Revival

I love it when things converge in unexpected and unplanned ways. It's especially delicious when past projects find new partners in the present. The "Religion and Theater" course I co-taught with my colleague C in 2007 and 2010 is experiencing just such renewed attention as we speak.

One such way is pretty obvious: when I encourage people to think about how one might "stage" the Book of Job, I am building on experiences in that class. I'd been interested in theater before, but it was only in the context of a course co-taught with a director that I really saw the parallels with textual interpretation, as well as the illuminating differences. So the course was on my mind last night in Princeton when I was extolling the ways in which my approach to Job has been affected by the interdisciplinary environment of The New School.

"Religion and Theater" has come back in another way, too. You'll recall the performances of the Book of Job for communities dealing with trauma which I've been telling people about on every available occasion (last night, too). Well, the director has recently been to Japan to help a local company do similar work for those affected by the earthquake/tsunami/radiation in Tohoku. I know a few people in Japanese theater, and am delighted to report that one of them has helped them find actors for their project. The story they wound up choosing, the Noh drama "Sumidagawa," is familiar to me, too. We taught it in "Religion and Theater"! It's a perfect story for the project, too. (And there's more: the Japanese opera director who made the connection turns out to have directed "Curlew River," Benjamin Britten's adaptation of "Sumidagawa" and my pash when we did Noh in 2010!)

And here's another thing. I raved to the "Religion and Theater" students that the community performance of the passion story on Palm Sunday was a striking point of intersection of religion and theater - in fact, they had to witness it for themselves (along with Purim). Well, guess who's in the Palm Sunday reading at my church next Sunday? And guess what part he's been given? Clue: he's been asking himself for the first time: WWJD?

Stage setting

"Religion in Dialogue" hit the ground running today with Plato's Euthyphro, a widely cited text in the philosophy of religion I confess I hadn't read in years, and have never taught before. Even if I had, though, I'm sure I would have taught it differently. Teaching "Religion & Theater has really affected the way way I understand things - in the best way! (If we get to do R&T again, I think we should include Euthyphro.)

Euthryphro is a young man who claims a special understanding of piety. Because of this knowledge, he is prosecuting his father for murder in a somewhat ambiguous case - which his relatives, in turn, think an act of terrible impiety. Socrates, who has himself been indicted on the charge that will lead to his unjust execution, meets Euthyphro near the court. He learns of his case and is rather taken aback by it, and engages Euthyphro in a dialogue on the nature of piety. How lucky, Socrates says, that he has met someone who really understands piety and can teach him about it!

Over the course of the dialogue Euthyphro offers definition after definition of piety - six in all.

to do what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrongdoer … whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother or anyone else (5d)

what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious (7a)

the pious is what all the gods love, and the opposite, what all the gods hate, is the impious (9e)

the godly and pious is the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods, while that concerned with the care of men is the remaining part of justice (12e)

if a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, these are pious actions such as preserve both private houses and public affairs of state (14b)

honor, reverence, and what I mentioned just now [prayer and sacrifice], to please them [the gods] (15a)

Socrates considers each, then raises objections to it (including what's ever since been known as the "Euthyphro dilemma"). At the end, Euthyphro, who has complained that Socrates makes his arguments move on their own, winds up returning to an argument from the start (the second definition). You've come full circle, Socrates observes, will you stop playing with me? Euthyphro excuses himself and departs (whether in exasparation or epiphany or anger or doubt is ours to imagine) leaving us without a conclusion - just where Socrates wants us. We discussed each of these definitions in turn, and paraphrased them in contemporary terms. (Try it yourself: they really cover the waterfront - Plato knows what he's doing.)

But first we talked about Euthyphro as if it were a piece of theater. How do you imagine the character of Socrates, I asked? (Arrogant, sarcastic, sassy, amusing himself, teasing, etc.) And Euthyphro? (Vain, innocent, clueless, proud, etc.) How do you picture them interacting? (In togas in front of a temple, no Socrates is lounging in a fountain, etc.) And finally: If you had to stage this, how would you do it?

As I'd hoped this got us (which includes me) thinking in a really creative way about the larger shape of the story, the nature of their interactions, the significance of the philosophical dialogue. Perhaps Euthryphro stands in the center of the stage and is turned around without his noticing by it by a Socrates circling him? Perhaps Socrates appears and disappears like a djinn, perhaps behind Greek columns. Or is it Socrates who stays in the same position, Euthyphro circling him over the course of the dialogue? Is there a religious statue at stage center which Euthyphro never sees? Or is the stage empty, and the characters' movement random through it? Does Euthyphro face the audience when he arrives at what he thinks is a final definition, always on the same spot or on another? Does Socrates ever play to the audience, or an audience on stage, or the religious courts in the distance? It really brought it to life!

