Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to see the Epic Theatre Ensemble’s vibrant production of  Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene. The play dramatizes life in three villages that perform passion plays. Act I is set in a village in Northern England in 1575; Act II is set in Obergammerau in Bavaria in 1934. The final act takes place in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1969, 1984, and “the present.” The Irondale Center is located in the former Sunday School space of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, and it’s an inspired setting for this funny, moving, and thought-provoking play.

Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellowship winner who has been nominated for a Tony Award for her latest work, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), wrote the first two acts in the early 1990s as a pair of one-act plays, returning to the subject in 2003 when the Arena Stage in Washington, DC commissioned her to write “a play about America” (as Ruhl puts it in the “Playwright’s Note” for the current production).”I started thinking,” Ruhl writes, “how would it shape or misshape a life to play a biblical role year after year? How are we scripted? Where is the line between authentic identity and performance? And is there, in fact, such a line?

If you’re reading this and you’re currently in my American Literature I class, those would be good questions to ask as a way of thinking about Melville’s Captain Ahab. Indeed, if you’ve heard me lecture about Moby-Dick, you’ll appreciate the way in which the play dramatizes who religious discourses can be manipulated for political ends. Those of you who have heard Byran lecture in Writing New York or read his contribution to The Cambridge Companion will appreciate the play’s metatheatrical moments. (For example:  Queen Elizabeth, Adolf Hitler, and Ronald Reagan appear in the play — the first two in acts one and two respectively and then all three in the final act — and they’re played by the same male actor.)

Ultimately, the play finds much to fault in the practice of Christianity over the centuries, but it still finds hope in spirituality — particularly the spirituality that arises from the artistic imagination. (Again, worth thinking about in relation to Moby-Dick as well.)

If your interest in the play is now piqued, you can learn more about this production by watching the video below. You can also read this preview, “Sarah Ruhl’s Sunday School Lessons,” which appeared in the New York Times on April 13.

The ensemble cast is uniformly strong, and there are talk-backs after nearly every performances. The play’s run continues at the Irondale Center (85 South Oxford Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn) until May 30. Opening night is May 12, after which (I suspect) tickets will be much harder to come by. Running time is about 3 and a half hours.