The much-lauded American playwright Sarah Ruhl wrote the first two-thirds of Passion Playwhen she was still a student at Brown University. She finished the last (and best) third eight years later. The play, which premiered in 2005 at the Arena Theater in Washington, DC, has now been introduced to Los Angeles audiences in an Odyssey Theater/Evidence Room production, directed by Bart DeLorenzo.
Passion Play is a poetic, provocative and wildly ambitious work that goes behind the scenes of three different amateur theater companies rehearsing a pageant about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Act one is set in Elizabethan England (1575), act two Oberammergau, Bavaria (l934); act three, Spearfish, South Dakota (1969).
Ruhl was obviously influenced by Brecht when she wrote Passion Play; the alienation effect is evident throughout, with the actors chatting up the audience before the play begins and the fourth wall being ignored throughout. The language is modern and quirky, exposition and psychology are largely ignored, dramatic scenes are interrupted by jokes and puns, mostly on the whimsical side. There are numerous love scenes, as well, plus bawdy jokes and fish symbols.
The theme that underlies all this busyness is the clash of religion and politics. In part one, Queen Elizabeth (the remarkable Shannon Holt) shows up at the village rehearsal and condemns its Catholic treatment of the Christ story. Elizabeth is both a figure of repression and satire here. Holt then becomes an oddball Adolph Hitler at Oberammergau in 1934, trying to make the Bavarian version of the passion play even more anti-Semitic than it normally was. A local Jewish girl (Brittany Slattery) tries to stand up to him and the village Nazis, only to be torn out of the arms of her lover and shipped off to the camps.
Despite their many strengths, I found parts one and two curiously uninvolving. It wasn't until Ruhl came closer to the present and wrote about a Black Hills youngster -- and cast member -- going off to Viet Nam and then coming home a shellshocked wreck that I truly connected to the piece. It helps that Holt is a hoot as a dimwitted Ronald Reagan and that Ruhl's dialogue becomes more naturalistic and believable.