And we're all set to explore the territory of religion and dialogue!

Translations from Plato, Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube
and revised by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002)

R&T final synthesis

As you know, I have students in all my classes write final syntheses - usually not graded, and sometimes in a medium of their choice (some creative examples). Since our pedagogy is seminar-style, many of the most important moments in a class are not scripted - at least not until someone writes them into the script. But even if we were a more conventional lecture-style school, it still would be a valuable exercise. It seems the best way for students to hold on to what they've been learning and thinking - and the best way for me to find out what I'm actually teaching, or helping happen in the classroom. As a rule, I do a final synthesis, too.

Repeating Religion & Theater, after two and a half years, was a treat. A chance to revisit some wonderful and challenging texts and issues, and to recombine them and integrate new experiences (we also shed a lot). The main change was to structure the class around a series of larger themes, each an "ellipse" centered on a single play and a work in theory or history of religion, and to spend several classes on each theme. The themes and plays were explored also through questions of acting practice and interpretation: how were actors prepared to play in these works when written, and how would/could one present the works today? (Most ambitious example of this: Britten's Sumidagawa-adaptation in Curlew River.) The course remained (probably inevitably) focused on theatrical rather than religious performance, but we did send students to attend two theatrical religious services: Purim and Palm Sunday.

How did it all add up? I'm looking through the students' final syntheses, and lots of people learned lots of things. Me too. Some of the issues I shared in the last class:

Beyond Serial Monotheism

My conclusion last time 'round was that theater involves a kind of serial monotheism - a quality of commitment to a particular production which religions would envy, but after one performance the commitment moves to the next one. Now I think I missed the wood for the trees. The life of the person in the theater as a whole, moving from play to play, has an integrity to it, a discipline and practice of emptying of self to characters and fellow performers, etc., which is deepened over time (or can be). On the other hand, a commitment to a particular religion isn't (or needn't be) monotonous, whether in the cycle of holidays or rites of passage, assisting powers like saints and bodhisattvas, or the journey of a soul. There's much religion and theater have to teach each other.

Belief/Performance

It's worth really thinking through what it means that belief is performed (Lopez), and that performance strives to be believable (or, as Erik Ehn put it, invites belief). This might change your understanding of all your convictions and commitments, performances and practices in a salutary way. (And while you're at it ponder what's promised by the phrase "faithful interpretation." Traditions, religion as well as others, live on only because they are reperformed, (re)interpreted... a new interpretation can be more "faithful" than an old one.)

Repetition

Repetition (a broader term than ritual) seems the daily bread of religion as well as theater (both rehearsal and performance). But does repetition deepen or flatten things, clarify or routinize? Are there bad and good forms of repetition (as we saw in Sotoba Komachi or Godot)? Is only the repeated real (Eliade), or does only the repeated let us appreciate, by a kind of contrast, the evanescent truly real?

The In-Between

The scenes you chose for final performances largely took place in some limbo after death, whether purgatory, hell, or judgment; other plays we looked at, from Bacchae through Noh and Faustus to Godot, are similarly in an in-between. Is there an affinity between the stage and what Soyinka described in "The Fourth Stage" - the transition between lives which keeps the cycle of death and birth going - and religious ritual? Does the artificiality of it, however hyperreal it also can (therefore) be, make it a wishful fantasy of transcending our mortality, or do we participate (at least anticipatorily) in actual transcendence? (Is this why actors are sometimes described as priests or shamans?) But is it a presentiment of transubstantiation (Calderon) or just a retablo de las maravillas (Cervantes)?

The Shape of History

The story told by secularization theory turns out to be true only of a small part of the world (Berger) - but this is the part on which we tend to base our understandings of theater and its history. As artists and thinkers, you have a choice whether to promote secularization (because it's not going to happen by itself) or to explore the persistent but hard-to-conceptualize enchantment of the world.

