In the Light is a work of fiction inspired by public reporting and extensive interviews with former members of a residential community in the United States that presents itself as an ecumenical Christian community in the Benedictine monastic tradition with a professionally recorded choir at its center, conducted by the Prioress. This is the second concert-length choral theater work by Thomas Lloyd following his acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Bonhoeffer. In the Light probes the dystopian social dynamics of a religious community where psychological control is maintained through the choir and its Abbess-conductor. Lloyd wrote both the text and music.

Forty years But when my girl
forty years here since gone away
when my girl, drew me out
now gone away, into her new world,
begged me to leave, how could I suddenly feel
then drew me outside, away, that I was now truly free,
from the only world I’ve ever known. suddenly free,
and yet not know why?

“With choral music, Christian liturgy, and support for women’s leadership in those traditions having long been at the center of my own life's work, discovering that such a community was the home of a choir whose professional quality recordings I had long admired was deeply disturbing. I had to find out more about how such a thing could happen.” Starting soon after completing Bonhoeffer, Lloyd began exploring more about the community through public documents, national media exposés, long discussions with former members, and time spent at the community as a guest.

In his earlier Bonhoeffer, Lloyd sought to probe the meaning of the evil of fascism through a community that sang African-American Spirituals and was led by a charismatic leader whose writings about that evil constantly referred to hymns and music he had learned as a pianist. With this new work, he saw a challenge to get beneath the surface of a coercive community dynamic where choral singing was an instrument of control and subjugation in and of itself.

Asking the choir to perform in an open, immersive staging to recreate the feeling of a visit to the community itself, Lloyd has structured the work with distinctly different kinds of scenes where the distinctions between the public and private dimensions of the community are clearly both seen and heard. Transitions between those two worlds are aided by videos produced by Lloyd with electronic music composed by his son Jeremy Lloyd (producer/performer with the Platinum recording artists Marian Hill).

Some scenes bring the two worlds together by having a visiting choral conductor come and rehearse the choir. He hears one kind of ‘public’ singing, after which the audience hears another as the choir acts out the internal dialogue of leaders and followers with the aid of special lighting and electronic sampling. In other scenes, four individuals step out from the community and through the theater’s ‘fourth wall’ to sing soliloquies directly to the audience revealing their conflicted individual perspectives on their life in the community. Three central “light session” scenes reveal through music the seductive energy of the community that leads an ordinary person to subject themselves extraordinary humiliation. The whole work is framed by fragments of a public worship service the composer attended at the community, and scenes that freely imagine how such a community might begin and end.

This work was created not to shock or expose a cultish community that has already received extensive press exposure. Rather, with an unflinching but compassionate view of a coercive community and its members, Lloyd reveals that such a social pathology is not something that can simply be dismissed as extreme, but can be found within social organizations at all levels of our society.

I should remain in silence with my cross;             How could I stay here, you ask?                                 
but seeing you gazing in from outside                     You say I don’t look happy,
like we’re swimming in a fishbowl                             that I don’t look alive?
I just had to come to the side of the tank               How do you stay where you are?
and say a few words.                                                 How do you know you’re content?

We all need social and political organization to flourish as a society. But when do we cross the line from productive social constellations to the dysfunctional, from life-affirming to demonic? Can individuals survive such an experience and come out the other side with a sense of self still remaining? Can traditional religious faith and artistic culture survive such a reckoning with the persistence of human evil?

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I have long been concerned with those who claim ownership of the minds of others. And also with those who come to offer their minds to such would-be owners through whatever combination of voluntary self-surrender and psychological and physical coercion. I’ve come to recognize that the mental predators are concerned not only with individual minds but with the ownership of reality itself. - Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality – On cults, cultism, and the mindset of political and religious zealotry, p. 1 (2019; The Real Press).