to employ unconventional theatre techniques that were based on improvisation in order to created a very pointed piece. According to the playwright Jean Claude Van Itallie, a member of the company, the piece was conceived with the idea that the actors would act as priests and that there would be a sense of one-ness amongst the congregation that they are questioning the same things in which the priest is questioning. Questions such as where does evil come from? What provokes people to commit murder? Is maintaining innocence a possibility within the contaminated world that which we walk upon? Though most of the piece is done in choreographed movement, mime, human sound-effects, hand-held instruments, there is text as well coming directly from the Bible along with a number of speeches written exclusively for the show. The plot of The Serpent takes an extremely non-direct route in order to answer these questions. The play opens with a group of actors onstage where one recites a graphic description of an autopsy while the other members of the group are creating different sound effects and movements that match the text. Then the remaining members of the ensemble join the stage to partake in a stylized re-enactment of the John F. Kennedy assassination. One actor counts slowly to twelve while the other actors partake in the re-enactment in slow motion, moving to a new position and new sound effect per count. This scene is run forward, backwards, and out of order to the point that it becomes so ritualized that there is now an element of comedy in play within this depiction of someone's untimely death. There is a sense of realization of how the horror of the murder rushes over the ensemble as they break free from their rigid formation and become instead a group of individuals fleeing from the evil that has just occurred. The ensemble then moves to the retelling of the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Four actors take the shape of the serpent that convinces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and are present as Eve then moves to convince Adam to partake of it. After being banished by God from the Garden, the actors then partake in a ritual enactment of the first true discovery of sexual love which takes place alongside a recitation of how the descendants of Adam begat the rest of