When hell's no fable

I'm not sure if I ever told you the story of how "Religion & Theater" happened. In April 2005 my friend C, a passionate advocate of community theater as well as documentary theater, directed a performance of "The Exonerated" (a play about men DNA tests had saved from unjust death sentences). It was the same semester I was planning my course "Cultures of the Religious Right," amazed, disturbed and in no small measure impressed by the evangelical sub- or countercultures I'd discovered. C and I got to talking about how powerful it is, as a form of community building and consciousness raising, to perform a play together, especially one which takes you to places you don't know, and I started to imagine how powerful it would be if our students performed some religious right play - perhaps a one-act, together with a secular one-act with the same cast? C thought the idea exciting, but first we had to find a good conservative Christian play. Neither of us could think of one, so we started asking around. I looked at the websites of Christian colleges to see what plays they were putting on - nothing of note. C asked her colleagues at NYU (where she had long taught), who concluded: "they have religion, we have theater." This seemed a bit too simple - hence our course. But we're still looking for our religious play.
A few candidates have come to New York recently. Paul Claudel's "The Satin Slipper" was on in January. The brief run of The Actors Company's production of T. S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party" has been extended several times; I saw it a few weeks ago. And I just got back from Jeffrey Fiske and Max McLean's adaptation of C. S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters," recently returned after successful runs in Chicago and DC. I'm not sure I've found my play yet, but these have been interesting. (As have a few secular plays which tried to take on religion, Geoffrey Naufft's "Next Fall" and of course Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play.")

Taking the most recent first, "Screwtape Letters" is a romp... but it has little dramatic tension (we're sure the devils won't win, and the soul for which they are vying isn't very interesting), and the pleasures it affords are ultimately not very interesting either: a mix of Schadenfreude and, I hate to say it, one of the sins it discusses, "spiritual pride":

an unobtrusive little vice which ... consists in a quite untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do not share this belief are really too stupid and ridiculous. ... He must be made to feel (he'd better not put it into words) "how different we Christians are"; and by "we Christians" he must really, but unknowingly, mean "my set"; and by "my set" he must mean not "The people who, in their charity and humility, have accepted me", but "The people with whom I associate by right". (This is text from the book, not all included in the play.)

Not every play has to be a tragedy, filling the viewer with terror and pity, but this play was too easy. No suspense, no moral complexity - even as Screwtape seems urbane and winsome, we know he isn't really. But then, he's not human anyway. One could imagine a play where the object of the tempters' efforts appears - even just in the distance, a pantomime - and seems to us by turns not worth saving and worth saving, saved and lost, but as long as the only figures on stage are a devil and his helper... (Screwtape Letters, to be fair, wasn't written as a play.) I kept seeing Rick Warren's beatific smirk: "We know how the story ends: We win." Can one make good drama, indeed any drama out of this?

Eliot's drawing room farce is about people (at least they seem to be people), and has its share of twists and surprises. Some characters seem by turns worth saving and not worth saving, saved and lost. Grand questions about human destiny are raised. But by the end, all the merely human characters are saved through the machinations of the rest, a shadowy bunch of guardians who might be angels. I found the story oppressive and infantilizing: I don't want to be led around by paternalistic guardians, and don't think wanting that (recognizing you need that) a desirable trait. (Spiritual pride of another kind, I suppose!) In any case, it saps the energy from the drama once you know what's going on. You don't know how people will end up saved, and there's some interest in the very surprising ways in which they are saved, but by the end you know they will be. Perhaps Eliot hoped we'd be interesting in the particularities that make one person's salvation martyrdom and another's bourgeois marriage... at least in this production, though, the surprising saving of the bourgeois was merely surprising, and Celia's transcendence of the ordinary merely odd. A different production might have made Celia's story more compelling and disturbing, I suppose...

Somewhat to my surprise, I think Claudel's insane Spanish golden age epic - shortened in the adaptation we saw from a nine-hour original - is the most dramatically compelling of the lot. There are guiding figures aplenty, from the moon to St. James (and a whole stable of other saints left out of the adaptation) but the human characters seize our attention. Their lives are full of drama - lots of passion, suffering and separation, the central lovers never able to consummate their love - and the plot full of outrageous twists. We find ourselves conflicted about the characters - saved or not saved, worth saving or not worth saving or, more broadly, hero or villain? - and so engaged in a different way than in "Cocktail Party" or "Screwtape." The individual characters and their passions are part of a magnificent(ly hokey and imperialist) providence, but they don't lose the groundedness in individual fates which seizes the viewer's attention and care. The situations, passions and questions which drive great drama are here, not relativized by the know-it-all perspective of God or his friends. Providence peeks through from time to time, but it's not offered to the viewer to survey. Indeed the strangeness of the plot corresponds to a God more uncanny than reassuring... and we're with the human characters, working out their fate, achieving extraordinary things, nature completed by grace. (It might be interesting to compare "The Tidings brought to Mary" with "The Cocktail Party.") Perhaps this is why Claudel alone succeeds in doing religion and theater?

