Funny and provocative and overpowering, Sarah Ruhl’s “Passion Play” is a feast for theatergoers who want to see the boundaries of traditional stagecraft pushed to their limits.
Yale Repertory Theatre presented the world premiere of Ruhl’s “The Clean House” four years ago and now the regional theater has opened its 2008-2009 season with an awesome staging of the writer’s trilogy of interconnected plays about the ways in which the Christ story has been dramatized for the last 500 years.
Act One takes us to England in 1575 where the queen has just banned stage tellings of the Passion, and the people in a small northern village are having their livelihoods threated since they are famed for an annual staging of the Bible story.
Act Two moves us to Germany in 1934 and the Oberammergau Passion which draws tourists from all over the world. Ruhl shows us the role the pageant played in reinforcing the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.
The third play is set in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1969 and 1984 where locals put on a popular Middle American version of the Christ story.
“Passion Play” is about acting and the theater as well as religion and politics.
Ruhl shows us the struggle of artists in three different eras in coming to terms with a stage representation of “the greatest story ever told.”
The playwright also examines the provocative and perhaps unintended sexual undertones in the story of the “virgin” birth and a handsome messiah’s relationship with prostitutes and eager male followers.
“Passion Play” never directly addresses the hugely popular Mel Gibson filmed “Passion” a few years ago, but Ruhl does explore the way show biz has benefitted from the sensational violence and near-nudity involved with various Bible tales and the end of Christ
Joaquin Torres (above) plays the young actors entrusted with the role of Christ in all three eras and we see how women (and men) are drawn to him. In the first act, two female admirers keep hoping the actor’s loincloth will slip; director Mark Wing-Davey makes Torres a sexual symbol as well as a religious icon in each of the three plays.
The cast is quite extraordinary from top to bottom, with several ensemble members returning to work on the play after doing earlier productions in Chicago and Washington, D.C. Polly Noonan plays a “village idiot” in the first two acts who is actually much wiser than most of the folks who mock her. In Act Two, the encounter between the “idiot” and a Nazi in the forest becomes one of the most subtle and horrifying dramatizations of the Holocaust that I’ve ever seen in a film or on stage.
Kathleen Chalfant delivers a tour de force performance as the queen, Hitler and President Ronald Reagan. Chalfant’s shape-shifting skills were part of the thrilling theatricality of the original New York production of “Angels in America” — where she kicked off the epic as an elderly rabbi — and she brings down the house with her work in “Passion Play.”
Chalfant’s Reagan has tinges of parody in it, of course, but she also draws us in close to the actor-turned-president in a fantastic and very brief aside in which Reagan confides to us about his love of public performance: “I always liked the light from the camera. The wall of light gave me privacy, made me feel comfortabke. A light would go on and I would relax. All I saw was the light.”
“People are afraid of actors,” the president continues. “They’re afraid we’re good at lying. I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’re really just EXTRA good at telling the truth.”
Sarah Ruhl and the company of actors presenting “Passion Play” demonstrate that Reagan was right in that bit about “the truth.”
