Mathematical reality

Was lucky enough yesterday to see an amazing play, one of the best in years, London's Complicite theater and Simon McBurney's "A Disappearing Number," part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Complicité is known for state of the art stagecraft, and it was a stunning show - great acting, amazing stage effects, multi-media, several plots (and time periods) moving simultaneously in the space of the stage. It was also a beautiful and profound story, or stories. What's it about? Mathematics, mathematicians, human beings: its two main plots follow early 20th century Indian genius Ramanajun and a woman who teaches college mathematics today, raising questions of love and belonging, loss and exile, partition, convergence and - the disappearing number - infinity.

One of its subjects is the beauty of mathematics, which it conveys in a manner which reminded me of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" (one of the very best plays I've ever seen) in the way it let the magic of the stage enact mathematical processes, lending each a new vibrancy and beauty. And beauty is truth here. Says an actor early in "A Disappearing Number":

ANINDA: (In an Indian accent.) I'm Aninda, that is Al and this is Ruth. (Pause. His accent changes.) Actually, that's a lie. I'm an actor playing Aninda, he's an actor playing Al and she's an actress playing Ruth. But the mathematics is real.

Complicite, A Disappearing Number (London: Oberon, 2008), 23

The play's other subject might be stated thus: is our reality any greater, in relation to mathematics, than that of actors on a stage? In the sense in which mathematics is reality, truth, beauty, are we real at all? Perhaps the way to true reality is to feel the force of the question.

It gets - dare I say it - pretty religious, the religion of the Upanishads. (If we do Religion & Theater again, maybe we can include this!)

Jesus leaving the church?

Oberammergau, whose passion play has just started up again, is not far from Ettal, one of the sites of clergy abuse. An article in the Catholic Church's greatest fan, The New York Times, reports that the director Christian Stückl no longer attends mass. Frederik Mayet, one of the actors playing Jesus (above), has looked into leaving the church, though his reasons have more to do with the Pope's rehabilitation of renegade bishops, one of whom had denied the Holocaust:

“I didn’t want to be a member of a church that welcomed Holocaust deniers with open arms,” said Mr. Mayet, who with his sad eyes, beard and lank blond hair resembled Renaissance depictions of Jesus even in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, adding that hearing church leaders condemn condoms and abortion while at the same time they were covering up child abuse was “personally disappointing.” “The leaders should think less about hierarchies and institutions and more about Jesus and how to reach the people again."

How tempting it is to imagine these villagers are more than just members of community theater, have some sort of mystical participation in the passion story, some deeper insight... (I thought I'd shared my mages from John Stoddard's account of the 1890 play; here's one.) Mary Magdalene marries Caiaphas the Elder! Joseph goes to war! Great for a headline, or maybe a play! Below: this year's expulsion from paradise.

Theatrical incarnation

Profound:

Live theatre, then, of all the arts, may best approximate the incarnational character of our God because of its combination of narrative and performance. A play is a story incarnated in real space and time by real people. … The actors tell the story by becoming the story. [Unlike genres which escape time like painting but also film and recorded music] It is subject to all the vagaries and complexities of life. An actor might forget a part; the timing of curtains, lighting, scene changes could go awry. The story is told in the messiness of an imperfect world, and at its best the live performance of a theatrical piece can bring everyone involved in the play—audience, performers, and stage crew—to a transcendent moment. Such a moment might be reduplicated but can never be recaptured. It, like life itself, is ultimately transient. Every play contains the possibility that it might disintegrate because of external or internal forces. This quality is lacking in film. Even seeing a film of a live performance of a play is not the same as being at the live performance. The risks involved in a fallen world are part of the inherent quality of a live performance.

Todd E. Johnson and Dale Savidge,
Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 58-59

An actor's work on a role

Very interesting religion and theater experience today, though not in the Religion and Theater class. The class "American Religion in the Age of AIDS" had invited in Yvette Heyliger, an African American playwright, author of a play on AIDS and the Black church called "What Would Jesus Do?" Yvette came with one of the actors from her show, Jerome Preston Bates, and they offered readings of a few scenes and discussion of the development of the play and its reception. It's always great to hear a play read, and this is a dramatic and funny one, and in places profound: a character has a dream of a black Jesus on the cross whose blood is HIV+. It was clear why the play was a success and also a bit of a scandal.

What turned out to be even more interesting was Jerome's description of his process as an actor, or - let me cut the theater BS - his difficulty with the part. He played a man, a successful church-going paterfamilias in Harlem, who contracts HIV in an anonymous encounter with another man - his first, he claims - and infects his wife. Jerome's a seasoned actor, who's appeared in TV soaps, "Law & Order," films, and plays by August Wilson - and several earlier plays of Yvette's - so playing a morally complicated character won't have been new to him. (He's played Jimi Hendrix!) What made this part such a challenge? Bates isn't just an actor; he's a Baptist minister. His character wasn't believable to him.