So, if we get to do "Religion & Theater" again, include Claudel? Or this whole problematic?

Dramas of secularization

The theory of religion part of Religion & Theater is winding down; soon we'll be focusing on rehearsal of students' final scenes, and gathering thoughts for final syntheses. For tomorrow's class I've given the students the text of a talk the sociologist of religion Peter Berger gave here in 2007 called (rather dramatically) "Secularization Falsified" (published in First Things in 2008). Here's the para (p24) I'll start discussion from:
I've always thought of the "international cultural elite" in terms of academics, but in the context of this class a different set of questions arises - questions germane to the project and problem of our course. Are the arts part of this secularist minority? The discussion of religion and contemporary art James Elkins curated certainly suggested as much. It'll be interesting to raise these questions about theater.

Hell's bells

Could there be a secular hell house? This question came up the first time we taught "Religion and Theater" but none of us couldn't imagine one. The answer was staring us in the face, later in the syllabus.

We didn't ask the question this time, but one of the students put two and two together on his own, and saw that Ibsen's "Ghosts" is an atheistic hell house. How right he is! A chamber of horrors, Henrik Ibsen's most scandalous play offers every deadly sin spiced with incest, syphilis and assisted suicide. And all of this is the result in some way or other of the dead hand of Christendom, with its misguided suffering for others, money-laundering charitable institutions and self-defeating efforts to raise your children on false ideals. Hell Houses suggest that devils are waiting in the wings to drag you to hell for your sins - and you might die at any moment. "Ghosts" suggests that Christians are devils to themselves and in hell already; their lives of duty, repression, sanctimony and vengeance are worse than death.

MRS. ALVING:

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them.

Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if the title Gengangere, apparently untranslatable but closer in meaning to the French revenants than anything in English, in its way refers to the undead namesake of the Christian religion. (The 1882 cartoon is from here.)

Don't taste, and see

One of the most provocative texts we read in "Religion and Theater" is Donald S. Lopez' essay on "Belief" from Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998). Lopez is a critical Buddhologist who knows that the notion of belief … is neither natural nor universal. (28) Lopez marshals historical and philosophical reasons to be suspicious of belief, leading to the suggestion that It might be described as an ideology, not so much in the sense of false consciousness but as an idea that arises from a specific set of material conditions. (28) It is really a fiction employed as a surrogate for more visible concerns (27). What sort of concerns? Well... The statement ‘I believe in…’ is sensible only when there are others who ‘do not’; it is an agonistic affirmation of something that cannot be submitted to ordinary rules of verification. The very impossibility of verification has historically functioned as a means of establishing a community against ‘the world,’ hinting at a counterfactual reality to which only the believers have access. (33) Ergo, a pretext for persecution.

This is fun in the context of theater, and especially if you read it at the same time you're puzzling out the Counter (or Catholic-) Reformation's embrace of the illusions of theater. Like the Spanish golden age plays which accompanied the Catholic Eucharist (we're again exploring Pedro Calderon de la Barca's Life's a Dream), the thing that cannot be submitted to ordinary rules of verification par exellence. It may be that substance is inaccessible to us, who can only see the attributes experienced by our senses. But this needn't mean that a natural science (and a merely symbolic liturgy) win out. Not if "reality" itself proves unverifiable! Can we really trust our senses? I invoked Descartes' "evil genie" to suggest what it would be like to doubt even the reports of your senses... and, returning to La Vida es Sueño, tried to show how one might turn, in confusion (or hope - not all the worlds we think are real are worlds we much like) to morality: it pays to do what's right even in dreams is one of the morals of the story. Or to paradoxical beings which participate in more than one reality. In Vida es Sueño, it's the temporarily hippogriff-like Rosaura...

In a class of philosophers or ardent secularists (or Buddhists), Lopez' argument would win easily. But in a room of people called to devote a life to the enchantments of the stage, where the visible and the real overlap and intertwine in mysterious ways, proving substance and attributes more malleable than you might suppose (actors experience a transubustantiation of their own), it's a closer call.

