Passion Play (Yale Rep, 9/23/08)

Left, Joaquín Torres in Passion Play.  Did you think I was turning Catholic?

I saw the Yale Rep production of Sarah Ruhl's theatrical triptych, Passion Play, last night on a whim spurred by a cheap-tickets offer.  Short version: I and the rest of the audience left the theater feeling somewhat befuddled, but I liked it.  How can I not like any production in which two Elizabethan courtiers carry a soldier off the battlefield in Vietnam, followed by Queen Elizabeth with a rifle and two gigantic fish puppets escorting a six-foot-long dead fish?

Long version....

Detailed spoilers follow; if you intend to see Passion Play, I suggest not reading my thoughts on it until afterward.

Passion Play is an interrelated set of three one-act playlets each dramatizing the production of a "Passion play" (dramatized Christian mythology, mostly focusing on Jesus's life and death, but in at least some cases apparently going all the way back to the garden of Eden) at some point in history: Elizabethan England, Oberammergau, Germany, in the 1930s, and South Dakota in the 1960s-1980s.  The first two, I believe, were originally done as separate one-act plays, and the third was written relatively recently to tie them together.  The whole thing makes for quite the theatrical marathon; a solid three hours plus intermissions had us staggering out in exhaustion at almost 11:00 after a 7:30 curtain.  The theater staff did make an effort to provide support to the audience: never before have I had ushers first appear selling drinks and ice cream to eat in my seat and then reappear carrying around small trash cans to take away the resulting litter!

This play is tremendously difficult to write about: the actors each play multiple roles, some of which have names and some of which don't seem to, so it's hard to know how to refer to them.  I've ended up using the actors' names in many places when referring to the characters they're playing.  I apologize if this is confusing.

Passion plays are interesting to me as a theatrical concept but make me shudder a little as a human being.  The Oberammergau production in particular (still going strong at ten-year intervals after 650+ years) is deeply associated with Christian anti-Semitism; well into my lifetime they were still depicting money-grubbing Jews with horns on their headdresses.  (I guess that was supposed to be more subtle than having them growing out of Jews' heads?)  At least into the 1980s the "collective guilt" of the Jewish people for the crucifixion was still part of the play, and most of the actors in the 1930s in Oberammergau were Nazi party members.  So the whole thing gives me cold chills on a personal level.  Ruhl addresses this in the Oberammergau segment of the play.

But let me go back to the beginning.  The first act is set in the 1570s, when Elizabeth was in the process of eliminating Catholic practice, including the Passion plays, from England.  One village is still playing the Passion (an Elizabethan turn of phrase I appreciated) in the classic style: village-wide community theater.  This was the same period in which religious community drama of this sort was being displaced by professional (and secular) playwrights and actors, so both theatrical and religious tradition are being destroyed. 

The segment opens with the village preparing for the performance.  John the Fisherman, whose name is no coincidence, plays Christ and appears to truly embody his character -- good, chaste, kind, etc.  His cousin Pontius, whose physical deformities are made obvious by pure physical skill without resorting to a hump or other costume assistance, dreams of playing Christ but is stuck in the dual roles of Pontius Pilate and the serpent.  Joaquín Torres  makes a convincingly saintly and physically beautiful Christ (and we do see every bit of his buff and scenic physique at various points in the evening), and Felix Solis (magnificent in all three sections) is the unfortunate cousin, who guts fish all day and dreams of beautiful blonde Mary (Nicole Wiesner), who plays the Virgin.  Rounding out the major characters are a second Mary (Susan Pourfar), playing the Magdalene, and the Village Idiot (Polly Noonan), a crazed young woman who confides all-to-apt observations to her jack-in-the-box toy while being constantly told to shut up by everyone else.

