We had some powerful theater in the course on the Book of Job and the Arts today! As in the first iteration of the course, Bryan Doerries, director of Theater of War Productions (earlier name: Outside the Wire), was with us, telling us about their experience performing the Book of Job for communities who had been devastated by natural disasters in Missouri, New York, Japan, Mississippi. But this time we were also again able to recreate the experience with a performance of the version of Job Theater of War uses, a condensed version of Stephen Mitchell's poetic rendition, read powerfully by four gifted students from our own School of Drama, and seamlessly integrated into a far-reaching discussion by Doerries. The young woman who read the part of Job, Sophia Rizzulo, was especially compelling. Watch this:
In the discussion which Doerries led afterward, one of the students articulated what many were surely feeling. Seeing and hearing Job as a young person, a woman, utterly transformed the Book of Job, whom the student had of course pictured as an old man. The founding premise of Theater of War is that, if we but encounter them in the right way - not in a theater but in a place that's already part of our lives and together with others in our community - the words of ancient plays will speak directly to us across gulfs of time and culture. That's what happened today. Job wasn't from Uz but our contemporary, her anger and pain that of the generations who find a world in ruins, while those who should have taken care of it deflect and equivocate and cynically blame her for her own suffering. One of the teaching assistants told me he was reminded of the transformative anger of Greta Thunberg. How dare you?
