Escape from cult upbringing: Travis Abels' 'Things I Hide From Dad' at IndyFringe

Patriarchy can have life-defining consequences at home, especially when its lofty representative in a boy's

Travis Abels about to be devoured by sin monster

life is a beloved father. "Things I Hide From Dad" is an autobiographical IndyFringe Festival show of compelling intensity and focus that has three more performances at the District Theatre. 

This personal account from a Hoosier man long resident on the West Coast, where he went on a painful journey of self-liberation, is lively and exquisitely designed. Recorded sound and Travis Abels' movements around the stage are coordinated to a fare-thee-well and always germane to his narrative. 

His struggles to reconcile his admiration for his father with the pulls of his body toward forbidden pleasures are symbolized by a secret closet. Into it Travis keeps trying to confine temptations as they accumulate and become monstrous. The boy's acceptance of the cult-like variation of Christianity that his pastor father adopted from the strict Worldwide Church of God had started to falter as puberty arrived. 

Sensuality encountered in the larger culture creeps into Travis's constricted life, interfering with his duty to pray. He comes across a Kenny G recording in a Christian bookstore, much to his surprise, and buys it for its promise to be free of church doctrine via the saxophonist's long-winded, swooning style. 

It stirs something deep inside him. Among Abels' skills as a performer is a physical representation of the unsuppressible drive to masturbate that is almost explicit but never gross. The same goes for how attraction toward the opposite sex is represented, as well as another indulgence of the pleasure principle in illicit drugs. Commendably, it's the story and its emotional resonance that prevail.

Abels holds on to the humor of achieving self-respect under trying circumstances. "Things I Hide From Dad" is grounded in basic struggles of maturation. In Abels' case, those took place against an insistence that only certain ways of putting aside childish things (as St. Paul advised) can save a lad from perdition. The Adventist theology embedded in him had a strong grip on his young mind insofar as the Last Judgment might come at any time.

Eternal torment is thus a threat that Abels represents vividly via the secret closet, out of which monstrous noises pour each time he unlocks the door to stuff a new danger inside. As Harold Bloom explains in his provocative "The American Religion": "If you teach children that failure to keep the Seventh-day Sabbath will bring upon them the Mark of the Beast, then you are in danger of scapegoating children." 

It's not hard to understand that such a burden is insupportable. So it's remarkable that Abels could make such an entertaining one-man show out of what it felt like to carry that ominous weight.  Even better: the happy ending of how he threw that off while continuing to love his father up to the end.