The text this play is based on is a remarkable combination of harsh judgment and yearning compassion, and I’ve tried in the play to push each state to an extreme, rather than try to reconcile or moderate them. If this results in a Jesus that you, like Susanna in the play, don’t like seeing, then I would urge you to keep your eyes fixed on the sight, because the one thing that seems certain to me about Kingdom is that any real glimpse of it is likely to be a discomfiting one.
I’ve entitled this play “His Yoke” in order to reference not only the yoke he urged on others, but the yoke that he himself bore. I think it’s interesting that his famous line, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” should come at the end of a speech in which, even if you don’t like the extreme version of it that I created for this play, certainly suggests a great weight of passion that must have been anything but easy to bear.