Jerome prefaced his reading with a somewhat surprising account of how he would have written the play. At the end Mr. Wilson (his character) would have come to the church and repented; that's what the church is for, people come to it for healing. But it's Yvette's play, he said, and he had to play what she had written - and did, both as an actor and as her friend. She confirmed that he'd had a hard time at first, and that it was a relief and a joy to everyone when he worked it out.

At the time, this seemed more a personal preference - that Jerome would have found a repentance scene more dramatically satisfying or more true to the black church. (Yvette, while raised in the church, has been practicing an Asian meditation tradition for two decades; she didn't know, for instance, that her title echoes the whole WWJD movement.) But in the subsequent Q&A it became clear that it went deeper. It emerged that Jerome thinks homosexuality is, like all forms of sexuality outside of marriage, condemned by the Bible. Accordingly, like many conservative Christians, he doesn't think homosexuality really exists, just homosexual behavior. He reiterated that the church is a community of sinners, none is without sin, not one, whether it's infidelity or stealing from the office or "what they think is a homosexual relationship." In his version of the play, Mr. Wilson isn't a bisexual or homosexual man coming out, however unwillingly, but a man called (like all men) to the ministry of heterosexual marriage who has committed sexual sin and needs to get right with God - which he could, if he turned to the church for healing.

It took the students in the class some time to understand (or believe) that he was really saying that homosexual behavior needed "healing," not a position often represented in our hallowed halls. I'm not sure I've been in a conversation with someone who believes that, either.

But I have to say that I was moved that someone who believes what he does was still, despite the difficulty, willing to act in Yvette's play - and to come with her to perform the scene. (Not to mention in the belly of the beast, a class on AIDS and religion at the New School!) She had described her play as a sort of "theater ministry," and he was doing ministry, too. Witnessing. But it was two kinds of witness, or a double-pronged witness. Perhaps he came to confront us with what he takes to be the truth about homosexuality, though that surely wasn't his main objective. He was also testifying to the power of friendship and understanding, and to the challenges (and limits?) of theater. Jerome doesn't share Yvette's view but as her friend it's his job to help her express it. And as an actor, it's his job to play his part believably - even to be something he thinks doesn't exist, a character wrong about his very identity.

And as a "Christian," it's his job to love the sinner. One doesn't often get a chance to see how tortured this can be in practice (and so to understand the depth of the torture and self-torture on the other end).

Is it very queer of me to be moved by this?

Plays in the plural

A theater visionary named Erik Ehn gave a talk at school today. His topic (assigned, I think) was Playwriting and Activism, and in a dense oracular talk he told us that theater is not theater, plays are not plays, and playwriting isn't playwriting. Instead, theater is social change (it's not about social change, doesn't lead to social change, but is itself a social change, constituting a community). A play is a hospitable occasion for diversity (it needn't be a script at all, though it can be). And a playwrite is a plowblade, disturbing things to create the space for all this to happen. For theater replaces reality with space; it - like the actor - gives itself away (in love). The sequence should be the personal leading to the public, then the plural, and then it's gone. Theater aims not for the fake real but the real fake. It is not action but the deferral of action. It is an invocation of belief not a suspension of disbelief, where a simile becomes a metaphor.

Heady stuff, which the theater students in the audience loved. I was less sure, perhaps because this was theater as religion (Ehn's talk was larded with references to Catholic mystics), and my déformation professionelle makes me suspicious of religious moves. Not of Ehn, who is inspiringly present and committed and real. Nor of his work, which includes, he told us, a commissioned piece for Virginia Tech, which will be not one play but fifteen, and one (or was it each) of those plays will be thirty-two two minute plays (for each of the victims), all played simultaneously thirty-two times. That's fantastic. His call to think outside the black box, the script, the "theater" was inspiring indeed, especially in imaging ways in which theater can serve as activism, addressing and articulating trauma and loss and tragedy. The emphasis on theater as a space for plurality, for diversity to be, was exciting. This was clearly theater as efficacy rather than entertainment.

And yet... is there nothing left for theater but transformation, naming trauma, building communities of witness? One of the saints he invoked was Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, and she is, if anything, the saint of the everyday. He picked up on her humility, likening his work to little flowers which someone might pick up and make something of. But one might also say that something art (and religious practice) can do is discover the value of the humble everyday as already suffused with meaning and significance. Arts (and religion) don't just name trauma, help us articulate inarticulable loss, a cry to God, but celebrate and build worlds of good. It may be some of his work does that, too, and just didn't come up today.