Underlying the actual plot is the pressure on people who play Biblical roles repeatedly to conform to their roles; John/Jesus is serenely Christlike while Pontius is a classic hand-rubbing theatrical villain, shattering the fourth wall to express his rage at his life and his jealousy of his saintly cousin directly to the audience.  The women are more complicated; Virgin-Mary, hating to sleep alone, walks the streets at night seeking male company, preferably the chastely unavailable John.  Magdalene-Mary is a cynic who declares a good book more enjoyable than twenty beddings (I would do well to take this to heart) and makes tart observations about the passivity demanded of women (she would rather do needlework than have sex -- at least that way she is the one doing the pricking).  (Above left, the two Marys discuss the comparative virtues of reading and sex; click image to enlarge.)  Love and desire among the main characters complicates everything: both Magaldene-Mary and Pontius pine after Virgin-Mary.  Magdalene-Mary's lesbian fantasies shock the friar to whom she confesses.  Pontius gets Virgin-Mary, briefly and secretly, and the resultant pregnancy leads to a desperate plan to present it as a second miraculous virgin birth.  All of this is woven in and among the scenes of the village rehearsing different parts of the Passion play until the entire thing comes crashing to an halt: Virgin-Mary vanishes, leaving the Village Idiot to play the role, and Elizabeth herself (Angels in America's Kathleen Chalfant) appears to stop the play and initiate a search for priests or other vestiges of Catholicism.  The playlet ends with Pontius' suicide atop the Ophelia-like drowned body of Virgin-Mary as a Catholic friar flees the village for France and the villagers sell off their costumes and props to a professional theater in London.  John, meantime, is shown in silhouette, fishing.  Untouchable by politics?  Or oblivious to others' suffering?

New politics, new religion, new theater, all linked together.  Nice.

Right, Kathleen Chalfant as Queen Elizabeth.

I have to credit the designers for their theatercraft: Allen Moyer's beautifully spare set of wooden walls with hinged panels here and there acting as windows is perfectly done.  Deliciously, deliberately primitive props like the halos for the angels and the wings and rigging arranged to loft a hulking, terrified carpenter high in the air to perform the Annuciation are a theatrical delight.  When the drowned Virgin-Mary's body is brought onstage and placed on a table, water pours from her body and mouth...and keeps pouring and pouring over the edge of the table in an endless stream.  And then there are those fish puppets: ghostly, human-sized fish carried mysteriously - or is that mystically? - across the stage as a dramatization of the endless parade of dead fish that make up the life of Pontius and a symbol of his disconnect from religion (fish being a symbol for Christ, as seen on countless bumpers nowadays).  And costume designer Ilona Somogyi must have had fun creating the crude knitted bodysuits with anatomically-correct genitalia for the have-a-fig-leaf scene in Eden as well as the spiffy Elizabethan courtwear of the queen and her two courtiers.

After that segment, the second act (Oberammergau) was a bit of a letdown.  The major actors carried over their roles in the play and the play-within-the-play, but the character of each role has changed: Torres is the reluctant and imperfect player of Jesus, Solis his close friend who plays Pontius but is soon setting off to join the army.  Solis' sexual attraction to Torres is gently portrayed, though his humiliation at the hands of a Nazi officer is hard to watch.  Noonan's Violet/Village Idiot is a Jewish girl whom the villagers literally lock in a cage.  Wiesner's Ilse is a coldly calculating actress who plays the Virgin Mary but secretly uses the Nazi officer for one-way sexual pleasure.  Pourfar takes the part of Torres' sister, pressuring him to live up to the family tradition of playing Jesus while, I think, quietly murdering their dying father.  Both Solis' and Torres' characters are both victims and future Nazis here, an interesting equalization after the first play. 

The set changes to a mountain-backdrop village and the costumes are modernized, but the fancier costumes for the Passion play itself include the infamous horned headdresses and the anti-Semitism comes to the fore, including a hilarious scene in which Noonan's character prompts Torres in his lines as Jesus but subtly warps them until he finally cries out (at her prompting) that he was a Jew, which of course horrifies the rest of the Passion play cast and the director.  The creeping anti-Semitism culminates in the reappearance of Chalfant, this time cross-dressing in the role of Hitler, and Ruhl's somewhat heavy-handed point (made by the Passion play's director) about how some people just want someone strong to tell them what to do.  This struck me as interpretable both as the obvious comment on the German people under Hitler and as a comment on organized religion itself.

