Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl, produced by the Circuit Theatre Company, directed by Skylar Fox with music direction by Linda Bard and set design and lighting by Christopher Annas-Lee
review by Tom Daley August 4, 2012
Last night I went to see Passion Play,
a play by Sarah Ruhl produced by the Circuit Theatre Company and
directed by Skylar Fox. I believe this company coalesced around Fox and
is largely composed of people who worked together at Newton North High
School (with a few additions from Fox’s contacts at Brown). Last year I
saw their production of Enron,
a dazzling entertainment and a memorably professional creation. Chris
Annas-Lee, Bagel Bard Pam Annas’s son, designed the lighting and sets in
both productions, and he acted in Passion Play. Chris
is a powerful presence. He has a strong, deep voice and his long face
and sturdy jaw accommodate both the deadpan humor and the deadly serious
pieces of his repertoire in this extravaganza. He was best as the young
director of the last of the four incarnations of the passion play (one
set in Elizabethan England, one at Oberammergau in 1934, and two in
Spearfish, South Dakota —one in 1969 and one in the era of Ronald Reagan
(circa 1984)).
Perhaps
the most extraordinary feature of this production was the music—this is
a very gifted ensemble of musicians.The harmonies on the songs (a list
of which, alas, was not given in the program) were flawless, and the
instrumentation bright if not exactly bold (neither the banjo and the
cello always achieved, given the acoustics of the Cambridge Family Y
Theater, the volume needed). And how on earth did they get that piano to
work? I was told, when I rented the same theater for Every Broom and Bridget,
that it was nigh near impossible to tune. Spirituals, folk tunes,
rollicking ballads (one anchored by a swaggering and spunky Natalie
McDonald), old hymn chestnuts—all of them were handled with astonishing
savoir-faire; all made a profound impact.
Director
Fox, deft at staging and a sensational choreographer of big
productions, has not yet been able to coax many of the actors in this
troupe out of their earnestness (or perhaps he is coaxing them into
this, but I doubt it). If at times some of them had a hard time sorting
out intensity from industriousness, there were some brilliant individual
moments manifesting nuance, particularly the performance of a very big,
very imperious Queen Elizabeth (Elizabeth I—played by Emma Johnson).
The Queen, whose face had a greater thickness of white clown paint than
the mug of Tammy Faye Baker had of facial powder, abruptly entered the
village where the play was being produced. She delivered a monologue
about how monarchs must paint their faces so that their subjects cannot
see them growing old or getting ugly. She asked if there are any
Catholics being hidden in the houses and then proceeded to cancel the
passion play. Johnson (who later played, somewhat less innovatively,
Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan) managed, as Queen Elizabeth, to be both
haughty and scarily comical, to come across as caricature and character,
to tower over the rest of the players (she is very tall) and seem
detached and yet excruciatingly connected to the electric static
emanating from the body politic of the little village.
Of
his three characters, Louis Loftus managed best as a rather tamped-down
VA psychiatrist—the subtleties of his acting craft emerged more
completely in that role than they did when he was a hectic and
passionate friar or an insufferably English aesthete/reviewer. An
energetic Juliet Roll played the Village Idiot, and at times was
ridiculously, hysterically little-girlish, although when the passion
play’s exasperated director (Caleb Bromberg) put her in a cage at the
Oberammergau production, she abandoned the screechiness and became
prophetic and compelling. The female lead (Madeline Schulman, who had
the female lead in Enron) was
damn good, especially when she broke out of the souped-up sincerity. In
the final scene from the Elizabethan section, she is carried back from
drowning herself in the river and laid on the stage by a very tender
John the fisherman (Sam Bell-Gurwitz), and water pours out of her mouth.
She is sensually dead, an Ophelia dragged from her river, her white
gown wet and revealing her comeliness. This was one of the most
arresting scenes in the play.
The
giant (oil?) paintings (by Nellie Robinson, Amalia Sweet, and Tess
Vasiliadis) that were used for backdrop for the Elizabethan productions
were quite amazing—there’s a painting of the Last Supper that was a kind
of carnival version of Caravaggio, at least in the portraiture--crooked
noses, balding pates, and the kind of faces you might have seen in some
Jewish ghetto—stark, almost violent profiles of men as they reached
middle age. Christ was dark and somberly Semitic-Mediterranean—not the
blond ideal of the Renaissance. The paintings had a bluish-gray cast to
them, as in Picasso’s blue period, and the profiles were almost
distractingly good.
One
of the most beautiful musical pieces was a rendition by four or five of
the singers of the old-timey ballad “I’ll Fly Away”—sung with such
touchingly sincere grace that I felt compelled to sing along. Here the
subdued jubilance might have been a model for some of the overcooked
talking parts of the play. The earnestness had such an authentic ring to
it, such a humanity—as if the actors actually were feeling what they
were singing without pumping it up to enhance their projection. There’s a
young man in the ensemble (one of the carpenters) who played the banjo
who was a particularly good singer. The cellist, Linda Bard, was the
musical director. She did an extraordinary job
.
.
A
love triangle with shifting angles between John/Eric/J (Sam
Bell-Gurwitz); Pontius Pilate/FootSolider/P (Justin Phillips); and Mary 2
(Madeline Schulman) manifests in all the different productions of the
passion play. By the end of Passion Play,
the three actors had grown into their roles, and done so beautifully.
In the final scene, after “P” returns to South Dakota after years of
wandering from VA hospital to VA Hospital, the experience of rejection
seems to sober both the character and the actor. His Vietnam War-induced
madness blooms into a kind of seer’s glory. In the finale (brilliantly
designed and choreographed), Phillips is rolled towards the front of the
stage on a platform as he conjures the wind while the rest of the cast
flows around him with clouds on sticks and other props, whistling like
the wind. I even heard the expert effect of snatches of an instrumental
version of the refrain, “Turn, turn to the wind and the rain,” from Bob
Dylan’s “Percy’s Song.” Viola, “P”’s daughter (Juliet Roll), gyrates a
large pole with a dove over her head—a most affecting touch.
The
issue of the rabid anti-Jewishness of the passion plays was dealt with
most successfully in a performance at Oberammergau. Hiding under the
stage, the Village Idiot (Roll) prompts the Christus, who has forgotten
his lines, and improvises, “And I am a Jew.” At the end of the
Oberammergau production, the character Eric (Bell-Gurwitz), who was
playing the Christus, sends her off on a train because she is not like
the other Oberammergauans, and is presumably Jewish. I forget which song
the ensemble was singing (perhaps there was none)—but that was another
deeply moving scene—the two of them staring quietly for a long time at
the future.
The
play went on for three and a half hours, with two intermissions, and it
was tough to sit through in all that barely mitigated heat and humidity
(the company had brought in large portable air conditioners and
fans—they moderated but did not massage away the discomfort). They are
moving to air conditioned venues for the next three performances--for
tickets to their August 10 and 11 (The Gordon Chapel at the Old South Church) and August 12 (Oberon at the ART) performances, go to http://www.passionplayboston.com/tickets.html.
All
in all, a pretty amazing production, especially given the fact that
this is such a young company (most of them 18-20). Director Fox and
Music Director Bard are visionaries; it will be interesting to watch
them as they further deepen their insight.
****Tom
Daley serves on the faculty of the Online School of Poetry and leads
writing workshops at the Boston Center for Adult Education and Lexington
Community Education. He is the author of Every Broom and Bridget,
a play about Emily Dickinson and her Irish servants, which he performs
as a one-man show. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in a
number of journals including Massachusetts Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Diagram, and Rhino.