Ehn has been going to Rwanda for seven years to study genocide and how society there has moved on (or not), something he described in eloquent impassioned terms about the inevitable imperfection of justice, which needs to be thought of instead as a tactic in the service of peace and hope. But he told an awful, aweful story (which I think I've heard elsewhere too) of a woman who had been told to sing and dance while her husband was killed and her daughter raped before her eyes. Months later, she was still singing and dancing, she couldn't stop, there was no moving beyond that point. I thought Ehn would come back to her (he said he would, I think) but he didn't. Where is she now? Dead of exhaustion? In an asylum? I can't help thinking (perhaps because we've so recently looked at Noh dramas) that a structured tradition of explicitly theatrical exorcism and catharsis in its own constructed space of heightened awareness and unchangeable texts might be what is needed.

Perhaps Ehn (who mentioned Dorothy Day's claim that the church is the cross on which Christ is daily crucified but attends daily mass) thinks only religion can do this. Only God. Perhaps he's right.

Between the Lands of East and West

One of the things I seem to do particularly well as a teacher (in part because not many others even try) is to let students experience the give and take of the history of ideas. Instead of reading a summary of thinkers A and B and C, we read a text by A, then one by B explicitly responding to the first text, and then a third responding to the first two. To me this seems the natural way to teach - and to get students to understand the importance of reading primary texts, how the history of thought happens, and even to imagine themselves a part of this history.
Had a chance to do this for the Religion & Theater crew today. We read three Noh plays (Utô, Sotoba Komachi and Sumidagawa), the third chosen as you know because it was the one Benjamin Britten heard in Tokyo in 1956 which inspired him to write his "parable for church performance" Curlew River. There's no way to experience what Britten experienced - even films of Noh performances are hard to find, though I did find three minutes from a recent (2005) production in Tokyo. And Southwestern University in Texas recreated the 1964 production. But we were also able to share the experience of his librettist William Plomer as he wrote the adaptation, who worked not from the memory of live performance but from the UNESCO-sponsored English translation of Sumidagawa, which appeared in 1955. The UNESCO translation has the further advantage that it includes drawings of actors' movements, which likely inspired the director of the first production of Curlew River, Colin Graham, to accompany his notes with little drawings too (by a Mark Livingston). (The notes are appended to the score, published by Faber Music in 1964). What fun to be able to explore all these together, along with all the issues in cross-cultural and cross-religious adaptation.

Curlew River, smoothly flowing
Between the Lands of East and West,
Dividing person from person!
Ah, ferryman,
Row your ferry-boat,
Bring nearer, nearer,
Person to person,
By chance or misfortune,
Time, death, or misfortune
Divided asunder!

William Plomer and Benjamin Britten, Curlew River: A Parable for Church Performance (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 24, 27. The illustrated translation: Kanze Motomasa, Sumidagawa in The Noh Drama: Ten Plays from the Japanese, trans. Special Noh Committee, Japanese Classics Translation Committee (Rutland, VT & Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1955), 147-59.

Stumped

It's the turn again of Kan'ami's Noh play "Sotoba Komachi" in Religion & Theater. I've enthused about it before, a marvel of pathos - with extra helpings of medieval Japanese Buddhism too. The ancient beggar two Shingon priests encounter on their way - she sits down on a stupa thinking it just a tree stump - turns out to be the wreck of a poetess who was once the most beautiful of women. They find this out through an exchange about the stupa.

FIRST PRIEST: Excuse me, old lady, but don't you know that's a stupa there you're sitting on? the holy image of the Buddha's incarnation? You'd better come away and rest some other place.
KOMACHI: The holy image of the Buddha, you say? But I saw no words or carvings on it. I took it for a tree stump merely.
FIRST PRIEST: "Withered stumps
Are known as pine or cherry still
On the loneliest mountain."
KOMACHI: I, too, am a fallen tree ...
(266)

Taking the stupa for a dead tree stump, known only for what it once was, makes deep sense, as the play is from the period of 末法 mappô, the decline of the law, when the saving teachings of the Buddha were thought no longer to be understood by anyone.

SECOND PRIEST: The Buddha that was is gone away.
The Buddha to be has not yet come to the world. (264)

The priests explain to the old woman that the stupa is the body of Kongosatta Buddha, the Diamond Lord, of whom Earth and Water and Wind and Fire and Space are all manifestations, to which she replies, rather profoundly: The same five elements as man. (266)

It is, in fact, the stupa which has brought these three together (KOMACHI: It was because I felt it that I came perhaps) not just to utter truths of nonduality ...