Hell's a disappointment

In Religion & Theater today we tried to recreate the most exciting discussion from the last time around, updating questions from morality plays like "Everyman" and Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" by turning to Hell Houses, contemporary evangelical Christian haunted houses with a mission. I'm not sure it quite worked.... This might be because the lessons C and I learned from it (and even took on the road to the ATHE) have already been woven into the class, or might be because we started the class with the "Hell House" film and have now looped back to look at it in a different light, but the start of the semester feels oh so long ago. Been there, done that! Some interesting discussion, though, about a recent performance of a Hell House by a secular theater company in Brooklyn, Les Frères Corbusier, of which I found a video (where else?) on youtube. What were they doing, how should one judge it, does it show the power of theater to broaden understanding? An article about a religious Hell House and this one, by Ann Pellegrini, showed categories used by Les Frères about their performance ("authentic" and "sincere" and not "ironic") to be slipperier than they realized. Performance aims to go beyond all of them...

See no evil

One of the things I've learned from my friend C is that you can't really just read a play. I mean, you can, but you learn so much more about it if you see a production - even a very very bad one - and even if you just have some people sit around and read it aloud. So I was surprised to hear her say today, of what seems to be her favorite play in our syllabus, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, that it's one she'd rather read than see. This surprised me the more as this is the play where I've felt most keenly the need to see (or at least imagine) a staging! What's going on?

I don't think it's that scholar Faustus makes more sense to me - in fact, I find him pretty uninteresting on the page. I feel the need of an actor to make Faustus' combination of bravado, skepticism, joy and blindness work from scene to scene, indeed, from line to line. And there I find I can imagine wonders - well, imagine a gifted actor working wonders. In the production I imagine, Faustus - like us in the audience - doesn't know if his story (and the world) is as Catholicism, Calvinism, Aristotelian tragedy, skepticism or libertinism claims it is. Is he free? Are there second chances? Is hell a fable?

But I need an actual actor (and a production) to show me if Faustus is testing things out, joyriding, feinting, or learning at each point. Two examples. First, when Mephistopheles parades the seven deadly sins before him (in the A version), what is Faustus' body language reaction? Do they attract him or repel him? Are the reactions similar or differ with the vice in question? Does he move toward them or turn away from them? Is he aware of his reactions? A good actor should be able to do all of this and then some, but I'd need to see how he does it to know if I thought it was right. Second, as Faustus approaches the end of his contract, and starts to understand (or think) that hell may be real after all, he tries to save himself through repentance but it fails. Why, how? Does he not believe his own words? Did he think these words would work (like the magic words he thinks brought Mephistopheles to him) and then discovers with horror then terror that they don't? And I'd need an actual production around this (especially the devils, of course), echoing or mocking his progress...

But this doesn't explain why C is content to let the words on the page do all the work. Perhaps she thinks even the most subtle performance will be a flattening, didactic or nihilistic. Or perhaps the big metaphysical questions seem clearer on the page than they would on the stage. Maybe my needing to see a particular actor take it in a particular direction, however subtle, is compatible with a sense that the play's possibilities cannot all be on display in a single production.

Titanic events

The Religion & Theater students have their second "religious observance" to attend this weekend: Palm Sunday. (The first was a Purim service or Purimshpil.) Explaining its significance and its place on the cusp of Holy Week, I came up with a perhaps inspired analogy. James Cameron's blockbuster film "Titanic" (1997) started with a scene in the present in which a computer simulation showed how the ship went down and how long it took. I recall swooning reviewers noting that something which one might have thought would lessen the suspense of the film actually made it that much dramatic. At every point in the ensuing (long) film, you felt you were somewhere along the way to that tragic but also precisely definable sinking. That, I said, is what Palm Sunday does for Holy Week. (Until Easter.)

This seemed to work for a lot of students, not just those unfamiliar with the idea but also some who know it. It also let me make the distinction between (some) contemporary and pre-Shoah theologies clear. "What's the boat that goes down?" I asked. In contemporary services, it's the church, it's all of us (all of us who do the palm business but quickly turn on Jesus, and need to be reminded on Ash Wednesday, with the ashes of last year's palms, that we are dust), so unworthy to have been saved by Christ's redemptive sacrifice. But not so long ago it wasn't us (or just us) but them: "the Jews."

The analogy works well, almost too well, in forcing an acknowledgment of the anti-Judaism which structured so much of traditional Christianity.

