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Why Passion Play: a cycle in three parts?
From Artistic Director Robert Falls
A little more than two years ago, I traveled to Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. to see a new work by a young playwright who was just beginning to receive notice, Sarah Ruhl. I was already familiar with several of her works, including Eurydice, a play I admired greatly, and we had recently committed to producing The Clean House at the Goodman. What I’d heard about this new play intrigued me, and I approached that performance with anticipation.
I was not disappointed. Sarah’s play, entitled Passion Play: a cycle in three parts was one of the most original and passionate pieces of theater I had seen in many years: a sprawling, imaginative, provocative work that used the theater and the history of three very different eras to focus on questions central to our own time, questions concerning morality, religion, politics and the role of art in defining ourselves and our world. It was a stunning piece of work, witty and unsettling and thought-provoking. It was also clear to me that the play was still evolving, that Sarah was still anxious to keep exploring the many issues that were part of Passion Play. Realizing that new, large-scale works don’t always receive another production in which to find their final form, I immediately began talking to Sarah about bringing the play to the Goodman, where I knew that she would find audiences receptive to her work and ambitions.
Sarah began work on Passion Play over a decade ago, after reading about the staging of the Oberammergau Passion play and the blurring of the line between performance and reality that actors experienced when playing such roles as Jesus or Mary. But as the commingling of politics, religion and morality have become more marked in our society in the past 10 years, Sarah began to address other questions, principally (as she writes in her introduction to the play) “how leaders use, mis-use and legislate religion for their own political aims, and how leaders turn themselves into political icons.” Later in this introduction she writes, “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.” How do we, Sarah asks, find our way through these differences? In a world of seemingly insurmountable divisions, can we hope to find common ground?
Like many complex plays, Passion Play offers no tidy solutions to these problems, no ready fixes for issues that are enormously complicated. But what Sarah does give us is a forum for ideas and our emotional responses to them, an eloquent, entertaining and very affecting theatrical event that allows us to gather together in one room and contemplate our world, our community, ourselves. Ultimately, Passion Play is about the theater itself, doing what it does best, in Sarah’s words: giving us the opportunity “to meditate on what we can do to affect change in very solemn times indeed.”
Robert Falls
Artistic Director, Goodman Theatre
Click here for more information about Passion Play: a cycle in three parts.