FIRST PRIEST: [Your sitting on the stupa] was an act of discord.
KOMACHI: "Even from discord salvation springs."
SECOND PRIEST: From the evils of Daiba...
KOMACHI:
...Or the love of Kannon.
FIRST PRIEST: From the folly of Handoku...
KOMACHI:
...Or the wisdom of Monju.

FIRST PRIEST: What we call evil...
KOMACHI: ...Is also good.
FIRST PRIEST: Illusion...
KOMACHI: ...Is Salvation. ... (268)

... but to prove them, and for her to be released from her suffering. Amazed by her erudition, the priests demand to know who the old woman is. The court poetess Ono no Komachi, she explains, now aged, self-banished from society, and possessed by the curse of the nobleman Shii no Shosho who had courted her. Proud and cruel she told him she would be his if he came one hundred times to see her, but on the ninety-ninth, he died, his spirit of frustrated longing now possessing her. As she tells this story, his voice emerges, and later the actor changes into his splendid clothes for the final cathartic dance... which frees them both.

KOMACHI: It was his unsatisfied love possessed me so
His anger that turned my wits.
In the face of this I will pray
For life in the worlds to come
The sands of goodness I will pile
Into a towering hill.
Before the golden, gentle Buddha I will lay
Poems as my flowers
Entering in the Way
Entering in the Way. (270)

It is the hundredth visit. His love, turned to hatred, and her cruelty, turned to sorrow, give way to compassion. An endless task designed to frustrate - a hundred visits - gives way to an endless task - piling a mountain of sand - which releases. Ono no Komachi-Shii no Shosho is an object lesson in nonduality: of Buddha and human, of love and hatred, of path and attainment, of discord and salvation. And it's an object lesson in the power of performance, in the right spot, for the right audience, even in the age of Mappô. You don't have to be a Buddhist to feel at least some of the story's mysterious powers, and to be grateful at the Buddha's compassion in helping them enter in the way.

But what if there is no such thing as salvation? Yukio Mishima, while still in his twenties, wrote adaptations of five classic Noh plays, "Sotoba Komachi" among them, without salvation. In his "Sotoba Komachi," the priests' role is played by a sickly poet who sees an old hag (99 years old!) in a public park, learns she was once a great beauty, and asks her to tell of her glory days. The set changes behind them to the Rokumei dance hall in the 1880s, and he plays the part of her suitor (though neither he nor she changes costume). Echoes of Kan'ami's text resound, but the story is slightly different. Her fate it is to remain a virgin forever, as every man who has declared her beautiful has died. She tries to stop the poet, who has lost himself in the past and claims not to see her old body and ragged clothing, from declaring it, but fails; he falls dead before her, back in the park in the 1950s. The saving encounter has not happened, and we have a sense that it has not-happened to her many times, and will not-happen again and again.

Kinda grim, huh, the Mishima aesthetics of death and beauty already in full form. Must have been as devastating in its way for audiences familiar with the Noh as the "death of God" happening at the same time in Europe. Could one perform his version today to the same effect? I'm not sure. Sad we would be, but we would not expect an exit from her curse in the first place - curses are easier to imagine believing in than release from them.

A somewhat analogous challenge arose in our college's recent production of Tolstoy's "Realm of Darkness," a story of an unexpected and transcendent confession in a morally bleak world. The director had the actors play the final confession scene three times, first with a stage miracle (the roof of the house opened up), a second time as if caught in a loop (the roof stayed open), a third time sped up like an old tape. After this, the actors froze in their places until the audience had left. The point, I gather, was to hollow out the stage miracle, and our sense that redemption through confession is possible. Time may stop, but nothing changes. But does anyone expect otherwise these days, even from the theater?

Nothing but tree-stumps around here...

Sources: Kan'ami Kiyotsugu, "Sotoba Komachi," trans. Sam Houston Brock, in Anthology of Japanese Literature, ed. Donald Keene (NY: Grove, 1955), 264-70 • Five Modern Nô Plays by Yukio Mishima, trans. Donald Keene (Tokyo: Charles Tuttle, 1957), 3-34 • First picture • Second picture • B&W photos in the Mishima translation

Lauda laude

Latest instalment in my recent religion-and-theater series (after this and this) was a performance of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights (part of the Bernstein 90th Birthday extravaganza planned by Carnegie Hall). The Baltimore Symphony under Marinn Alsop were joined by singers, professional and high school, to make a cast of 750 ... which made it almost extravagant enough to fit the location - once a Vaudeville theater in a style David Dunlap has called "Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco," and since 1969 the "Palace Cathedral" of prosperity preacher "Rev. Ike" (whose website informs us he dared to go where most theologians, Bible teachers, and preachers would not. As an evangelist, on TV, radio, and at mass meetings, he had the “nerve” to PREACH “Prosperity NOW!” — long before it became popular to do so.)

