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Queen, Fuehrer, President:
Politics, Passion and Play
By Tom Creamer
Sarah Ruhl chose with great care the settings for her three-part cycle, Passion Play. Elizabethan England in 1575, the newly Nazi-controlled Germany of 1934 and post-Vietnam America of the early 1980s were periods of great political charge, and they were each dominated by figures able to imprint their personalities onto history. Ruhl gives three figures cameo appearances in her play, glimpses of experts in the theater of political passion playing the roles they crafted for themselves.
A Passion play adapts to the stage scenes illustrating the life of Jesus Christ, focusing on the last events of his life: his entry into Jerusalem, his arrest, trial, Crucifixion and Resurrection. These faith-inspired dramas arose in medieval churches in the 11th century when scriptural texts were divided into voices to be proclaimed by priest and congregation. At some point the theatrics were moved outside the church to the churchyard or market square and the plays became more and more spectacular, aspects of religious holidays enacted by entire communities. Each town's craft guilds became responsible for presenting the Bible scenes appropriate to that craft; for instance, the carpenters' guild would be responsible for erecting the cross for Christ's Crucifixion. A number of these plays were written down and are known now by the town where they were performed, such as the York and Wakefield Cycles.
In time the taste for the theatrical entertainment of these religious pageants gave rise to a more secular theater in the courts and commercial theaters of Paris, London and Madrid in the 16th and 17th centuries, while the religious dramas remained in the provincial towns, produced by and for the locals. But when political change swept the capitals, eventually even the smallest village felt the effect, and this was the case for the village in northern England, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, where Sarah Ruhl begins her play.
When Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1540s, England began a long, wrenching transformation into a Protestant country. Henry's son and succesor, Edward VI, pushed the country relentlessly into the Protestant camp, only to be succeeded after five years by his sister Mary, who just as ruthlessly tried to steer England back on a Catholic course. Their sister Elizabeth, who came to the throne in 1558, returned official policy to the Protestant side, but, being a better politician than her siblings, she managed to avoid the chaos their more fanatical religious policies had pushed on England.
Even so, it was no time to be a Catholic in England. All Roman Catholic priests were banned from the country, or risked torture, imprisonment and death if caught within the kingdom. Religious images regarded as Catholic were stripped from churches and all Catholic worship went underground. The old Passion plays were too closely associated with the Catholic past and were shut down. The Wakefield Cycle was last performed in 1576; a finalattempt to stage the York Cycle in 1580 failed. With the rise of the Protestant monarchy, the state became the power that appointed bishops, issuing authorized versions of the Bible and official prayer books. The Passion plays were suppressed in part because they belonged to the Catholic past, but also because they existed outside the control of the new Protestant state.
When she made her entrance on the political stage in 1558, Elizabeth quickly pushed through Parliament the Supremacy Act, which required every political and religious officer in the kingdom to submit to her governance in all things spiritual and temporal. But Elizabeth recognized she could accomplish much more if she went beyond the law to win her subjects' hearts and minds. She let herself be styled the "Virgin Queen," a monarch unallied by marriage to any other power. She would be devoted solely to the welfare of her people, a kind of worldly Protestant nun, married only to England.
Elizabeth, much like a trained actress, made sure that she was seen. She made frequent "progressions" around her kingdom, showing herself in all her finery to her subjects. In this age long before mass media, these travels kept her fresh in the minds of her countrymen, and they served to shift the burden of the queen's entertainment from her own treasury to the pockets of the lords and loyalists at whose manor houses she would sojourn.
Elizabeth was acutely aware that ruling involved performance. As an old woman, she was once going through records with her court historian when she came upon a document relating to the reign of her predecessor, Richard II. The reference brought to her mind the attempted coup by her once-favorite, the Earl of Essex, whose supporters had hired Shakespeare's acting company to perform his tragedy Richard II, hoping that the story of the usurpation of a king would inspire Londoners to support overthrowing the current queen. Elizabeth, who frequently enjoyed theatrical performances at her court and who had undoubtedly seen the play, remarked to her historian, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?"
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In 1633, an outbreak of bubonic plague threatened Oberammergau, a small village in southern Germany. Desperate for relief, the villagers made a vow that if God preserved them from the disease, they would present a play about the life and death of Jesus Christ every 10 years. The plague receded and, ever since, with very few exceptions, the villagers of Oberammergau have fulfilled their ancestors' oath. Today, more than 2,000 villagers take part in the presentation, as behind-the-scenes crew, in crowd scenes, and in the leading roles, which are often passed down from parent to child.
While Oberammergau became a pilgrimage site every decade for thousands of Christians, the nature of its Passion play and its reputed anti-Semitism have also brought controversy. The accusation stems both from the text of the play and from the manner of presentation. The script included a verse from the Gospel of Matthew about a Jewish mob shouting for Jesus' execution: "His blood be upon us and also upon our children's children." The Jewish high priests, the Temple money-lenders, and the rabble confronting Pontius Pilate were all played as exaggerated stereotypes. The play asserted that the Jews were to blame for the death of Jesus.
