Theater: Passion Play

Irondale Center

Brooklyn, N.Y.

(866) 811-4111

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Sarah Ruhl’s four-hour epic, set in three distinct eras, contemplates religion, morality, and theater itself, said Jeremy Gerard in Bloomberg.com. Passion Play imagines the backstage drama behind three very different re-enactments of the last days of Christ. In 16th-century England, villagers put on a Passion play even as Queen Elizabeth threatens an edict banning all religious performances. In 1930s Germany, a Nazi-approved production emphasizes “malign characterizations” of Jews. And in 1980s America, a South Dakota town hopes to bring in tourists with its Passion play. In each instance, “the Passion onstage is little match for the passions off,” as grippingly enacted by the “time-traveling leads,” who play the actors cast as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Pontius Pilate in each era.

Passion Play is “the most thrilling piece of theater to hit New York” in recent memory, said David Sheward in Back Stage. As the characters’ destinies are altered in different ways by their parts in the Passion play, Ruhl provides a razor-sharp examination of the way “faith and art interact with politics and personalities.” The young girl playing Mary in Elizabethan England “gets pregnant and pretends her condition is of divine origin.” The actor playing Jesus in Nazi Germany joins the SS and ends up becoming a murderer. In South Dakota, the part of Pilate is played by a Vietnam veteran, who is constantly reminded of his complicity in the killing of innocents.

Each of the play’s three sections “could conceivably stand on its own,” said Dan Bacalzo in Theatermania.com. Yet by weaving them all together, Passion Play becomes “more than the sum of its parts.” Strong performances by the play’s three principals—Hale Appleman as the Jesus actor, Dominic Fumusa as Pilate, and Kate Turnbull as Mary—anchor director Mark Wing-Davey’s masterful production. Ruhl’s enormous triptych, while often critical of the role of religion in society, is never “anti-religious”—in fact, it often manages to evoke a “sense of wonder that signals there’s something beyond the human dramas we’ve seen played out before us.”