The temple-like theater turned theater-like temple now available for hire was just right for a piece which nobody knows how to classify. Broadway and liturgy, drama and ritual, Bernstein called it a "theater piece for singers, players and dancers." It mixes most of a Catholic mass (in Latin) with rock, folk, blues and protest music (it was commissioned in 1968 and premiered in 1971 for the Kennedy Center opening, so you feel the vibe of Woodstock and the yearning for an end to the Vietnam war). It calls for an orchestra with lots of percussion, a blues band, church organ, electric guitar, marching band, huge choir, children's choir, and more... and each of these gets its moment in the sun, playing the kind of music it loves.

"Mass" tells the story of a young priest (the Celebrant, wonderfully performed by Jubilant Sykes) who, to make a long story short, goes mad as his congregation becomes less and less interested or committed; in the end, he destroys the sacrament, upends the altar, tears off his vestments and dances. But that's not the very end, which is the return of the "Simple Song" which the celebrant sang the start, before putting on his vestments (which starts out sounding like some chromatic mystery but is just a downward scale from C to C, with pauses and one turn) -

Sing God a simple song
Lauda, Laude...
Make it up as you go along
Lauda, Laude...
Sing like you like to sing
God loves all simple things
For God is the simplest of all

- now sung by a choirboy and joined by the once restive congregation:

Sing God a secret song
Lauda, Laude ...

This performance was seamless, the transitions from highest of high culture music (tone rows, echoes of Stravinsky and Shostakovich) to lowest somehow never jarring. It's like a tragedy, except for the ending, which finds beauty and the restoration of community through the destruction of the officiant... which makes it, for all the imagined sacrilege near the end, kind of a passion play... Like the mass.

Somewhat to my surprise, the music has aged well, but it's very much a piece of its time in its view of religion. In 1971, the churches seemed to be fatally emptying; religion's only hope of survival was as a "secret song," outside established institutions, a protest against a God gone AWOL. But sitting in Rev. Ike's palace - remember that he bought the place in 1969! - one is reminded that religion got through that crisis, and is going strong strong strong. So strong, in fact, that the protest and the anguished doubt in Bernstein's "Mass" seems a fond memory, a reminder of possibilities of spiritual awareness now harder to see.

No passion

Since it's closing Saturday I don't have to discourage you from going to see the highly praised Yale Rep production of Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play". The production is indeed impressive, but let me say that I was disappointed to the point of perplexity by the play - I had high hopes that it would not only be a great evening of theater, but something for the next iteration of our Religion & Theater course. "Passion Play" is long and stunningly ambitious, and yet manages to seem strangely empty. I suppose we should have known what we were in for when the guy who took tickets told us there was free coffee during the two intermissions.
"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?

ATHE for Religion and theater!

Well, my last day at ATHE (I'm at Denver International Airport, waiting for a flight back to San Diego) was a treat. It began with a warm-up led by someone from the American Theater Movement Association, based on stretches he learned in Russia, a wonderful way to start a conference day - though it left me by turns super-limber and suddenly stiff for a while! Then I checked out of my hotel, took a last stroll through downtown Denver, and spent some time in an unshuttered Starbucks finalizing my remarks for the panel C and I were to lead. (It was across the street from a shuttered one, and put me in mind of the Starbucks I used to frequent in Melbourne, many of which are among the 61 of the chain's 84 Australian branches just closed.)

Next I attended a staged reading of Volver, Volver, Volver by Leonard Madrid (winner of the first Latino PlayWorks prize), a play so new it's still in process - and was impressed again at the candor and care with which creative artists respond to each other's work. The play was 50 minutes long and quite enjoyable, and the 40-minute "talkback" was even more enjoyable, as the crew who'd rehearsed the reading described their experience with their parts, and many members of the audience praised and discussed the work, suggested changes, etc. As the discussion went on, I found I had lots of suggestions, too, and filled the margins of the response sheet with leading questions we'd all received. It's entirely different from an academic presentation of work in progress, much more supportive and helpful, nobody trying to draw attention to themselves but all trying to understand the artist's project and help him make it better, fuller, truer.