Left, Felix Solis as the modern soldier playing Pontius Pilate.

Finally, the third act brings us forward to my own lifetime, running from 1969 into the early 1980s.  While the roles within the Passion play again remain the same, Torres' and Solis' characters are completely inverted from the first act: Solis is the responsible soldier, going off to Vietnam and leaving behind his wife (Wiesner), who promptly has a pot-fueled one-night stand with irresponsible wannabe-actor Torres.  She then considers abortion for the resulting pregnancy, lending a whole new level of meaning to her lines as the Virgin Mary about her son's death.  Only Pourfar's gently religious tollbooth attendant seems to maintain a sincere and uncomplicated Christian faith, a complete turnabout from her cynical Magdalene-playing Mary in the first play. 

Solis fights in Vietnam, leading to the surreal sequence I mentioned at the beginning of the review: he slays a giant fish and is then removed in stately procession by Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers, followed by fish-puppets escorting the dead fish.  Chalfant's Elizabeth makes the interesting point that she fails to understand why men would go to battle and die if not for a monarch who will be with them on the battlefield and take direct responsibility.  Politics and authority have become impersonal and distant; this will then be echoed by what happens to the formerly community-organized and -acted Passion play.

Solis returns, suffering from PTSD, to find both his marriage and his role as Pontius threatened, the latter by a hired director who is professionalizing the production.  In a magnificent moment, he alters the play itself during rehearsal, insisting that unlike Pilate, he will not wash his hands of responsibility, but instead will accept the blame for Jesus' death.   As his marriage dissolves and he retreats into mental illness, the Passion play is slowly changed from a community project to an Equity production with out-of-town professional actors brought in and the community actors reduced to working behind the scenes, though at least this also causes the removal of the horns from the Jews.  There are virtues to impersonality and professionalism; do they balance the drawbacks?

Chalfant reappears in drag again as we enter the 1980s, this time as a sunny but forgetful Ronald Reagan making morning-in-America-style political speeches; clearly an unworthy "monarch" for people to follow or to die in the service of.  Noonan becomes the preteen daughter of Wiesner (now divorced from Solis) and the increasingly slick Torres.  But in the end, Solis, having thought her his own daughter, disregards her parentage and loves her as his own, accepting responsibility as none of the other characters show any special desire to do, and becoming a Christ figure.

I spent most of the day thinking about Passion Play.  The arcs of Solis' and Torres' characters with their reverse-parallel passages from villain to saint and vice-versa.  The less pleasing portrayals of Wiesner's and Pourfar's characters.  The giant fish puppets.  Solis' magnificent performance, especially in the third segment.  The virtues and defects of a monarchy vs. a more impersonal form of government and the desire of many people to follow a strong leader (religious or political or a mixture of both).  The entirely mixed feelings this sort of intensely Catholic religious expression stirs in me, combined with my revulsion for the anti-Semitism which seems nearly inseparable from Passion plays.  The delicious theatrical trappings of both the plays and the Passion plays within them.  The arc of theater itself and its shift from religious drama to community theater to professional theater.  Politics as theater; is there any political trio more theatrical than Elizabeth I, Hitler, and Reagan?  Personality-cult monarchy to personality-cult dictatorship to personality-cult democracy; is this religion or politics?

I can't come up with a brilliant summation, but I was thoroughly fascinated and am tempted to see the production a second time just to see what further angles come out when I need not focus so intensely on trying to keep track of three separate plots.  Overall, I recommend both the production and (since it's only making a short run here) the play in general in what I am sure will be numerous future productions.

Comments

[Serge]

Christian anti-Semitism...

Ten years ago, I got into a bit of a clash with the husband of my baby sister-in-law. He refused to consider my assertion that anti-semitism is very much a part of Catholicism. Sure, he was a Catholic, but he grew up in the Bay Area, and younger than me by close to a decade, and he wouldn't admit as valid my own experience as a once-Catholic in a mostly Catholic part of North-America. Strangely enough, he saw no contradiction between his position and his parents's background: they were Catholic Jews who left Austria in the 1930s, for the reasons you can imagine, and in fact were on Hitler's enemy list for their also being communists who did plays that Adolf's ideology didn't approve of. Then again, my brother-in-law is something of a know-it-all.

