Marines grapple with history and judgment in new play
“The Pearly Gates” for many represents the Gates of Heaven or the gates of the afterlife. The term is used in folk songs, ballads, poems and in the everyday expressions of 19th-century cowboys and lone Confederate soldiers who wandered the country after the close of the Civil War.
Theologians view it as more of a children’s story: St. Peter at the Pearly Gates checking his list and telling the newly dead whether or not they get to go into Heaven. This is a generalized fable of what really happens: the dead rise out of their bodies in spirit form while able to view their old physical bodies lying motionless in a bed or operating room table as survivors as doctors work frantically to bring them back to life.
But the newly released spirit form is happily divorced from all pain and suffering and may now be quickly moving through a white tunnel where there is no time and where it may come to a beautiful field where often they are greeted by someone they recognize — a long dead relative, a guardian spirit or angel, or in some instances the Christ of Scripture.
The writings of Edgar Cayce reveal no exterior judgment for the newly dead but a peculiar situation where we judge ourselves as we view our former life on earth, the people we hurt, the families we may have mistreated as well as the good things we’ve done. The self-judgment isn’t to make us feel bad but to show us how we need to improve, and so in some cases many of us are given the option to return as new souls in new life situations to “make up” for these mistakes.
The opposite of the Pearly Gates, of course, are the Gates of Hell, a state of the after life few want to talk about although hell was brilliantly portrayed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, “No Exit,” where a group of people get to spend eternity sitting in a room together talking endlessly which at first doesn’t seem so bad but then “reality” hits when personality differences implode and the situation becomes intolerable: these people with whom you share zero chemistry and actually dislike will be your eternity partners in a room with no doors or windows.
In Joshua Crone’s, “A Marine Walks Up to the Pearly Gates,” a stunning play presented as part of the 2025 Philadelphia Fringe Festival at Yellow Bicycle Theater, we witness eight Marines — each one having fought and died in a major American war since the Corps was founded in 1775 — enter the afterlife kicking and screaming. The afterlife in this case is also a room, a holding cell where the “prisoners” are prevented from passing through the gates.
The Marines in question are not Christian saints like Padre Pio floating into a world they had glimmers of during their mystical experiences on earth. These are nuts and bolts guys — and one woman — who do not go gentle into that good night.
Patrick Kaine/Nez/Tiggs (Michael Eoin-Stanney), as Marine number one, has just died shortly after the founding of the Corps by the Continental Congress. He arrives thinking he is still in the throes of battle, sees the mammoth Pearly Gates but finds he can’t pass through them. He’s barefoot, as are all the Marines who follow him, and dressed in a jumpsuit that looks more like a prison uniform. This Revolutionary War casualty is also an Irish immigrant. For this reviewer, his Irish brogue was hard to understand at times although his panic needed no explanation.
He is followed by other Marines, all of them victims of instant death which mystics claim is not the ideal way to transition. Disoriented, each Marine attempts to negotiate their new reality as shadowy figures are projected onstage representing the people or families they knew in life. The ghostly figures speak in muddled voices and provide a sort of profile for each soldier.
Marines being Marines (battle-fatigued and on edge), the second arrival, Prescott (Joshua Crone) enters the room like a hand grenade, sees Nez/Tiggs and wants to fight him. In trying to understand what’s happening, Prescott’s paranoia works overtime and he gives the Irishman several good throttles before finally realizing they’re both in the same boat — dead — just Marines who fought in different wars.
Throughout the play, Prescott acts as a sort of Virgil/commentator as each dead Marine enters the room and goes through the same song and dance:
Where am I, how did I get here?
Fortunately the script manages to avoid dangerous redundancies in answering this question. The “you are dead” news is told in different and clever ways. Some Marines catch on faster than others. The young World War I buck, Karl Savitzky (Giacomo Badalamenti), arrives in the room like a crazed stallion, eyes popping out of his head. As the most boyish of the bunch, he settles in fairly quickly while lamenting he was just getting started in life when he died.
The WWII Marine who died during the battle of Iwo Jima, Roy Hathale (Lenny Ramos), moves about the stage as if he always had a foreknowledge of death and its mysteries. Being of Navajo extraction — his ancestors were medicine men with knowledge of hidden spheres — provides him with a mature advantage.
When Prescott, a Marine who fought and died in the Seminole Wars (1817-1818), sees the Navajo Marine, he wants to fight him because he thinks he’s the enemy. Life memories are hard to exorcise but the two eventually work it out after threats and confrontations. When Vietnam War Marine Carter Crawford (Najee Duwon), a black man, enters the room Prescott is quick to ID him as a runaway slave and demands to see his “free papers.” Prescott’s arrogant bravado is topped by the physically stronger Carter who wrestles him to the ground several times after confronting him over the slave talk.
While Prescott got his just desserts, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of the woke stereotype working here of the stronger black man versus the weaker white man, et cetera.
The Afghan Marine, Jennifer Larkin’s (Anna Kurtz), entry into the room was a laborious event with repetitive replays of her agonizing death. Once she comes to and realizes what’s happening, she encounters Gunny (John Crann), a sailor with hair like Eraserhead, an enigmatic figure more toned down than the rest of the guys (except the Navajo) partly because he’s a physician who went into the after life without his medical bag and stethoscope.
What follows is why some object to women in combat: Gummy begins asking Jennifer “normal” questions that she interrupts as flirtatious come-on’s. And yet Gummy (the sly duck) and as Jennifer points out, was quick to give her mouth-to-mouth before the two of them died in combat. Jennifer, of course, is no sissy girl but a wildly assertive Marine who will attack and challenge any man if she feels threatened. She shows her mettle when she dominates a couple of the male Marines in the room for one infraction or another.
As they used to say in the 1970s: was her beating all the men just an artificially constructed PR women’s lib moment, or was it the result of genuine female physical strength?
But Prescott’s comment — “They’re letting in women now!!” — got laughs from the audience.
At last we meet the Korean War Marine, Tilman Young (Thoeger Hansen) who has the secret combination to a large box that must be opened before the Pearly Gates will finally allow all these Marines representing 250 years of Corps history inside the Pearly Gates.
With the mission accomplished and the gates open, the final act is a spectacular song sung by the full crew, all of them (issues resolved) united in mind, spirit and body, and ready to take on whatever may come next.
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.