The last two panels I went to were a wonderful way to wind up the conference for me, taking me deep into the issues around "religion and theater" which brought me here in the first place. The first, called "Quakers, Mormons, and Catholics, Oh My! Liberal Arts at Conservative Schools," was an eye-opener. Three panelists (the Catholic couldn't make it, but a Quaker teaching at a Southern Baptist college was there instead) discussed the difficulties of running a theater program in colleges suspicious of modern theater. It was absolutely fascinating to learn about the suspicions, the ways they were addressed, the opponents and the allies of these programs. The panelist from an Evangelical Quaker college described the situation all faced - parents, alumni and donors come to public performances, and want to see proof that the school is "Christ-centered," not evidence of critical thought - so lots of contemporary plays are off limits, but only for these public performances, in classes and unpublicized student showcases, there's more freedom. Each of our panelists described ways s/he had found to convince timid or suspicious administrators that theater built Christian character through deeper understanding of others, etc.

But another set of concerns was more interesting: students who've signed a "lifestyle pledge" forswearing profanity, sex, intoxicants, etc. are troubled (or jealous) at seeing their fellows engaging in these behaviors out on stage. Not acting, engaging in. In general it seemed that everyone worried that playing the part of a sinner could be bad for the soul of the actor; these worries (familiar to secular culture too, how numberless are the plays and films about actors consumed or possessed by characters they play) reflected interesting theological differences, and forced one member of our panel to forswear method acting for viewpoints instead - the actor's shamanistic channeling and transfiguration of which my friend C talks were seen as dangerous here, and contained by constant reminders that you never become the character, you are always still yourself. We were left with questions about whether one could train a successful actor in this way - but also with questions about whether there aren't in fact ways in which theater can be harmful for actors and spectators. It was amazing to be in a discussion where both of these kinds of questions could be raised.

And then it was time for "When hell's no fable: Fostering Dialogue Through a Meeting of Everyman, Doctor Faustus, and Hell House," the panel C and I put together (also sponsored by the Religion and Theater Focus Group). We opened with an acting exercise, a brief manifesto from me about the value of reading Everyman and as if it were Hell House and Hell House as if it were Everyman, and C's description of the explosive discussion the juxtaposition produced in our class. Next, a graduate student from the University of Maryland described a variety of Hell House-like productions she's studying for her dissertation, many dramatically much more interesting than Hell Houses: unlike anyone else who's worked on these plays, she's actually spent time with the communities which produce them - I think we provided the setting for the first public presentation of her research. And then a professor from a Catholic university in Los Angeles took us on a quick tour of laughable devils in theater from the English Renaissance (when laughing at the devil was the way of calling his bluff) to Hollywood (which oscillates anxiously between silly and really scary satans).

The ensuing discussion was great. We were a small group (it was late in the day) but everyone you'd want there was there: the author of the first article on Hell Houses, a grad student at UCSB writing his dissertation on it, and - thanks to C - Stephen Wangh, whose own work in trying to use theater to bridge the divide between conservative Christian and secular culture (Testimony: Scenes from an American apocalypse) I saw a few months ago. After various people compared notes on various Hell Houses they had seen, Wangh took the discussion in a really interesting direction: he'd found that his attempts to understand conservative Christians (he's a skeptic) would reach a point beyond which he could not go, and as he turned back from that point, he was filled with sadness. I was reminded of the "existential regret" Lee Yearley describes, and of the sadness missionaries must feel on not being able to convert their friends (I only mentioned the former), and then the grad student from Maryland told us she'd taken her husband to a Judgment House and he (an unbeliever) had felt a sadness at not being able to share the joy of the production, a sadness which lasted several days.

Wow. These are amazing people, these (religion and) theater folk. What a treat to get to know them! Ah, boarding's started, so adieu for now!

Visitation

Went back to my old stomping ground, Princeton, yesterday. Nice to take a tour through the Art Museum, celebrating its 125th anniversary with an exhibition of its masterpieces (and to commune again with my favorite Shang bronze, their Morandi, Ilya Repin's staggering "Golgotha," and Emil Nolde's ravishing bright-dark "Twilight"); go on a brief splurge at the Princeton Record Exchange (including Duke Ellington's 2-disc Small Groups 1938-39 for $9.99!); grab a coffee at Small World; have dinner at Mediterra with friends... and marvel at changes to the university's achingly picture-perfect campus. On a luminous late spring afternoon, when students have just left but reunions and summer construction haven't happened yet, it's like a movie set built incon- gruously in stone.

The reason for going up yesterday was a production of a piece of documentary theater developed by Stephen Wangh and Kristin Dombek called "Testimony: Scenes from an American Apocalypse." This course-based project, part of a multi-year exploration, had 14 Princeton students conduct interviews with people on campus and (over Spring break) across the country about their faith, or lack of it. The "testimonies" were then brought back and knit together into a powerful performance piece, each student embodying several different people of very different religious persuasions.

