my script instead of on my job, the rest of the play emerged, the other characters appearing one by one, and finally coming out in one final burst that resulted in a first draft ten pages longer than, but otherwise exactly the same as, the play I was to workshop before audiences in San Francisco almost two years later. Since then, with the exception of Simon’s final monologue, which I tinkered with at the urging of Alison Luterman, the only revisions to Mathew 33:6 have been another five pages of cuts and the sequential switching of four scenes, making the show an unusually organic contribution to my canon, where most of the longer works have evolved over years of planning, drafting and refining. Even Vincent of Gilgamesh, which retained almost 90% of its original draft, took me six months to write and a year of pre-planning. This play was an idea one moment and then a two-hour manuscript three days later and it’s aging well for me: I know what I wanted to say here, and I like how I say it. My style of theater has often been called “confessional” and “romantic” and I think this piece is the apex of those two forms in that it is nothing but one character after another disclosing their deepest thoughts and observations and yet it ends (or does it?) as filled with mystery as it was at the beginning. The great abstract tools of the romantic philosophy, the candle and the mirror, are both utterly frustrated in their function and yet they are essential to the construction of the show and its core conceit, namely being a veiled farewell letter to a brief but beautiful love affair that both challenged and affirmed everything I believe, in addition to teaching me a great deal about the nature of joy and faith. But the shadows obscure the mirror that this play holds up to my life, and the light that flickers from the candle brought to dispel them only creates new shadows in different directions, and while Mathew and Simon are engaged in a story symbolic of my own neither one is me nor takes anything more than superficial (albeit, important) details from real people in my life so anyone looking for an easy equation will be as frustrated as anyone looking for definitive answers about God unless they choose to re-write the information according to their own beliefs, like Brian, or just refuse to acknowledge what doesn’t fit in with their interpretation, like Ruth. Personally I prefer Claire, so brave, so humble, so precise… but for better or worse, I am Judith, too fascinated to decide if she believes, one foot in the dark, one foot in the light, listening to the echoes of something from another place that, ironically, can only come from within us. Thank God she came to the rescue. Otherwise, I might have just bled all my feelings all over the stage, which rarely makes for good storytelling.