Tags
#ReadingForParity, Eurydice, Female empowerment, George W Bush, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Oberammergau, Passion Play, Pontius Pilate, Queen Elizabeth I, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Ruhl, Second Stage Theatre, Spearfish South Dakota, Vietnam War, Virgin Mary
You thought I was finished with the Parity project, didn’t you?
Although I said I was going to read and blog about 12 plays this summer, I’ve had a hard time narrowing down the number of plays to just 12. There are many more fascinating contemporary female playwrights whose work I am hoping to read over the next few months. In some cases, I couldn’t find a copy of their play in time for this project. In other cases, the work was not yet published.
But I decided that I couldn’t take on a project like my #ReadingForParity one and not include a play by Sarah Ruhl. Not only does she have fantastic initials (I too am a Sarah R.) but I can definitively say that seeing her Eurydice at Second Stage Theatre in June 2007 was the first time I was aware of seeing a contemporary female voice writing for the theater. Obviously there were women writing brilliant plays before 2007 (some of which I’ve read this past summer such as Tomorrowland and Las Meninas) but for me, Sarah Ruhl, was the beginning of my understanding that there were women in contemporary theater breaking boundaries, experimenting with style and language and, most importantly, writing compelling plays from the point of view of compelling female characters.
To that end, just before summer officially comes to a calendar close this week, I’ve decided to include a bonus blog post for #ReadingForParity. And in fact, this is sort of like a triple bonus blog because I chose to read Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play trilogy- three full length plays in one.
In Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, she explores the behind the scenes stories of three different communities in three different time periods as they each take on a passion play- a dramatic performance of Christ’s story. The first play takes place in Elizabethan England, when practicing Catholicism – and by extension, putting up traditional passion plays- was severely frowned upon by the Queen. The second play takes place in the German village of Oberammergau on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power. The third play takes place in Spearfish, South Dakota in the years of the Vietnam war through the Reagan administration.
All three of these locations actually have histories of producing passion plays, but that is not the only thing Sarah Ruhl finds in common between these three seemingly disparate communities. There is a story of forbidden love at the heart of all three plays. In one play, the unmarried woman who plays the Virgin Mary sleeps with the unmarried man who plays Pontius Pilote and becomes pregnant. To save her reputation, she lies about her baby’s origins, claiming that her pregnancy too was miraculous and immaculate. In another play, the man playing Jesus falls in love with the woman playing the Virgin Mary- who also happens to be his married sister-in-law- while her husband is fighting in Vietnam. There are also instances of homosexual love at times in which that type of relationship would have been perceived as dangerous and sinful.
The same actors appear in all three plays, often portraying different characters in each piece but with traces of similarities. There is always a seemingly innocent but actually sexually active woman (often called Mary I) who plays the Virgin Mary in the town passion play, and there is always a Mary II who plays Mary Magdalene in the town’s passion play. The man who plays the character of Pontius the fish gutter in the first play (and plays Pontius Pilate in all of the passion plays) is the foot soldier in the second play and P, the Vietnam pilot in the third play. In all three plays, he is restless and, especially in the first and third plays, seems to percieve himself as slightly different from the rest of his community.
Throughout the three plays, the characters grapple with how the world of the play influences their own reality. Is the actor who plays Jesus inherently holier than the actor who plays Pontius? Is the actress who plays Mary Magdalene less pure than the actress who plays Mary? There is a sense of finiteness to the casting: when the women playing the two Marys want to switch roles, the director refuses to let them. When an old man becomes too infirmed to play Jesus, his son struggles to take on the responsibility of playing the son of God and claims that there was a holy glow emanating from his father when his father played the role.
However, the artificiality of theater is acknowledged too, and used as a means of seduction. In the first play, Pontius tells Mary I (the Mary who subsequently becomes pregnant and claims divine conception) that, “plays aren’t real. Your knee on my chest, Mary, that’s real.” Echoes of this same logic can be found in the second play when the Foot Soldier- played by the same actor who played Pontius in the first play- tells his love interest Eric that “play aren’t real. The soldier’s boot – that’s real.” It’s interesting that the version of the line said in the Elizabethan era talks about physical intimacy as being more real than theatre while the version said in the Nazi Germany talks about violence as being more real than theatre. In both cases, one has to wonder if the statement is actually true.
Throughout the three plays, the relationship between politics, religion and theater is explored. In her playwright’s note, Sarah Ruhl states: “I found myself fascinated by how leaders use, misuse and legislate religion for their own political aims, and how leaders turn themselves into theatrical icons.” Though the trilogy was finished during the years of George W. Bush’s presidency, this theme is particularly relevant in 2015 given the hype and theatrics already demonstrated by the 2016 presidential candidates. (Were Sarah Ruhl ever to consider adding a fourth, contemporary play to this work- which I doubt she would- it would be great to see Donald Trump make an appearance at a twenty-first century passion play!)
Parallels exist not only between the actors in all three plays but also between the depictions of the political leaders. The Reagan character makes a speech that echoes imagery from the speech made by the Queen Elizabeth I character at the end of the first play. In fact, Queen Elizabeth and Hitler both make out-of-time appearances in the third play as well. And in every play, every political leader is championing a war. In her playwright’s note, Sarah Ruhl wonders about the similarities between theater and war, “what is the difference between acting as performance and acting as moral action? It is no accident that we refer to theaters of war.”
The impact of war is perhaps most obvious in the play set in Nazi Germany but Queen Elizabeth’s religious war leads to the culminating action of the first play and the effects of the Vietnam war make their mark on the third play. This pattern is best stated by the child Violet, played by the same actor who plays the Village Idiot in the first play and the town’s only Jewish child in the second play. She often says and does extraordinary things that the rest of the community ignores or misunderstands. In the third play she tells her father, the former Vietnam Pilot played by the same actor that plays the German foot soldier and the English Pontius, “there is always a war before and a war after”. What a truthful and yet damning perception of human nature, especially from the mouth of a child.
But Sarah Ruhl is not writing a nihilistic piece of theater. And she is quick to deny that Passion Play is any sort of “a political treatise”. Instead, she intends for her Passion Play to “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 so there is indeed hope in Sarah Ruhl’s three passion plays, alongside and perhaps because of the terrible social truths she explores.
This is particularly true in the third and final play, where she seems to be suggesting that coming together as a community could be the first step towards social harmony. For one thing, the director of the South Dakota passion play exasperatedly asks, “If we can’t get along in a theater when the world is falling apart then how can you expect anyone to get along in this world?” An inversion of his question could lead readers/audience members to the notion that if one can get along in a theater, then maybe one can learn to get along in the world as well. But even more significantly, at the very end of the third play, P the veteran has the realization that “when you’re awake you can fight for what you believe in, no matter what costume you’re wearing.” It doesn’t matter what role you play in the theater or in life. What matters are your beliefs and how you intend to act upon them.