The genre of documentary theater - in some ways more like documentary film-making than anything else - is an intriguing and relatively new one. It makes different demands on actors than creative drama, including a distinctive relationship of responsibility to a specific person whose words you are speaking. I know a bit about the genre because my friend C, with whom I co-taught "Religion and Theater" last semester (the reason I went to this), has written and directed some documentary theater pieces of her own (I was in the one about Clifford Odets!). "Testimony" was engaging and well put together, but in a few cases I thought it nearly broke faith with its subjects. It's one thing to have two monologues unfold in syncopation - showing similarities across great differences of background and conviction - but it's another when people who had clearly been interviewed on their own were made to seem in conversation with each other.

I hope to see further iterations of this project - perhaps at Lang! I'll leave you with a poem to which one person featured in the play alluded. This was in a scene artfully juxtaposing an Evangelical's account of being saved by coming to understand mystery and wonder with a secular poet's discovery of her vocation to be a poet. The poet described taking a class of middle school students to a poetry festival, and hearing the following poem by Mark Doty. It's final line cracked her open, made her realize she didn't want to be a teacher all her life but instead a poet - for poetry can express wonder in ways people locked into religion cannot know.

Visitation

When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us ,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited. . . Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale
—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats

—Holy Infant, Little Marie—
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
—a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?

The theater piece was able to let the poet make her argument forcefully, but also gently question it through the juxtaposition with the Evangelical's account - question it not to poke holes but offer the possibility of bridges, conversations. At its best, the whole play did this. An exciting project!

HipHopEMass

Stumbled this morning into a Hip Hop Mass (actually a Hip HopE Mass). It was at St. Mark-in-the-Bowery, an Episcopal church known as a place for artistic experimentation. A student a few years ago (in Religious Geography of New York) visited and told me they gathered in a circle, as indeed they do, and that it was very touchy-feely, which indeed it was - the exchange of the peace went on forever. But it's also one of the first places where a hip hop mass happened, and I happened on a happy reunion of the first hip hopers. I'd really like to say it worked. The music was terrific, and having hip hop dancers spinning in front of the altar was kind of exciting in a way.) But, while diverse, St. Mark's is still led by a white guy, however hip, whose well-meaning efforts to read hip hop versions of various prayers predictably fell flat. Peeps, homies, hood? God's got our back? We're representin'? I can imagine this would be exciting in a community where hip hop lives, but here it was forced, however heartfelt. (But once we got the hang of it, the congregation did do well with responding to amen with Word!)

Here's an example, the Hip Hope Mass version of Psalm 23:

The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.
He allows me to chill.
He keeps me from being heated
and allows me to breathe easy.
He guides my life so that
I can represent and give
shouts out in his Name.
And even though I walk through
the Hood of death,
I don't back down
for you have my back.
The fact that you have me covered
allows me to chill.
He provides me with back-up
in front of my player-haters
and I know that I am a baller
and life will be phat.
I fall back in the Lord's crib
for the rest of my life.

The reason I was at St. Mark's had nothing to do with this mass. I wanted to get rush tickets to a theater matinee at the Public Theater, and St. Mark's is nearby. Got the ticket (and another for my friend C), but Stephen Adly Guirgis' new play, "The Little Flower of East Orange," was a bit of a disappointment. Too many different things going on, not always strengthening each other. You might recall that a play by Guirgis was the culmination of C's and my Religion & Theater class last semester, a work pitch perfect, beautifully structured, rich and witty and profound... and one which worked a nearly miraculous reconciliation between the various members of our class. Maybe "Little Flower" will end up as satisfying a piece of theater, but I'm afraid it's got a long way to go before it gets there.

In touch with the Virgen de Guadalupe

I read about an interesting performance for the feast of the Virgen de Guadaupe (it was Wednesday) at the cathedral in Los Angeles. Suzanna Guzmán, who plays the Virgen, describes something very interesting:

Ms. Guzmán, ... has performed as the Virgin seven times.
She said that she had sung all over the world, most recently appearing with Plácido Domingo in the Los Angeles Opera’s “Luisa Fernanda” last summer, but that only after a performance as the Virgin of Guadalupe have people wanted to touch her. It made her so uncomfortable, she said, that she now removes her mantle to take her bows to make sure there’s no confusion.
“It’s the most surreal event,” she said.

