"I think God is maybe like a tollbooth attendant. Only he doesn't give you change. You give him a dollar and he gives you a fish." Thus speaks a woman of the Great Plains whose avocation is the playing of Mary Magdalene, as she appears in Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play, a Cycle. Ruhl's fantasia on the genre spectacle, as performed over the centuries, is actually more suggestive of a Medieval mystery play. Symbols of the Christ—a fish, a dove—reappear throughout the hefty three-act work as she visits performances in 16th-century England (during a period of repression of Catholicism), in Bavarian Oberammergau in the run-up to the Second World War, and in Spearfish (fish!), South Dakota in the aftermath of Vietnam.

In each act, each of the the main players in the Passion (Jesus, Mary, and Pontius Pilate) is performed by a character portrayed by the same contemporary actor. For instance, Felix Solis gives us three clear, distinct versions of men playing Pilate: a crippled fisherman, a soon-to-be recruit in the German army (with homosexual tendencies the Nazis would soon quash), and a Vietnam vet. If the conflict of the Passion remains the same in each act, and if the backstage conflicts (contract negotiations, bickering over the size of a part, "little theater" preening) remain surprisingly the same, the "real life" conflicts change and shift and reflect one another. The sexual antagonism between the Jesus player and the Pilate player in Acts 1 and 3 becomes love in the central act.

Ruhl uses the device of the wise innocent, not unlike her character Mathilde in The Clean Room. Here, it's the Village Idiot/Violet, played with scene-stealing skill by Polly Noonan. Violet is a Jew sent to the camps at the end of the second act, and (less effectively) a literal child in the rambling third act. With a voice placed so high up in her head, her comic Village Idiot sounds like a ventriloquist's dummy.

Robert Dorfman plays a series of campy historical character roles: Presidents Reagan and Nixon, a fully bedecked Queen Elizabeth I, and a chilling, histrionic Adolf Hitler. Dorfman's command of Hitler's vocal dynamics suggests why the man had such a charismatic hold on his country.

Which is to say that this is a very theatrical play. The sky turns ominously red at mid-afternoon, but the mystery behind this omen remains for us to solve. The most stunning effect comes at the end of the first act, when the drowned body of the Mary player is carried onstage and laid on the deck. Water comes from her mouth in a small yet steady stream while the scene plays out, flowing directly downstage into a hidden trough at the lip of the stage. It's a simple, potentially dangerous, daringly strong choice. (And you can bet that there is staff at the break mopping up the residue.)

posted: 9:45:10 PM  

Five rules from the NPR drinking game.

posted: 2:05:25 PM  

This is a bit of a pleasant surprise: British playwright Harold Pinter has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005.

(Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.)

posted: 10:04:43 AM  

AOL has sent out 660 million CDs, and I have three shoeboxes full of them.

(Thanks to debris.com.)

posted: 1:04:59 AM