Joe's View

Playbill.com announced some great stage news earlier this week. The epic Sarah Ruhl drama, “Passion Play,” that opened the 2008-2009 Yale Rep season is being produced in New York City in April.

Mark Wing-Davey — who staged the New Haven production — is putting together a new, site-specific version at the Irondale Center inside the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

Previews of the Epic Theatre Ensemble show will be starting April 27 with an official opening set for May 12.

I loved “Passion Play” at Yale Rep but understood why it was not immediately snapped up by a commercial producer in New York — the three-hour piece calls for a large cast and considerable scenic elements.

Yale Rep did the show at the larger University Theatre rather than the Rep stage and it was an awesome production of Ruhl’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 dramatizes 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.

The cast was 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 played 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 (above and below) delivered a tour de force performance as the queen, Hitler and President Ronald Reagan.

Ruhl’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.”

I can’t wait to see this play again. I hope Wing-Davey is able to use some of the amazing actors who made the New Haven production so special.