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

Headstand

A rather inspired class in Religion & Theater today, I dare say! Recently we've looked at Eliade's argument that "archaic" societies are built around "archetypal repetition" rather than the iffy satisfactions of presuming to "make history" (for most peoples, he argues, history is a source of "terror," time a source of suffering), and evil as problem for thought and action. We also had a mask workshop. And before today's play, Elie Wiesel's rarely performed The Trial of God, students were required to attend a Purim service or Purim Play - the Jewish holiday was this past weekend. (To tell the truth, I built our syllabus around religious holidays, something I do whenever I can.) It's argued that comic and often masked Purim Plays (purimshpiln) are the origin of Yiddish theater; Wiesel's play takes place on Purim in a pogrom-ravaged Ukrainian town in the 17th century, and is in its own way a purimshpil, though it speaks of "Purim without the Purim miracle." It all worked pretty well, I think, as it gave students a chance to experience a vibrant religious theatrical tradition, and to see the dramatic/performative space it has offered for dealing with the terror of history. Purim is the festival of Esther, who with her cousin Mordecai saved the Jews from destruction by an evil adviser to Persian King Ahasuerus named Haman (but when the megilla - the Esther scroll - is read, you never hear H's name as the whole congregation drowns it out with noise-makers). The story is, in fact, a farce, working through dramatic, even violent reversals ("it was reversed," 9:11): Haman (hiss!!) plans a parade for himself but Mordecai is celebrated; Haman (boo!!) builds a gallows for Mordecai and his people but is hanged there himself. Shoah survivor Wiesel's play hopes for reversals but finds none. But it explores the horror of this through three elements of Purim-like drama. First, Purim is like carnival, upside-down time, a time when structures are turned on their heads and roles reversed - a time of release but also be a time of truth-telling: in Wiesel's play, everyone plays a part and even an embittered inkeeper's refusal to allow purimshpil in his inn becomes part of the repartee; when he says the players can stay only if they stage a trial of God, does he hope they'll agree? Second, on Purim it's a mitzvah to get drunk - indeed you should drink until you can't tell the difference between Mordecai and Haman: as The Trial of God proceeds, its characters get ever drunker, saying ever more outrageous things - but do they know they do? and is this taking them farther from or closer to truth? Finally, Purim is about secrecy, about hiddenness - God is, if He's in Esther at all, hidden, since it's the one book of the Bible in which even the name of God doesn't appear. (In the Septuagint, the Bible translation still used by Orthodox Christians, six chapters full of prayers are added to Esther to remedy this.) Is God in the play? If so, He's hidden in it, hidden perhaps even in the playing. Profound, and perfect for our class. And then there's this:

MARIA: What's theater?
BERISH: When you do something without doing it, when you say something without saying it, while thinking that you did say, and you did do something - anything - that's theater. (38)

followed up near the play's end with this:

MENDEL: Outside, Haman's mob is getting ready, while inside, the Jews went on with their prayers; that was their idea of theater. (96)

Bali hai

We had a mask workshop in Religion & Theater this morning, led by a Dane, who's spent many years going "forth and back" to Bali, and his American assistant. The masks are carved and lacquered in Bali by a native mask-maker, but to the Dane's own designs. While inspired by religious dances, they are not themselves religious but rather influenced by Michael Chekhov's "archetypes." We thought it would be useful for students to experience the power of masks - important in the ancient Greek, egungun, Purim and Nôh traditions which are our topics for the first third of the course - and these acting teachers' religion-inspired-but-not-religious approach sounded ideal for our purposes. One very interesting thing they did was place masks over students' faces without letting the students see the masks first. Had they first seen them, we were told, they'd be thinking about the mask rather than responding with feeling and will. But responding to what? In some cases it was surely responding to others' responses to the mask you couldn't yourself see, but increasingly we were led to believe that it was the power of the masks, that is, the intention of their maker. ("I could make a mask that killed you if I wanted," the Dane said at one point.) This is where I'm not sure anymore. Every tradition has tales of masks which possess their wearers, and the workshop played on our susceptibility to this superstition, our desire to be possessed. Did I just say superstition?!

World theater

Excitingly global moments in Religion & Theater today. E, one of our colleagues from the literature department, talked about "Death and the King's Horseman" - she directed the second production of the play ever, in Barbados, after having been in Nigeria at the time Wole Soyinka was establishing himself. ("Don't think you can do postcolonial studies without leaving the United States," she warned.)

