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Review: Passion Play: a cycle in three parts
2,000-year pageant dazzles, charms
Puppets, satire, war, fairy tales and the Crucifixion are a start for 'Passion'
Taken from the September 25, 2007 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times
By Hedy Weiss
Though utterly accessible, Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play: a cycle in three parts is such a monumental attempt to synthesize the religious, social, historical and theatrical worlds of the past two millennia that you might well stagger out of the theater and into the real world in a slightly vertiginous state.
To be sure, Ruhl's work, which opened Sunday at the Goodman Theatre, is no academic exercise. The Wilmette-bred writer (author of The Clean House and winner of a MacArthur "genius" fellowship), is all for play, and the play of ideas. And with the collaboration of Mark Wing-Davey, an endlessly inventive, highly detail-oriented director -- as well as a slew of ingenious designers, and a cast that morphs seamlessly through three acts spanning four centuries and an operatic-style running time of 3 hours -- she gives us poetry, fairy tales, soap opera, puppets, satire, literal and figurative flights of fancy, and three different takes on the religious pageant about the crucifixion of Christ denoted in the play's title.
Along the way there are "guest appearances" by Queen Elizabeth I, Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan. There are troubling pregnancies and acts of adultery. There are war and warring brothers. There are anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. There are miraculous fishes. There is a village idiot who sees everything and sometimes becomes the sacrificial lamb. There are obstreperous theater directors and actors just being actors. There are riffs on tourism. There are the show business of politics and the politics of show business. And beneath all the greasepaint there is a scrubbed-bare reality that suggests the greatest passion plays of all are those played out in our daily lives, and in the intersection of those lives with the greater forces of history. Theater has it charms, but reality is where the true drama lurks.
The whole thing is at once wondrous, transfixing and vaguely hallucinatory (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Mary Zimmerman). It also can be overly precious. Only so much ingeniousness can be absorbed, no matter how many charming surprises, whimsical riffs or darkly ominous dreams unspool.
In each of the show's hourlong plays, the lives of a group of amateur actors, and the lives of the biblical characters they portray, are at odds. In a sense, the running joke here is that everyone is miscast -- whether in medieval, plague-ridden England, at the Nazi-ridden 1934 Oberammergau festival in Bavaria, Germany (the strongest scenario), or in the vast expanses of South Dakota during the Vietnam War and later Reagan years.
The leading actors -- the exceptional Brian Sgambati, as well as Joaquin Torres, Kristen Bush, Nicole Wiesner, Polly Noonan, T. Ryder Smith, Craig Spidle, Brendan Averett, Keith Kupferer and John Hoogenakker -- form an airtight ensemble. And Allen Moyer's highly adaptable, movable feast of a set (gorgeously lit by James F. Ingalls, with remarkable projections by Ruppert Bohle and a splendid soundscape by Cecil Averett) add magic to this mystery tour.
Theater Review
'Passion Play: a cycle in three parts'
Highly Recommended
When: Through October 21
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
Tickets: $20-70
Call: (312) 443-3800
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