San Francisco, USA - Nineteen-year-old Stephan Jones was sitting in a movie theater in the capital city of Guyana with his basketball teammates when someone sneaked into the theater with a message from his father.
It was an order to get revenge.
"That's as much as was said," Jones remembers more than a quarter-century later. "But we knew what it meant. Anyone who crossed my father without contrition was to die. We knew if that order came, it meant something horrible was happening in Jonestown."
Jonestown, a commune hacked out of the Guyanese jungle, was the home of the People's Temple, a religious cult ruled over by Jim Jones. His rebellious son Stephan was in Georgetown playing in a basketball tournament while his father led more than 900 cult members in a horrific mass murder-suicide on that November day in 1978.
Stephan's story, and that of scores of other survivors and victims of the Jones-town tragedy, is told in "The People's Temple," opening this weekend at the Guthrie Theater.
The documentary-theater project was written by Leigh Fondakowski. She was part of the team that created "The Laramie Project," the acclaimed play about the brutal 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard during an anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming.
In both scripts, Fondakowski and a team of writers interviewed those closest to the tragedy. Both plays are composed almost entirely of the words and emotions and observations gleaned from those interviews.
Jones, who's now 46 and lives a quiet life in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and four children, was among the first to be interviewed. And among the most eager.
"I was thrilled when people wanted to take these stories and put them on the stage without their own political slant," said Jones, who is thoughtful, soft-spoken and articulate in an interview.
"A big part of this whole thing was to bridge the gap between those that died and the people that were looking at it. Telling it with flesh-and-blood human beings on the stage finds a story that a large body of people can identify with."
There's a different tale and a different set of reasons for just about every person who died in Jonestown after drinking — or being injected with — cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. One play, Jones said, can't tell all those stories. But it helps explain what made his father's movement so seductive to so many different people.
"In the play, I'm somewhat of a sympathetic character," said Jones, who had begun drifting away from his father before the tragedy. "If people can see this guy was capable of some real evil, maybe they'll have some understanding of our experience and how people wound up there."
They weren't just brainwashed sheep, says Fielding McGehee, whose wife lost two sisters in Jonestown.
"They were a diversity of people who came to the temple for a range of reasons," he said. "Some wanted to help the needy; others were the needy wanting help.
McGehee now runs the Jonestown Institute, an online resource center for the survivors and families of the massacre.
As one of the people who helped connect Jones with the California theater team that assembled "The People's Temple," McGehee says the play dovetails with the Institute's mission "to keep the waters roiling."
"The questions the play raises resonate through the ages," McGehee said. "But there aren't too many answers. There's an old saying that says we have to live the questions to find the answers, and I think that's what the play is about."
Jones says he's still rebuilding his life after the events of 1978. He has a clear-eyed image of his parents — his charismatic but profoundly sick father, his strong-minded but co-dependent mother, who died at his side. And, like all sons, he sees in himself a reflection of his father.
"I carry all of that — the actor's mind, the sweet heart, the ton of rage and more than a share of narcissism," he said. "Fortunately, I had people in my life who wouldn't put up with that; I had a mother who taught me never to do what my father did with it, and I had enough of a personal crash to come out differently."
"He was really kind of a silly man," Jones continued. "And we enabled him. If anybody had really challenged him, it might have saved his life, and many others."