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A Passion for Theater
Interview with Sarah Ruhl
This has been quite a year for Sarah Ruhl. The Wilmette native became a mother in April 2006, giving birth to daughter Anna Beatrice, while her play The Clean House enjoyed its Chicago premiere at the Goodman and made the rounds of theaters around the country-including a hugely successful run at New York's Lincoln Center. Her latest play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, which will come to Steppenwolf next spring, premiered at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C. this summer, and Eurydice, her heartbreaking rendition of the myth, was produced last season at both the Yale Repertory Theater and New York's Second Stage. To top it all off, she was awarded a Fellowship by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, who recognized her as a powerful presence in the American theater. Now, she's returning to Chicago to tackle Passion Play: a cycle in three parts-a remarkable exploration of politics, religion and performance that is undoubtedly her most ambitious work to date.
In a recent interview with Goodman Theatre Literary Manager Tanya Palmer, Ruhl discussed how the play came to be written, why she's drawn to the subject of the Passion play, and her hopes for the Goodman production.
Sarah Ruhl: I started the play 10 years ago, so a little less than a third of my life has been spent working on the play. I think I keep coming back to it because of its largeness. There's something about the notion of a woman playing the Virgin Mary or a man playing Pontius Pilate that gives you endless permutations to
play with. When you transfer the Passion play to a different historical context the possibilities are endless. So I think I keep returning to it because I keep having questions. Having been raised Catholic and having been raised in the theater, those two things come together to form some kind of crucible for questions I keep coming back to.
Tanya Palmer: The third part, which is the most recent addition to the play, is set in Spearfish, South Dakota and centers around the Black Hills Passion play. How did you find out about that particular Passion play and what was your process in developing that part of the piece?
SR: Well, the research was kind of like Russian dolls. I'd be writing one part and I'd do research that would lead me to the other part. When I wrote the first part, I found out about the dark history of Oberammergau. When I was writing the second part I found out that two people from Germany came over and started the South Dakota Passion play in the 1940s. Seven years ago, I took a road trip with some friends to visit Spearfish, South Dakota, where the Passion play is still produced every summer. I'd always intended to write the third part, but it was Molly Smith at Arena Stage who actually instigated it. She threw down the gauntlet and said "we'd like you to write a play about America." And I thought: what could be more American than this confluence of religion and politics in the heartland?
TP: Though the three parts take place in different time periods and different locations, characters essentially recur over time and space; there's a man who always plays Jesus in the Passion play, for example, and a woman who always plays Mary. But there are also some unexpected characters who reoccur-like the "Village Idiot," for example. They take on different guises in all three plays, but are always played by the same actor and are always outsider figures. Can you talk a bit about where the character of the Village Idiot came from?
SR: It started with the first part; it felt right to me that there be a fool when dealing with the Elizabethans. There was also something about the fact that she was an outcast and didn't have a part in the play. So I was thinking about civic life and all these people who could be in the play, who were citizens because they could be in the play. And then there was this little girl who is trapped in the public square with her jack in the box who is told to go back and sit down. I was interested in the question of who was not in the play and why.
TP: Something that's interesting about the fact that characters reappear throughout the cycle is that we watch them grow and change over the course of hundreds of years, rather than the traditional character arc of, at most, a lifetime. Was this a conscious choice when you started writing the play, or did it surprise you as it evolved?
SR: I think in some ways when you're inside the writing, you're only dimly aware of how the meaning accumulates. But it is true that I was consciously playing with questions of identity and patterning. So in the first part the man who plays Jesus and the man who plays Pontius are cousins, then in the second part they're lovers, then in the third part they're brothers. The woman who plays the Virgin Mary is in love with the man who plays Christ in the first part (and it's unconsummated), then in the second part they're brother and sister, and in the
third part they spend one night together. I was interested in the question: if people are, in a sense, reincarnated historically and there are little bits of their old souls floating around, to what extent does that creep into their personal lives? I don't know what I actually believe in terms of the metaphysics of it, but I was interested in each character having a 300-year journey that accumulates as it goes.
TP: Another interesting trio of characters, all played by the same actor, are the power figures in each time period-Queen Elizabeth in the first part, Hitler in the second part, and Reagan in the third part. Do you think they also create a single character arc-like the character who plays Jesus, or the character who plays Mary?
SR: I think it's similar. I certainly don't think that Reagan is Hitler incarnate. But each of those three figures addresses questions of how powerful people use theater to make things happen; how they use the same tricks that actors do to be liked and to control politics. In our age it's televised. Famously, Nixon was the first person who looked really bad on camera, so now for politicians to succeed they have to look good on television. For Elizabeth it was more important that she look good from a distance in a really incredible costume. And in Hitler's day it was this strange fevered oratory. It's interesting that candidates are now hiring acting coaches. Politicians live or die by their acting abilities, which is why I was drawn to Reagan.
TP: Theater serves as a metaphor for a lot of different things in this play-certainly you explore the relationship between theater and politics, but you're also drawing connections between theater and religion.