[Serge]

Magdalene-Mary is a cynic who declares a good book more enjoyable than twenty beddings

Books are friends, and friends are the best thing a person can have. More durable than beddings too, even quilted ones. Heheheh...

[Marilee J. Layman]

I was thinking at the beginning of your review that I would want to see it again. It sounds like there's lots of symbols and relationships that would take second looks.

I'm not fond of Passion Plays either, it's almost impossible to do them without making the Jews evil.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Serge:
The Catholic hierarchy has been attempting to reduce official and unofficial Catholic anti-Semitism since Vatican II, sometimes in ways that strike me as rather patronizing, though that's certainly a major improvement on persecution. Some of it can be annoyingly disingenuous, too. The current Pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking in 1980 of the Oberammergau Passion play: "I beg of everybody, particularly our Jewish friends, to stop reproaching us with an anti-Semitism totally alien to the historic roots and content of this play."

Yeah, right.

But a large part of the problem (for all forms of Christianity, not just Catholicism) is that Christian theology considers Christianity a fulfillment of and replacement for Judaism. Binary problem: Christ was or was not the Messiah. There's no middle ground, no Schrodinger's Christ. I don't think any organized Christian sect can logically acknowledge as legitimate the viewpoint that Christ might not have been the Messiah after all and the whole son of God thing was imaginary and therefore their entire theological basis of existence might be incorrect. (Though it's certainly possible for an individual to follow Christ as an entirely human moral philosopher rather than a demi-deity, I don't know of any sect that organizes on that basis.) And if Christianity is correct, then Judaism is incorrect in refusing to accept it. And there's no easy way to get around this little theological problem, though of course people of good will can and do agree to politely ignore it socially and at least in the West we currently have a general consensus that believing people are in error about religion is not a good or sufficient reason to kill them or start a war. (And it took us quite a few centuries to get there, didn't it?)

But Passion plays are dramatized theology, and not terribly sophisticated drama at that. (There's an interesting challenge for a playwright: a sophisticated Passion play.) So that whole uncompromising element is going to pop out pretty easily, and it's not a big step from "the Jews are wrong" to "the Jews are evil." Is it impossible to do a Passion play and not make that step? I don't know. They do keep trying to clean up the Oberammergau production, with some success. It next goes up in 2010; it will be interesting to see the reactions then.

[Serge]

I've never asked my friends who are believers how they see Jesus. For one thing, it'd probably come off as offensive even though that's not my intention. I think Jewish beliefs are that Jesus was a Prophet, but I'm probably wrong.

About the Messiah... One of the weirdest biblical movies I'e ever seen is The Silver Chalice, not exactly one of Paul Newman's best. Still, it dealt with a subject that few such movies ever dealt with - that there were quite a few people who claimed to be the Messiah. This film was like Monty Python's Life of Brian, but without the laughs. Let me correct that. There were laughs, but they were unintended. Still, how else to react to the sight of Jack Palance wearing tights and jumping off a tower because he's convinced that he is the Son of God?

[Paul A.]

Serge: Coincidentally, just a few minutes ago I was reading Roger Ebert's blog, where he's posted a remembrance of Paul Newman.

The first time Ebert met Newman, apparently, was in 1968 when Newman was touring in support of a political candidate:
I remember him starting every speech the same way: "I'm Paul Newman, and first off I want to apologize for making 'The Silver Chalice'."

[Serge]

Paul A... Maybe it's The Silver Chalice, and not his campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, that put Newman on Nixon's enemy list.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I just want to note that people are still claiming to be the Messiah, or in some cases having it claimed for them after death. I believe the Lubavitchers still have dissenting factions over the status of their late rabbi (article here from a few years ago), though I don't think he claimed any such thing during his lifetime. And David Koresh (of the Branch Davidian cult) claimed to be the Messiah. It seems to be a significant subgenre of the whole "delusions of grandeur" psychosis.