The play is off-puttingly difficult for first-time readers, but she showed several ways in, such as that the story is not just about British colonial Nigeria but Soyinka's frustration at being invited to Cambridge by well-meaning dons who regretfully placed him in the Anthropology department as "there is no such thing as African literature"! (I'll show you Yoruba literature, I'll show you its depth, and its distinctive and profound tradition of tragedy!) And she showed us how the play explores a number of competing conceptions of death in Yoruba culture, a death relativized (to an extent) by reincarnation, which may indeed mean that the ancestors are not only present in some general way but might be reincarnated in you, and a quite different meaningless death which is the shadow of the losses to slavery; meanwhile all these views are condemned as "primitive" by the colonizer, whose religion promises eternal life if you reject the "deathiness" of your traditions...

Hearing about this from a white English woman who had spent time in Africa and the West Indies brought the global context in which Soyinka writes into our classroom. Even more came from my visiting Japanese friend H - have I mentioned that she's an actor and theater director? - who came to the class. She told me that Soyinka's play (which she saw in rehearsal in London in the mid-'70s, and again a decade ago in a Russian production in Tokyo) is highly regarded in Japan, where its concern with honorable suicide in the service of a lord is a familiar theme (indeed, one of the main themes of kabuki!). She and E communed over the insufficiency of language and thinking to convey what Soyinka's after; what's needed is live performance and, even more, dance and music (drumming).

Did any of this make the play more accessible to our students? I hope so, but we'll have to see. It is a lot to ask them to understand foreign concepts of death (and undeath, for the dead are present in the world, and on the stage, in masks, etc.), but we do have a whole semester to get them to see theater as broader than western concepts of performance. Religion too. Our next unit is on Noh drama, so I'm sure to use the Japan-Soyinka connection and keep on plugging understandings of religion that are neither theistic nor merely humanistic.

I leave you with one of the pivotal speeches in "Death and the King's Horseman," in which a wise woman explains the "death of death" on which everything depends. (An "elesin" is the "horseman" who leads a dead king through the transition back to rebirth; without the elesin, the king can't find his way, and the whole community's survival is in jeopardy. But his voluntary "committing death" also shows humanity's metaphysical superiority to death.)

It is the death of war that kills the valiant,
Death of water is how the swimmer goes
It is the death of markets that kills the trader
And death of indecision takes the idle away
The trade of the cutlass blunts its edge
And the beautiful die the death of beauty.
It takes an Elesin to die the death of death . . .
Only Elesin . . . dies the unknowable death of death . . .
Gracefully, gracefully does the horseman regain
The stables at the end of day, gracefully . . .

(Norton Critical Edition, 35)
(Egungun mask pics from here, here and here)

You are not here

Here's another diagram from Religion & Theater, this a map of the religious world of Nigerian play- wright Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horse- man.

The play is about a man whose hereditary role is to be "horseman" (elesin) to the king: when kings dies, the horsemen (as also the king's horse and dog) precede them into the other world. This means, they die before the king is buried. But what makes the king's horseman more important, in his way, than even the king is the fact that he goes freely. As another character says, it is not the horseman who dies but death. And through this voluntary dying, the horseman proves for all that human beings are stronger than death.

The story is based on an actual event in 1946, when British colonial administrators prevented a king's horseman from performing the act for which he was born, and it's tempting to see the play as about a confrontation of cultures - Elesin Oba and entourage vs. Simon Pilkings, the District Officer and his wife Jane. Indeed, many critics have praised the play for just this. Soyinka wants nothing of it, and the text starts with a note saying so:

[T]he facile tag of ‘clash of cultures [is] a prejudicial label which ... presupposes a potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous, on the actual soil of the latter. … The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. The confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind—the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passage which links all: transition. (Norton Critical Edition, 3; map above is on 70)

How do we prevent a culture-clash reading, how do we present the play as metaphysical (and not a metaphysics-clash either)? It's not easy. I tried today to suggest that students imagine the story with a different catalytic incident than an English colonial administrator - say, a Muslim ruler a few centuries ago; who the disrupter is really doesn't matter that much. That sounded to some students like I was trying to avoid the colonialism question, I think, so I'll try to make the point another way on Wednesday. Look at this map of the Yoruba cosmos, I'll say, pointing to the one at the top of this post; where do the Brits fit here?

Nowhere, of course. That doesn't mean Pilkings and his ilk are not in Yorubaland, getting in the way of things. But unless and until things are prevented from taking their proper course, they're not really there - not as Brits. They're not from some other world - there is no other world for them to be from. They're intruders, that's all, who don't belong here, and cause nothing but harm. To avoid a culture clash reading and its implicit imperialism, we need to understand them as characters in the Yoruba world, not establish a truce between them and the Yoruba on the territory of the play.

