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Passion Play: a cycle in three parts now playing!

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Engage in a discussion with Goodman Artistic staff about Passion Play: a cycle in three parts. Please send your questions, comments or ideas about the production to PassionPlay@GoodmanTheatre.org. Selected entries will be posted on our website with a response from the artistic staff.

From: Thomas N.
Hello,
I saw the play on opening night and i can't stop thinking about it. I enjoyed a lot. I really loved the Village Idiot character. That character to me at least she seemed to be the only pure and honest character in the play. I really like the view on Hitler. The part right before he enters the plays stage and addresses the audience. I thought that was so interesting. The line "some people see me in black and white. But this eye (pointing to his eye) is brown with gold lace in it." I am not sure if that is the exact line but is goes something like that, but I was so interested with that depiction of him. And i thought thats where it was going. When he resumed his normal role i wasn't surprised. but that depiction was so interesting I don't know what about it but it has stuck with me. I have a few questions one is why are there women depicting women on stage during the first act. During the Elizabethan period from what I have read women weren't allowed on stage. All I know it was a play that had it's base in bible, but if women were found on stage they were killed. But I could be wrong and not reading the right book. I was just wondering why that was portrayed that way. But the first act was my favorite. I really liked the tie between how people view leaders as a divine being. I also liked how Mary who is supposed to be this pure person and the character was actually a whore. The one thing i can't put my finger on is the big fish crossing the stage. I think i get the boats representing the winds of change? But that also is gray to me. I also was wondering what the significance of Elizabeth was in the last act. I think it was to show the way people view their leader as a beauty? But not sure about that.

I would love to see the show again. I most likely will see it again. I loved it. Thank you.

To: Thomas N.
Thanks very much for your comments concerning our production of Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play; I'm very glad that you found the play and the production so provocative. In answer to your questions:

1. Women were not allowed on the professional stage in Elizabethan England, but they were permitted to take part in plays that were part of religious rituals or services, since these were produced by amateurs. A woman's participation in a professional production would have led to charges of immorality (although probably not execution); but a woman who took part in a passion play would have been seen as a devout religious believer.

2. The significance of the fish is the aspect that has been the most discussed element of the production, and various audience members have different thoughts about that symbol. For me, their significance lies in their religious symbolism, fish being an agent of nourishment and thus salvation. But I would be very interested in hearing your further thoughts about this, now that the production has had a chance to settle in your mind.

3. The reintroduction of Queen Elizabeth in the third act has also been open to a lot of diferent interpretations. For some, her regality and strength are a contrast with the more contemporary leaders depicted in the play; others have seen her as almost a godlike figure, returning to survey what has become of humanity in the four hundred years since her rule. Again, do you have any further thoughts concerning this?

Again, we do very much appreciate your interest in Passion Play. I hope you will take the time to see it again; I assure you that a second viewing of the play will be every bit as rewarding as the first. Thanks for your support of the Goodman Theatre, and we'll look forward to seeing you at future productions.

Sincerely,
Steve Scott
Associate Producer

From: Joeseph L.
My friend and I have been subscribers to both Steppenwolf (six years) and The Goodman (four years) and have rarely been disappointed with the quality of productions we have seen from either theater. Tonight was a marked exception. There was a story to tell tonight, but we both believe that tonight’s play failed to tell it with the deft artistry to which we have become accustomed. Either the playwright wrote an ambitious but badly constructed play or that, somehow, her play was not presented effectively. Overall, we suspect the former -- the playwright’s reach far exceeded her grasp. (Please pardon the cliché.)

First, the playwright had many choices to make – what to leave in, what to leave out. Invariably, she seemed to choose to leave things in when the play often could have been much improved by subtraction. Like a child with an erector set, the playwright apparently wanted to use as many toys as possible without worrying about whether these added to or detracted from the play as a whole. Part of this may have been that she couldn’t seem to decide whether she wanted one play or three. As a single play, it is too long with too many extraneous subplots that seemed to detract from her central theme, namely the interplay between the staging of Passion Plays (at three different historical periods) and the political concerns of those eras.

A nude scene was pasted into the first act which had no relationship to advancing either that character’s development or the plot. Gratuitous lesbian and homosexual relationships were included in the first and second acts which, likewise, failed to have any real meaning in terms of the central theme of the play and which were otherwise not really fully explored further. Please understand that we are not averse to nudity or homosexuality if it is means something to the play. Perhaps if the playwright had written three separate plays, these devices could have been woven more effectively into the plot and character development of each play. As it is, she introduced these and other side themes into each act that she could not or would not properly explore in the others. Besides the general theme of actors putting on Passion Plays, there was little to unify the three acts into a play.

