"Passion Play" is really a cycle of three plays, each an (excessive) hour long, about a community putting on a Passion Play: somewhere in Northern England in 1575 (as Catholicism is being suppressed), Oberammergau in 1934 (Nazis! Nazis!), and Spearfish, South Dakota in 1984 (red America!). The same actors appear in each act, playing characters who play the same roles in the Passion, so, for instance, the startlingly buff Joaquin Torres plays a virtuous fisherman Christ in the first, the gawky gay son taking over Christus from his father in the second, and a slick aspiring television actor in the third who uses actor training jargon in trying to make Jesus "real." Meanwhile historical and contemporary concerns, rivalries and romances, and Moral Questions like homosexuality and abortion make an appearance - and politics: the superlative Kathleen Chalfant appears as Elizabeth I, Hitler and Ronald Reagan. Exciting theatrical conceits - but to what end? One can imagine (I kept trying) something grand happening here... I tried... hard...Big Questions are raised, or seem to be, or it seems must be, about art and politics mainly (about Theater most of all). But not, however, about religion. Which is odd, since one might have thought a play about Passion Plays... But no. Ruhl isn't interested in the Passion Plays as religious testimonies or rituals (or even in seeing the story shaping the lives of players in any profound way, as does the wonderful film "Jesus of Montreal"). That fish is long dead. It's just community theater with all its internal personality politics - and trade. Where there are miracles, they come from a village idiot who can make the sky turn red for no particular reason - and from The Theater, which offers us spectacles of schools of fish, model trains, assorted ascensions, and Elizabeth I holding a combat rifle as her pantalooned men carry off a wounded soldier in the Vietnam war on a stretcher (preceded by giant fish).
Say what? I guess I'm trying not to be offended by just being perplexed. Couldn't these issues have been raised without using the Passion Play as the trampoline on which successive acts jump in order to do their strange flips and leaps?