The virulent anti-Semitism of late-medieval Europe was so exacerbated by Passion plays that as far back as 1338 the city of Freiburg forbade the inclusion of anti-Semitic scenes in performances lest they provoke violence against Jews; Rome forbade performances entirely in 1539 because they were regularly followed by attacks on the Jewish ghetto. Jews were advised to stay off the streets during Holy Week.
In the decades since World War II and the Holocaust, the Oberammergau production has been modified to reduce the play's anti-Semitism. The "His blood be upon us" line has been cut, text has been added to demonstrate Jesus' "Jewishness," and the role of villain has been shifted away from the Jewish priests and mob calling for Christ's Crucifixion, to Pontius Pilate, who instead of being depicted as a troubled man with a conscience, now appears as a cruel agent of an occupying colonial power.
But in her play Sarah Ruhl visits Oberammergau at an earlier period, in 1934, when the village performed a special 300th anniversary production of their Passion play. It was undoubtedly the moment when the play's anti-Semitic trappings were most acutely apparent, for this was Germany just a year and a half into Nazi rule. Adolph Hitler, who first attended the Oberammergau Passion play in 1930, returned on August 13, 1934. It was a critical moment for the German leader. Six weeks earlier, during what came to known as the "Night of the Long Knives," Hitler had violently purged the Nazi ranks of any possible challengers to his authority. He had also just proposed a new law that would name him Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor and give him total control of the armed forces. On August 19, the German people would vote on the constitutional change.
Upon his election in January 1933 Hitler had announced to the German people his intent to make the country's churches an integral part of his plans for the nation; privately, however, he was intent upon the eradication of Christianity in Germany. "You are either a Christian or a German," he said to his advisers. "You cannot be both." So his well-publicized trip to Oberammergau on the eve of the August elections was an elaborate ruse intended to lull Catholic voters, particularly in Germany's south, into his trust. But his viewing of the Passion play played another, much darker role in his ultimate plans for German society, a role which he described years later, at a 1942 dinner:
One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain forever watchful in them a knowledgeof the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace been so convincingly portrayed in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.
This xenophobic take on the Oberammergau Passion play was a prime example of Hitler's appropriation of the arts to fulfill his own racist political agenda. Himself a painter of dubious skill, Hitler was fascinated by the arts, both as a diversion (he delighted in lengthy gossip sessions about the worlds of theater and music) and as a bolsterer of his own plans for Germany. He found inspiration in the passionate operas of Wagner, and used his own knowledge of architecture to create a massive plan for the face of a new Berlin. Hitler was also highly aware of his own gifts as a performer, and referred to himself often as "the greatest actor in Europe." He spent hours rehearsing his speeches and the accompanying dramatic gestures, and prided himself on a presentational style that stirred German audiences-not through logical argument, but through theatrically styled passion.
* * *
In the third part of Passion Play, Sarah Ruhl brings her story home to the heartland of America. The setting is Spearfish, South Dakota, where in the 1930s a German immigrant, actor and producer Joseph Meier was invited to establish a permanent home for the Passion play he had been touring around the U.S. Meier's version was based on a 13th century production from Luenen, Germany. Now in its 67th year, the Spearfish production has become a featured attraction of the Black Hills tourist trade.
Ruhl sets the third part in the years after the Vietnam War, a time when soldiers returned home bearing wounds both physical and psychological, and she finds her emblematic politician in Ronald Reagan. After Watergate and the end of the drawn-out Vietnam adventure, Americans responded eagerly to Reagan who, with his vision of America as a gleaming city on a hill, promised to make them feel good about their country again. Although there were feeble objections to the notion of an actor as president, Reagan saw no reason to think his long Hollywood career had had a negative effect on his political viability. He thought the opposite, saying toward the end of his second term, "There are times when I wondered how you could do the job if you hadn't been an actor."
Reagan relished his role as president, delighting in giving and receiving the salute, and his aides carefully stage managed his appearances so that in every flag-filled photograph or video clip he was seen as the embodiment of what it means to be "presidential." In a 2001 lecture titled "On Politics and the Art of Acting," playwright Arthur Miller said of him: "Ronald Reagan disarmed his opponents by never showing the slightest sign of inner conflict about the truth of what he was saying. Simple-minded though his critics found his ideas and remarks, cynical and manipulative as he may have been in actuality, he seemed to believe every word he said." In other words, he was a very good actor.
Sarah Ruhl's characters in Passion Play perform the roles they have been given: Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate. But at what point, she asks, does the role begin to distort the person playing the role? And what are the risks when the performer is not simply your neighbor in a Christmas pageant, but a president exercising all the power of his or her office? Again, from Arthur Miller: "Admittedly, we live in an age of entertainment, but is it a good thing that our political life, for one, be so profoundly governed by the modes of theater, from tragedy to vaudeville to farce?" That suggests that maybe those of us sophisticated in the ways of the theater have a responsibility to discern good acting from poor leadership.
Click here for more information about Passion Play: a cycle in three parts.