Surreal, yes, for her. But for the viewers more than surreal. More like really real. They don't think they're actually touching the Virgen, but they're surely doing more than touching a symbol. It gets them closer to the Virgen. They're touching something real. Not the Virgen, but not not the Virgen. Perhaps one could describe it as touching her touch.

I think it's an illustration of the continuum of transubstantiation I waxed lyrical about in my closing thoughts on Religion & Theater.

PS This post produced an exciting exchange with Guzman herself! I've taken out one posting, which named names; here's the upshot:
Hearing from you because of my blog is like getting a rose at Dios Inantzin without even being able to be there! Thank you so much for your beautiful account. It's wonderful to hear more about what you were feeling, and to sense the rightness of Valenzuela's having you form the hinge as the fourth wall opened (to mix metaphors). It shows how complex but also how rich the interpenetration of performer and role - and religious object - in religious drama can be...
I should perhaps explain that my friend C and I are nearing the end of a semester-long team-taught course called "Religion & Theater" at Eugene Lang College, part of the New School in New York City. (C's an actor and director; I'm in religious studies.) Through readings of plays and theoretical texts from religious studies, acting exercises, improv and discussion we have been exploring the ways in which theatrical performances are and are not like religious ones. It's a suggestive topic (more like a world of topics), very hard to address at any level but platitudes: the "vocation" of the actor, the "sacred space" created by the fourth wall, the "drama" of liturgy, the "communitas" which theatrical performances as well as religious observances offer performers and viewers, etc. - even as actor training bristles with religious ideas from yoga to shamanism to transubstantiation! Would you mind if we shared your reflections with our students?

(Un)masking

Here's a striking claim I found in an article about the use of masks in modern performances of ancient Greek drama ...

Masks are almost ubiquitous in non-western cultures. The western and Islamic worlds are unusual in regarding the mask as a mode of concealment, not a mode of revelation and transformation. It seems to be a correlative of monotheistic religions that they want human nature to be single, not multiple.

David Wiles, "The Use of Masks in Modern Performance of Greek Drama,"

in Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium,
ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley (OUP 2004), 245-6

More history, more boys

I want to qualify my endorsement of the film of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys," which I saw last week. The film stars the original cast, but so much has been cut that I'm not sure you wouldn't be better off just reading the script (or reading it first). And it is consummately a piece of theater, weakened rather than enlarged by the possibilities of film. The film makes it about a few characters rather than the world made by all the characters and the ways it makes them.

I make bold to say this because two happy coincidences have left me very well informed - and even more enthusiastic - about the play! First, a friend of mine lent me Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, which includes an account of the genesis of "The History Boys." And then I got to see the justly celebrated Melbourne Theatre Company production of the play!I checked Halftix at 12:40 yesterday and found they had tickets (they haven't had tickets for this show before) - but for the matinee which started in twenty minutes! I grabbed one and ran down Swanston Street and across the Yarra to the Arts Centre, cursing at the crowds, and found a play engaging and moving and profound in ways I could hardly have guessed from the film. (Well that can't be true, I wouldn't have gone to these lengths had it not piqued my interest and convinced me it was even more interesting as theater!)

This production was fantastic. And it was very interesting indeed to see the characters played by different actors so soon after the film; most were good, some were very good and several (notably the headmaster, and the object of everyone's desires Dakin, who in this production looked like a singer from Duran Duran, perfect for 1983!) were even better than the original cast. The characters are richer and more complicated, and Irwin turns out to be dangerously nihilistic. But the main thing was seeing it work as theater, and learning just how much had been cut for the movie.

Besides lots of poetry it seems to me the very heart of the argument of the piece is lost in the translation to film: that there's something analogous to Henry VIII's decommissioning of the monasteries going on in results-oriented modern education. (It's mentioned in the film, but not enough for you to see it structuring the whole; I suppose the audience for a Hollywood film couldn't be expected know what was being referred to.) And that there's a connection between this utilitarian understanding of learning and history and the cynical and nihilistic politics of Thatcherism (and Neoliberalism more generally).

Abbreviated beyond recognition also is the viewpoint (centrally important to Bennett, methinks) characterized by Wittgensteinian reticence and the perspective of those who don't make history, and represented by Mrs. Lintott, the only woman in the play; but the lines where she claims Wittgenstein for the woman's view ("didn't he ride on the other bus?") have been dropped. Gone also is the idea that the precious thing that art and poetry and a sense of the past give us (if we're lucky enough to have a teacher like Hector) is similar in some powerful way to the consolations of religion.

I can see now why people said this was the best play they'd seen in years. Go see the MTC show if you can (it closes Saturday). Otherwise, read the play. And then - only then - watch the film and fill in the gaps.