Passion Play: a cycle in three parts

Were but passion enough. In an attempt to address the Bush era’s treacherous, licentious integration of governance, religion and art, Sarah Ruhl’s century-scanning work examines troubled productions of the Passion play in Elizabethan England, post-Weimar Germany and 1970s South Dakota. Using several dramatic tools of her generation—unchecked whimsy, ironically misplaced historical figures, antitheatrical technology—Ruhl’s play somehow manages to suggest perversion, despotism and gigantic floating fish without dramatizing any of it onstage. Well, that’s not technically true—the giant fish make several appearances.

Although the three-and-a-half-hour run time could exhaust the patience of a Trappist monk, this glacial indulgence isn’t the problem. Unlike, say, Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days, in which the essence of Shaw’s Saint Joan reverberates in the lives of the Missouri community-theater enclave producing it, the Passion’s themes never resonate among Ruhl’s characters; even though they speak at length about it, they speak vapidly. (“No one actually wants to be  Christ, they only want to admire him from a distance,” is about as deep as it gets.) To be fair, however, if Ruhl ever writes the inevitable play about putting on a play, she’ll be well armed; her eye and ear for the neuroses of show people are razor-sharp.

Wing-Davey’s production can’t make heads or tails of the script’s detached imagery (all those toy ships on sticks evoke, at best, a grade-school Columbus Day pageant), but the director is certainly adept at handling actors with eccentric gifts. Nicole Weisner, usually seen on the tiny stage of the Eurocentric Trap Door Theatre, is note-perfect as a sappy ’70s Jesus freak, while Craig Spidle’s three stage directors are each uniquely fussy and funny. And spectacular stage creature T. Ryder Smith leaves mouths agape as Queen Bess, Der Führer and the Gipper. But the predictably oppositional perspective is toothless—those Nazis were so intolerant of homosexuals, and was President Reagan flaky or what?—and village-idiot characters (played by Polly Noonan) meant to act as each era’s conscience simply come across as infantilized. As a play, it’s merely an overwrought misfire. As an event that professes to speak to the moment, it’s a charade. —Christopher Piatt