Theater: Muhlenberg’s ‘Passion Play’ explores 400 years of Christianity
The Bible has been the source of many plays for more than 2,000 years, a tradition that Sarah Ruhl examines in her 2008 drama “Passion Play.”
The work is presented Thursday to Sunday at Muhlenberg College.
“It’s a play about the power of theatricality,” says Muhlenberg theater professor Beth Schachter, who directs. “It’s an opportunity to enjoy the ways in which the theater process can be both funny and an expression of faith of all sorts, within larger themes of love and forgiveness.”
Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the death and resurrection of Christ in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergau, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, S.D., from the late 1960s through Reagan’s presidency. In each era, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics is never far in the background.
The production is a work of fiction, not a passion play, but the audience does see segments of the passion story performed in each of the three eras.
Schachter says the play approaches the story of the Passion with “a certain reverence, as a story that holds a sublime significance for many of the characters.”
Schachter says that, for her, the play’s most interesting question has to do with the role of the individual in determining the course of history. In
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