One evident unifying devise was the use of big fish which had some meaning in act one (where key characters were fishermen) but were artificial devices dropped into acts two and three almost as filler, giving little more than the illusion of high symbolism. Another was the “red sky” which seemed to be another theatrical non-starter. Making the actress who played the Virgin Mary a “whore” was a devise that unified each of the three acts but was this intended to be a statement against Catholicism, more heavy-handed symbolism or was it intended to serve another purpose?

The second act was the best of the three, perhaps because Hitler is an easy enough villain to accept as evil and his use of the Passion Play as a means of further justifying anti-Semitism was clear and unequivocal. However, in the other two acts, was the playwright trying to paint Queen Elizabeth I and Ronald Reagan in a similar role – political villains of their respective eras? Certainly there was no attempt to make either of them anything but caricatures – pantomime villains – and the Reagan jokes were as stale as vaudeville.

Finally, the third act seemed to be simply an afterthought to the other two. Having the apparitions of Queen Elizabeth I and Adolph Hitler appear in this act were ham-handed attempts to unite it with the first two acts (more failed symbolism). It ran too long and it left one wondering “will this play never end?” However, this act could have easily been made into a separate play but then one would expect that the whole “Passion Play” aspect would be downplayed to nothing more than an incidental backdrop to what is otherwise a story about a Viet Nam veteran’s struggle with his past, his betrayal, his disillusionment, and his personal demons.

To: Joeseph L.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments concerning our production of Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play; although I am sorry that you did not care for the play or the production, you do bring up a number of very interesting points that deserve a response. Sarah's play is indeed an ambitious one, asking a great many questions about our relationship to art, to religion, to politics, and to the intersection of all of these. It was originally intended as a triptych of plays which could stand alone, and, as you noted, the organization of each play is completely different as a result. Although I would disagree that the dramaturgy of the plays is sloppy, Sarah has indeed chosen to create narratives which are not entirely neatly constructed, and the open-ended nature of her examination of the play's themes has resulted in sequences which do sprawl at times. However, nothing in the play is intended as gratuitous. The references to homosexuality that you question are very much in keeping with one of the play's themes, that of thwarted desires. In Part I, for example, Pontius, who all his life has wanted to play Christ, also desires Mary 1--but because of who he is, she cannot love him. Similarly, Mary 1 wants John the fisherman, who because of who he is (and because of the role he plays) cannot see her for what she truly is. In this act, Mary 2 loves someone that she cannot have, because of the rules of the society in which she lives. In Part II, the relationship between Eric and the Footsoldier is potentially a dangerous one, because of the dictates of Geman society--and which causes the final horrifying moment of that play, in which Eric must lead the play's other "scapegoat" (Viiolet) to her death because he has become part of a machine that would destroy him if it knew his true nature.

In terms of the flash of nudity in Part I, both the director and the author saw the moment as a kind of couterpoint to the "theatrical" Adam and Eve sequence that came earlier in the act--the difference between theatrical nudity and "real" nakedness, which is also meant to underscore the humility and innocence of the character and of the town in which the play takes place.

You also mention the use of the political figures in the play: Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan. None of them was intended to be a caricature per se, but all were introduced to show in contrasting fashions the ways in which political figures co-opt and adopt for themselves the religious and artistic rituals of the societies that they oversee--and the vast contrast between those rituals and the reality of the world around them. The other metaphorical devices that you mention (the fish, the red sky) have been much discussed by our audiences in terms of their significance, and their meaning varies greatly from viewer to viewer, as does the symbolism of the ships in Part III. Each of these has religious overtones, and each relates to the quest for power and control that many of the characters in each of the plays strives for. Finally, the implication that the actress playing the Virgin Mary is a whore is not intended as a criticism of the Catholic Church, but is yet another example of the gulfs of difference between theatrical reality and "real" reality.

Again, thank you for sending us your thoughts concerning this production. As I'm sure you can imagine, Passion Play has elicited a wide variety of comments and ideas from a number of our audiences, and we are glad to receive them. Although ultimately you didn't enjoy your experience with PASSION PLAY, I hope that you will return to the Goodman for other productions in our season, and that you will continue to share your feelings about those productions with us.

Sincerely,
Steve Scott
Associate Producer