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Review: Passion Play, a Cycle
'Passion Play, a Cycle' is a masterful effort
Taken from the October 2005 issue of the Washington Jewish Week
By Lisa Traiger
In times like these (war, overwhelming natural disaster, threats of terror) art needs to be about big things, ideas, issues, responsibilities.
Hot young playwright Sarah Ruhl, in her latest production, addresses what she describes as "the nexus of religious rhetoric, politics, love and theatricality." In other words: big ideas writ expansively on the canvas of her new three-act play, Passion Play, a Cycle, which itself spans 3 1/2 hours.
Her work, in its debut as a sprawling triptych at Arena Stage through Oct. 13, deals mightily in weighty issues that lie at the core of today's society. For her framing device, Ruhl has chosen the ancient passion play, a Christian religious drama that dates back to late Medieval Europe and continues to maintain deep-seated anti-Jewish underpinnings.
Passion plays have long been a thorn in the Jewish community's side. Throughout the centuries, it has been difficult to overcome the anti-Jewish sentiments at the heart of the passion that depict Jewish mobs as Jesus killers. These plays were rooted in Catholic ritual in the Middle Ages; their modern incarnations, which continue to be prevalent in Europe, have made their way to America, particularly Midwestern and Southern states.
Witness actor/filmmaker Mel Gibson's controversial foray into the genre with his Passion of the Christ, which became among the most-talked-about films of 2004.
But Ruhl's Passion cycle has no real interest in dealing in theological questions surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus. (That's been left that to the region's premiere Jewish theater, Theater J, where questions of Jewish and Christian foundational belief are currently being debated in The Disputation.)
Ruhl uses the passion play as a take-off point. In spanning 400 years, she reaches back to rabidly anti-Catholic northern England, circa 1575, for her first act. The townsfolk are intent on staging the play even at great risk, for Queen Elizabeth I who makes a striking and satiric cameo sought to squelch Catholicism and its trappings, including the community-acted passion play.
Ruhl deals in relationships and characterizations: Mary (a radiant Kelly Brady) simply believes that somehow playing a divinity will lead her to the divine.
Howard Overshown is assigned to play the man cast as Jesus in all three acts, and he finds monumental differences in each. As John, a poor fisherman, he's yet unformed, slightly naive, as is the staging of the play-within-a-play, helmed by an amateur director (Leo Erickson).
As Jesus' foil, the man who plays Pontius Pilate, a passionate Felix Solis is burdened with a deformity. In Act 1, it's physical, a hunched back and limp; in later acts, his outward flaw becomes an internalized imperfection
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Other characters take on parallel roles in each of the three acts, lending a sense of continuity to what Ruhl originally wrote as two individual plays before Arena invited her to complete the cycle with the final apotheosis of Act 3.
Act 2 opens in Oberammergau, Germany, in 1934, during the insidious rise of Nazism. Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps has famously staged a townwide passion every decade since 1634 in thanksgiving for a vow that was made during the massive plague when the town wasn't wiped out.
This second passion has an altogether different tone. The amateur actors of the production carry a world-weary demeanor while the Jews are depicted as comical but vicious Jesus-killers, costumed in operatic horned helmets with massive Stars of David on their chests.
Most touching in this act is the reappearance of Act 1's village idiot, this time as an outsider, Violet (skillfully played by gamine Polly Noonan). When Jesus can't recall his lines, there she is, under the table, whispering them to him, but she twists his words until Jesus admits he's a Jew.
It's shocking for the cynically anti-Semitic townspeople. Violet, the outsider, represents the lone, sensitive Jewish voice in Ruhl's play, and when she is caged and then flees, a yellow star tacked on her worn sweater, the reference is pointed, even more so than the appearance of a near-comical Hitler.
But nothing is as powerful as sound designer Andre Pluess' rumble of distant trains as the lights fade to black.
The final passion, staged in Spearfish, S.D., in the 1970s and '80s, is perhaps most powerfully and blatantly political with its Vietnam-era anti-war message resuscitated for the current political turmoil. This time, Ruhl's political icon (fine impersonator Robert Dorfman, also Queen Elizabeth and Hitler) is Ronald Reagan of Morning in America iconography, strapping, jocular and rosy-cheeked.
But the Spearfish townsfolk intent on staging the passion are wan, beaten down by the heavy load contemporary society has placed on the town's working class populace. Here Pontius' deformity is mental anguish, the result of a post-traumatic stress disorder acquired in combat in Vietnam.
His brother, a budding professional actor, returns to the homestead to play Jesus with both chagrin and contempt, for he believes he must be bigger than this small-town community theater passion play.
This is the case, particularly once Pontius reconnects with his daughter (again Noonan, with her little girl squeak of a voice). She plays the wise fool and he a hallucinating dreamer.
Ruhl traffics in magical realism and poetic language, as this worn-down foot soldier can't get his life back on track. Resonant images drawn from earlier moments, a red sky, a school of fish, begin to multiply as this act spirals toward its dreamlike finish, drawing together memories and half-thought truths from each of these three time periods.
The trajectory of this triptych seems at times oddly off-kilter, but playwright Ruhl and director Smith both manage to find an alchemical sensitivity that somehow puts everything in its place, even if all is not yet right with the world. And that's precisely what Ruhl wants us to believe. The passion plays cannot heal a world riven by the hatred, intolerance and war.
Her message is at heart perhaps Jewish: positing that repair (in Jewish tradition tikkun olam) can come only from human deeds, not divine sacrifice.
Smith stages Passion Play, a Cycle in astutely epic ways. She isn't afraid of Ruhl's multi-layered script, its time traveling characters and its unfettered imagination.
Set designer Scott Bradley and lighting designer Joel Moritz have discovered vastness in modest spaces in which to place an open sky of midnight blue, blood red and sunset orange. Framed within the curving proscenium arc, a simple wooden cross serves as a centerpiece around which everything in the passion revolves.
Costumes by Linda Cho are fully and finely finished, lending character and timeliness to each of the three periods Ruhl examines.
But the ultimate responsibility for this collaboration rests with Molly Smith, who persuaded Ruhl to put two of her plays together and pen a third. It was a brave and wise decision and Washington audiences will benefit from its vision.
While clocking in at nearly three hours and 40 minutes, Passion Play, a Cycle doesn't feel overly long as each element is succinctly addressed. It's a masterful effort from Arena Stage, one that may one day be compared to other great late 20th-century works, like Tony Kushner's Angels in America.
Passion Play, a Cycle, is onstage through Oct. 16, 2005 at Arena Stage in the District.
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