[Serge]

True, Susan, but, when I think back to my youth as a good Catholic boy, there never was a mention of another Messiah way back then. None that I could remember anyway.

[Neutleissuere]

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[Neil W]

I for one would like to agree with every word of Neutleissure's comment, although some punctuation might make his or her point clearer. Sadly I don't have the time to follow the link.

[Marilee J. Layman]

Well, I live in Northern Virginia, my first Layman ancestor in the US was from Prussia, fighting for the Brits, and I live on Civil War battlefield. I don't believe Einstein's beliefs but the League of Nations was pretty good.

[Serge]

Marilee... I live on Civil War battlefield

Isn't that kind of draftee... er... drafty?

[AJ]

As far as I know, there was exactly one Civil War battle in AZ, it was very small and it took place at Picacho Peak, which I drive by every week on my way to Tempe for dance classes. It's a very cool, distinctive rock formation/small mountain. Nearby is the most awful-looking little town ever, called Picacho. There's a state prison further in from the highway, but right along the highway there's a very run-down mini-mart, gas station and hotel. It looks like the sort of place where if you pulled in because your car acted up, you'd become the next victim of the local psycho killer. I dread the day my car breaks down in Picacho.

[Serge]

"...I dread the day my car breaks down in Picacho..."

That sounds like a good opening line for a story, AJ.

As for the Civil War, I thought the furthest west it had gone was Glorietta Pass, which is north of Santa Fe, but I'm not sure.

[Susan de Guardiola]

It's spam, but it's amusing enough that I've simply disabled its gnu-for-sale link and left it in place for us to mock.

My ancestors seem to have been a fairly dubious bunch during the American Civil War, getting captured and promptly switching sides. I do a ball in Gettysburg every fall and am always slightly mystified at the passion people put into ACW reenacting.

I agree about that being a good opening line for a story.

[Serge]

I guess people are quite passionate about Civil War reenactments because some of them are still fighting that damned war in the real world.

On the subject, I'd like to recommend Gardner Dozois's alternate-History short story "Counterfactual", in which young journalist Clifford Simak contemplates what would have happened if Robert E Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S Grant.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I'll counter-recommend Harry Turtledove's How Few Remain, which is an excellent alternate-history novel about the aftermath of a Civil War in which the south fought the north to a standstill. I remember reading it at a Balticon and liking it so much that I was reading it in the elevator when the doors opened and who should get on by Turtledove himself. I blurted out that I loved his book and couldn't put it down, waving it in his face (still held open by my thumb to the correct page) by way of illustration. He thanked me, after which brief exchange I promptly put my nose back in the book -- I think I was on my way to judge the masquerade and wanted to get to the end of the chapter. I heard him mutter "this is so flattering!" as I kept reading.

I later gave a copy to my history-buff and very...southern uncle, who also liked it a lot.

[Marilee J. Layman]

Yes, we have many Civil War museums and re-enactments. Just a few blocks from me is our Confederate Cemetary and people are still being buried there.

[Serge]

Marilee... people are still being buried there

For a moment I had this image of Civil War soldiers who keep rising from underground and they have to be reburied again and again. It has been a long day, yes.

[AJ]

Serge, this is what Wikipedia had to say about the matter:

"Efforts by the Confederacy to secure control of the region led to the New Mexico Campaign. In 1862, Baylor was ousted as governor of the territory by Davis, and the Confederate loss at the Battle of Glorieta Pass forced their retreat from the territory. The following month, a small Confederate picket troop north of Tucson fought to with an equally small Union cavalry patrol from California in the so-called Battle of Picacho Pass."

Since it says "so-called battle" I'm not surprised that you've never heard of it. I don't even know where I heard that random bit of trivia. Probably from my Dad.

I don't have much interest in alternate histories, unless they are steampunk and not particularly focused on specific wars. I find wars to be the least appealing part about history.

I've thought about writing a story about breaking down in Picacho, but I don't really have a knack for horror, so I don't know what I'd do with it.

[Serge]

AJ... You could look at old episodes of "Wild Wild West" for inspiration.