The play signals the metaphysical insubstantiality of the Brits by having the colonial administrator and his wife first appear in traditional Yoruba clothes and masks - impounded from egungun mourners for the dead king, in fact - which they think will make an amusing impression at a dress-up ball at the European club. At first, they just look ridiculous (indeed, they're rehearsing a tango!). But eventually we learn that they look like the dead or not- quite- dead whom egungun dancers embody, lost, liminal beings...

At the National Theatre in London last year, an even more radical effort was made to desubstan- tialize the Brits: they were played by African actors in whiteface!

Metamorphoses

In Religion & Theater yesterday, we had students perform scenes from Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Groups had half an hour to prepare, but (so!) the staged readings had a real freshness about them. Few of the students knew the play - we hadn't asked them to read it, and gave each group only the scene it was charged with presenting. I don't imagine many more were more familiar with Ovid.

No matter, the scenes played out beautifully to an unusually appreciative audience. And as the students brought them to life, I was back in the Circle in the Square Theater, where I saw the original New York production in December 2002, with its large pool of water in which transformations happened, the cast narrating and acting out and commenting on a bunch of Ovid's stories in witty ways which then, suddenly, became heart-breakingly beautiful or sad. One laughed then wept, and wept more, at the fragility and pain and nobility of human life, of human embodiment and love.

The friend who took me to see Metamorphoses was one of many New Yorkers who had gone to see it in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (it opened in New York just before that fateful day), many going several times. I felt the grief and pained solidarity of the city then, and felt it again seeing the scenes performed by our students.

Ceyx's plea, as his ship sinks, that at least his body be washed ashore to his beloved Ceyx (who knew he would die), must have resonated unbelievably at a time when so many beloveds' bodies had disappeared, most never to be recovered. (One thinks now also of all those still trapped in the rubble in Haiti, and their mourning families.) And the gods' mercy by which he is revived and they become a pair of sea birds. And the final scene, where two generous old people, Baucus and Philemon, are given a wish by the gods and ask: May I die when my love dies, may I live as long as my love, that is, may I live for ever... It gets me every time.

Zimmerman didn't write the piece for 9/11 of course (it was developed and premiered in Chicago). But this only makes it a clearer demonstration of the powerful ache and consolation of those tales, and of theater.

Diagramming

For Religion & Theater, we're reading Richard Schechner's essay "From Ritual to Theater and Back," a classic of performance studies. Schechner tries to move beyond the stale commonplace that theater "originated in religion" or "ritual" by suggesting that the real contrast is between performances concerned with "efficacy" and those affording "entertainment," though in fact you never find one without a touch of the other. Indeed, they define a "continuum," and cultures swing back and forth along it. Written originally in 1974, Schechner in this essay is convinced that an age of entertainment is again giving way to one seeking efficacy. Mmmmaybe. In the meantime, enjoy some of his speciously precise but beguilingly beautiful diagrams. (He's part of the 20th century theater's convinction that it can and should be scientific: a system, a laboratory.) These first two describe a cycle of Aboriginal Australian initiation dances which parallels the life cycle. The one below purports to show that ours is a time of great theatrical significance (earlier points where the curves crossed: ancient Greece, the time of Shakespeare) and that the future must lie in ritual, efficacy, the avant garde, not in entertainments like Broadway and theme parks!

New semester

A new semester of classes started today. My conversation partners for the semester's adventures are thirty-two "Religion & Theater" students, mostly actors; my colleague C, which whom I'm team- teaching that class; and ten students, mostly religious studies majors or minors, for a seminar on "The Book of Job." Fun and more fun!

C and I have taught "Religion & Theater" once before (as you might

recall), in Fall 2007, and a very different course on Job was one of my first at this school, in the Fall of 2002.

As actors will be the first to tell you, it's always interesting to do something a second time. This year's "R&T" is slimmer - fewer plays, more time to circle them with more explicit religious themes; we're also taking advantage of the Spring to have students experience Purim and Palm Sunday. As for "Job," well, we're writing a book!

Religion & Theater 2.0

Three weeks from today our new semester begins, and with it the new version of Religion & Theater, which I teach with my friend C. Exciting! I've just sent out information about course texts to the students (so they can get used copies and even start reading), and this:

If you have experience with religion, start thinking about aspects which could be understood as performative, dramatic, cathartic or even comic. If you have experience with theater, start to think about aspects which might be interpreted as festive, liturgical, contemplative or even sacramental.