SR: Absolutely. I think they're both about having faith in an invisible thing. Theater's the most superstitious, hard to do, strange, quivering soufflé of a thing. You don't know why it goes well one night and badly another night. It's essentially like having a revival. Are the people moved or are they not? Is it because you have the wrong preacher or the wrong people? There's something sacred about the connection between the actors and the audience, something ritualistic. If you look at the Greeks, theater was a religious activity. Now it's totally split. Religion is over here and theater is way over there. When we did the play in Washington, we discovered that a lot of the actors were religious. It's not something that people talk about in theater circles-it's not avant-garde to admit that you're religious. In the same way that on the left it can be embarrassing for some Democrats to admit that they're religious. But I think there are just as many of the faithful on either side of the political divide. I also think that for a lot of people who are engaged in the arts and aren't involved in a particular faith, theater feels like a religion to them.
TP: The director of this production, Mark Wing-Davey, has been involved with the play for quite a while. Can you talk about the evolution of your collaboration with Mark?
SR: I was at Sundance with the play-Mark was there working on a play by Naomi Iizuka-and he saw the reading. I was very reverential and in awe of him; just meeting him was exciting. And a couple years later he said, "Oh, I want to do the play in London!" At that point it was just the first two parts. He did this beautiful production with really wonderful actors in London. They got the play absolutely right even though it wasn't a big budget production. The actors so sincerely threw themselves into it. And I came and saw it. And then I wrote the third part for Molly Smith, the artistic director at Arena Stage. The third part really wouldn't have existed without Molly. Molly did a beautiful production in Washington, but I didn't have time to quite finish the third act. It was such a huge undertaking, so this production feels so crucial to me in terms of how all three acts fit together. Mark did a reading of all three parts in London which I wasn't able to go to, but then we did a workshop in New York that the Goodman sponsored that was a delight. Mark had the actors doing all kinds of interviews that were related to the play. He had them interview Vietnam veterans, people who gut fish, children and basically anyone you could think of that related to the play. The actors came back and pretended to actually be those people. It was all fuel for the rewriting process.
TP: You started writing the third part of the play, which focuses on a Vietnam Vet returning from the war, just as the country was going to war in Iraq. In your introduction to the play at the time, you talk about the sense of urgency you felt given the rush to war, and the general political climate in the country at the time. Now, a few years have passed. The war continues, but the political rhetoric has changed somewhat. How do you think this passage of time affects the play?
SR: I'm hoping that it allows the play to be looked at in a more universal way. When I wrote the third act you couldn't criticize the President for going to war. Those were the times we lived in. So to write a play that was critical of war even though it wasn't set in the present day seemed like an attack on the President or the troops. And now that's changed. But we're still in a situation where people are dying and making sacrifices every day. I'm hoping that the third part becomes more about how the man who plays Pontius Pilate has to kill someone. That's the role he plays, the part he's handed. In the same way, soldiers who go to war-that's the part they're handed. So it becomes more about free will and war in general as opposed to this particular war in this particular time.
TP: What you articulated earlier about Pilate-that this is the role he was handed-makes a lot of sense to me. In a way, everyone is trapped by, or at least must contend with, the role that they're given. Either the role is at odds with who they are or who they want to be, or with who they want to be with, or with the
culture that they're living in.
SR: I think it's the question of who writes the script of our life, who gives us the costumes? Ronald Reagan said "there's not much difference between being the President or being an actor, except you write the script yourself." We're no longer in that time, when Lincoln wrote his own speeches. There's a story about Reagan reversing the order of his lines. He made the applause line different, and the reporters were making jokes about his bad memory, but actually it was Reagan the actor keenly knowing which line was the laugh line, and which line was the applause line.
TP: The play deals directly with religion and politics, two clearly divisive topics. Do you think the play can speak to people from different faiths and with a wide range of political beliefs?
SR: I feel that the play is kaleidoscopic, so it should have something for people on any end of the ideological spectrum. It's a play about people who have strong beliefs. In every part there are 12 people, all of whom believe something different. So there should be some sense that everyone's beliefs are refracted in a different way.
TP: One of the main subjects you address in the second part of the play, and that you allude to in the third part as well, is the Passion play's long history of anti-Semitism.
SR: Yes. There is something at the very root of the Crucifixion story that is anti-Semitic. And certainly some retellings are worse than others. That's what my play is about. The Elizabethan version certainly had a tinge of anti-Semitism, but the story of the play is more about Jesus and the miracles he worked and the fact that he died tragically. It's interested in the Ascension and the Annunciation and all the Miracles. Whereas in Oberammergau, the narrative is the plotting of the Jews to kill Jesus. It fascinates me that it's the same story, but how you tell it and what events you choose to include mean either you're blaming an entire people for the death of Jesus, or you're not. Pontius Pilate was the villain in the Elizabethan plays, whereas in Germany, Pontius Pilate was a noble Aryan who didn't want to kill Jesus but was forced to. Having been raised Catholic, I've always been bothered by how, on one hand, I was taught that all religions are to be respected, and yet on the other hand, if you don't believe a certain set of beliefs you're basically considered a heathen who is going to hell. I always tried to reconcile how both of these things could be true. How could you say on the one hand that there is only one true church and also believe that everyone else should be respected and honored? I think that's part of what keeps bringing me back to these questions. Because I don't know if you can ever solve them.
Click here for more information about Passion Play: a cycle in three parts.