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What's Behind Passion Play?
Author's notes from Passion Play: a cycle in three parts:
I started writing this play ten years ago after re-reading a childhood book which includes an account of Oberammergau in the early 1900s. In this old fashioned narrative, the man who played Christ was actually so holy as to have become His living embodiment. The woman who played Mary was, in real life, just as pure as the Virgin. I started thinking how would it shape or misshape a life to play a biblical role year after year? How are we scripted? Where is the line between authentic identity and performance? And is there, in fact, such a line?
The first act is set in 1575 in England, when Queen Elizabeth was about to shut down the Passion Plays in order to control religious representation. Not many towns still performed the Passion in 1575; the village of Act I is, then, itself something of an anachronism, oddly suspended between the middle ages and the Renaissance. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth banned religious plays altogether; up until then, over one hundred towns in the British Isled performed the Passion. Meanwhile Elizabeth, excommunicated by the Pope in 1571, increased measures in the 1570s to cleanse England of Papal trappings, including Jesuits. Ordinary Catholics often housed priests in order to maintain Catholic rites.
The second act moves to Oberammergau, Germany-a town where the Passion Play, begun in the middle ages, even now continues to be played every ten years. Many narratives describe Oberammergau as a living picture of the New Testament, ignoring the fact that, in 1934, the director of the Passion was already a member of the Nazi party. The actor who played Christ and the actress who played the Virgin Mary were also early party members. By 1947, every actor in the play had at one time been a Nazi, with the exception of the men who played, ironically, Judas and Pontius Pilate. (The play takes liberties with these historical facts.) As late as 1946, the village of Oberammergau denied knowing anything about concentration camps, although Dachau (where Oberammergau's one Jew was sent during the war) was only seventy-five miles away.
The Passion Play, which often incited pogroms during Easter when performed in medieval Germany, became a kind of historical perversion during the war, seen with our contemporary lens. In 1934, Hitler saw the Passion and was greeted with open arms. He came a second time on August 13, 1934-six weeks after "Night of the Long Knives", when Hitler purged his leadership of known homosexuals, Communists, and Jews. Act II of Passion Play quotes the 19th century Oberammergau script (famous for its anti-Semitism) as well as quoting a speech Hitler made at dinner, expression his admiration for the Oberammergau Passion in 1942. Everything else in the play is an invention. I am indebted to Saul Friedman and James Shapiro for their careful research.
It should be said that, since the war, Oberammergau has made many attempts to reform their Passion Play; has invited Jewish scholars and has revised their text in order to reflect a more ecumenical world view. Many Passion Plays have enlisted the anti-defamation league to get it right, or at least, more right. And yet, even today, we are plunged into the same kind of moral/ aesthetic debates when Mel Gibson took up the mantle of the Passion, which had one of the biggest viewerships, ironically, in the Arab world. But more people talked about "Passion-dollars"-the surprise commercial success of the movie-than they did about the dangers of focusing the Gospel story on violent scape-goating.
Ten years after beginning Passion Play parts 1 and 2 (which I begun with the encouragement of Paula Vogel when I was an undergraduate at Brown University) I returned to the cycle. I discovered that there is now a Passion Play in Spearfish, South Dakota, started by an actor from Germany in the 1940s. I felt that I had to continue the story. Serendipitously, Arena Stage in Washington D.C. asked me to write a play about America. A daunting task. Until I realized that little is more American than the nexus of religious rhetoric, politics, and theatricality. Especially at the present moment, when it seems as if we are in the midst of an unacknowledged holy war, conducted by a man who feels himself to be appointed by God (he must have been appointed by someone, he wasn't appointed by the popular vote of 2000). Never have the medieval world and the digital age seemed so oddly conjoined. I'm interested in how leaders use, misuse, and legislate religion for their own political aims, and how leaders turn themselves into theatrical icons. Queen Elizabeth, wearing layers and layers of make-up, "married" herself to England.; Hitler took photographs of himself gesticulating until he got it right; Ronald Reagan, who paved the way for our current administration, had miraculous and natural powers as an actor. But what is the difference between acting as performance and acting as moral action? It is no accident that we refer to the theaters of war.
More and more, it seems to me that the separation between church and state is coming into question in our country. We are a divided nation. And the more divided we are, the less we talk about what divides us. The left is perceived of as anti-religious ideological secularists; the right as religious zealots. But whatever happened to the founding father's rationale for separating church and state? More devotion was possible and more kinds of devotion would be possible with that freedom. I miss that conversation and I think theater is a good place for it. To my mind, devotion is like a quality of light-how is it possible to legislate the quality of light? It would be like legislating the invisible moments that happen in a theater. And ultimately, this play is about those moments-about how actors wring moments out of their private lives in order to bear witness in the community.
Ideally, Passion Play (parts 1,2, and 3) would be performed all together in one evening or else in rotating repertory. Together, the three parts form a cycle play-alone, they do something different, but they can technically stand alone. If in repertory, I suggest doing Parts 1 and 2 on one night, and Part 3 on the next. If the resources of one theater are too limited to produce the entire cycle, I can imagine two theaters in one city collaborating to put the cycle up together. In the original guild productions of the Passion, the carpenters in the village would handle the crucifixion scene and the bakers would handle the Last Supper. Perhaps our theatrical communities could borrow from the primitive guild model.
I wrote the first draft of Passion Play, part 3 before the 2004 election, with a great sense of urgency. Now it's 2005. It's easy to feel powerless as the great political wheels turn, financed by enormous wealth. But then you get to thinking about what starts every grass-roots revolution-people organizing in one room. Luckily that very special right is protected by our Constitution. And as ill-suited as some theater artists are to some meanings of the word organization-there is one thing all of us tend to do well, and that is to organize people to come to one room. It is not that the play you are about to read is a political treatise-not at all-but it does provide us with another occasion to be in one room together as we continue to meditate on the relationship of community to political icons. And to mediate on what we can do to affect change in very solemn times indeed.
--Sarah Ruhl
This play is for Paula Vogel
Click here for more information about Passion Play: a cycle in three parts.