In “Pilate and Christ” from the second act of Jesus Christ Superstar, when the Roman governor Pontius Pilate asks a soldier to identify the arrested man brought to him, the soldier responds, “Someone Christ, King of the Jews.” Both the question and the response are understood to be mocking: of course the governor knows who this is, and of course the soldier knows his name. But how would the story of Jesus change if the name, title, and body of a man were removed from it? Over the weekend, in these last days of Lent, I saw Jesus Christ Superstar performed by an all-woman cast at the Phoenix Performing Arts Centre in Duryea, Pennsylvania, and I’ve been sitting with the artistic and spiritual revelation that this show offered ever since.

The story of the Passion itself lends itself well to the kind of doubling with which the show is often produced: the adoring crowd quickly becomes an angry mob, torn between their hatred for Rome and their fear for the way of life they’ve managed to preserve under Roman rule nonetheless, and their abrupt turn is as jarring and disappointing when portrayed by women as by men. Additionally, seeing women in the roles of Pilate, Roman soldiers, and the religious authorities with whom they maintained an uneasy and mutually contemptuous collusion reminds us that there is little promise of a feminist utopia in a mere collection of bodies; the lack of regard and care for Mary Magdalene (as played beautifully by my dear friend Emily Bly!), the only woman’s role in the show as it was originally written, from a woman Judas and the other disciples highlights the ways in which women who don’t fit neatly into prescribed roles have always troubled women as well as men.

But what of a woman Jesus? Keighlyn Alber as Jesus brings the tenderness, defiance, and resignation of the Jesus of the Passion to brilliant life, but there’s more to the portrayal than just Alber’s skill as an actor and singer. There’s no adaptation, on the lines or between them; the songs are sung as written. So Jesus’s refusal to participate in the aspects of patriarchy and empire presented in the show, from his defense of Mary Magdalene to his spiritual abstention from his own various hearings before Pilate, Herod, and the high priests, emanate from a body with that’s revealed to carry a large tattoo of the clenched fist inside the symbol of Venus. And it’s worth remembering that Jesus is a physically demanding role, no matter how artful the staging of the scourging and crucifixion are; this particular wounded Jesus reminds the audience that Jesus is in solidarity with the beaten and murdered women of the world rather than the ones doing the beating and murdering, a reminder too many in authority, even and especially Christian authority, still need. The vulnerability of God in a human body is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity, one thrown into greater relief by the historical vulnerability of the female body to the forces against which both the historical Jesus and the one portrayed in the show battled.

It’s enough for me to believe in a Jesus who, though he happened to have lived in a male body, nevertheless treated women as subjects rather than objects in his ministry, took them seriously as moral agents, and was unashamed to be represented or supported by them. But the Jesus that Keighlyn Alber inhabited for two hours is one on which I dwell nonetheless. Maybe it’s simply because, even as a fairly adventurous consumer of media, seeing women play a cast of men reminds me of how rarely we get to see women all along the spectra of human emotion and morality. But the courage and confidence with which Alber carried the role suggested that the love of God as embodied in Jesus is equally as feminine as masculine—perhaps nonbinary, perhaps transcendent of gender altogether. That’s an idea to which I imagine many Christians pay lip service, but if we really believe it, then should a woman Jesus really be so revelatory? Would a “Someone Christ,” if that “Someone” was femme, be more challenging to us than Jesus Christ?

Photo credit: “Hailey Lou Yaw,” part of the Drag Christ series by Jason Tseng. Used with permission of the artist.