Hale Appleman (center) and the company in a scene from
Epic Theatre Ensemble’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play
(Photo credit: Carol Rosegg)

At three and a half hours and spanning 425 years, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play is a hugely ambitious project. Epic Theatre Ensemble is to be commended for bringing this enormous undertaking to Brooklyn’s Fort Greene arts district. Mark Wing-Davey who has directed this trilogy at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and New Haven’s Yale Repertory Theatre has re-envisioned his production for the Irondale Center, a converted Sunday school, with peeling walls and religious plaques. This historic building is the perfect setting for a play that deals with the connection between religion, politics, community and theater. The company of eleven actors is called upon to do yeoman service in this long, complex evening, as they are often on the side lines when not performing in a scene and required to remain in character.

Ruhl is an extremely gifted playwright and each of her plays seen in New York since October 2006 is vastly different from the previous ones: The Clean House (2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Eurydice, Dead Man’s Cell Phone and In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a current Tony Award Best Play nominee. Both her subject matter and form varies from play to play, and she writes in a highly poeticized language that approaches verse. The three parts of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play are each complete in themselves. However, the total work is greater than the sum of its parts, creating resonances that would not be possible without the companion plays.

Inspired by the religious festivals in which everyday citizens come together once a year to stage the death and resurrection of Christ, the play takes place in three time frames and three settings: a village in Northern England in 1575, the year in which the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I banned all religious plays; Oberammergau, Bavaria, in 1934, the year Adolph Hitler attended a special tercentennial production; and at the Black Hills Passion Play, in Spearfish, South Dakota, beginning in 1969 and continuing up to the present.

Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play is not so much about the religious aspect of these annual presentations but the effect they have on the community and the amateur performers that partake in it every year. This is reinforced by the same actors in the Epic Theatre Ensemble production playing the same roles throughout: Hale Appleman who plays the actor who portrays the Christ, Dominic Fumusa as Pontius Pilate and Kate Turnbull as the Virgin Mary. The visual production by Allen Moyer and Warren Karp is an integral part of this theatrical event. Huge mobile wardrobe and scenery cabinets are reconfigured to create different locales along with a trestle table and some chairs. This not only suggests the amateur nature of the Passion play presentations throughout history, but allows for an easy transition of time and place. Except for time-dependent outfits like soldiers’ uniforms, Gabriel Berry and Antonia Ford-Roberts have costumed the cast in nondescript contemporary clothing which allows for the metaphor of a continuous flow of time, from 1575 until now.

According to Ruhl’s program notes, she started with the idea of how it would shape the lives of these amateur performers to play the same Biblical role year after year, roles which were inherited from one generation to another. To clarify the political context of these plays Queen Elizabeth I, Hitler, and President Ronald Reagan put in appearances in the witty guise of actor T. Ryder Smith who impersonates all three. In Part I, set in Elizabethan England, the popular and desired girl playing the Virgin Mary becomes pregnant and tries to pretend that that it was an immaculate conception. This leads to a tragic outcome for the community.


Hale Appleman and Kate Turnbull in a scene from the Epic
Theatre Ensemble’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play
(Photo credit: Carol Rosegg )

There is an historical background to Part II which takes place at Bavaria’s Oberammergau Festival, circa 1934, a community which has reenacted the Passion annually since 1634. The facts are that an anti-Semitic text was used until after World War II and that every actor in the play had at one time been a member of the Nazi Party except for the men who played Christ and Pontius Pilate. The young man playing Christ follows his friend into the army to fight for a glorious ideal and ends up ingloriously rounding up Jews to be sent to concentration camps. Hitler’s historically accurate appearance to compliment the anti-Semitic aspect of Passion text foreshadows events to come in the Holocaust.

Part III is set at the American Passion Play founded by a German refugee and begun in 1939 in Spearfish, South Dakota. Beginning in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War, the actor playing Pontius Pilate is drafted into the army and returns unable to escape the guilt he feels for his actions overseas. Depicting events in 1969, 1984 and the present, Part III is the most powerful play, putting center stage the tragedy of traumatized soldiers in our time who are unable to find help in returning to society. The caricatured portrayal of Reagan, the ultimate actor-leader, during a campaign re-election tour, only adds to the surreal quality of the entire work.

The first and third parts develop triangular love affairs between the three lead characters, (John, Mary and the actor who plays Pontius Pilate) while the second play set in a Germany that is beginning to break all the rules, posits an affair between the two men. The men are cousins in the first play, lovers in the second, and brothers in the third. Each play has its own tone: the first is mostly comic, the second surreal, and the third tragic. The final play written some years after the first two brings together all of the strands, as well as including some flashbacks to previously depicted events. In the scene of the Vietnam soldier on the battle field, he hallucinates a battle at the time of Elizabeth I as the beginning of his personal descent into hell. In each play, the actors rehearse different scenes from the life of Christ in the style of an amateur theatrical as it has been performed in the last five centuries.

Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play turns the eleven actors into a repertory company as all of them appear in each play, with some playing multiple ensemble roles within a single play. Each part begins with a rehearsal scene, after which the characters continue with their private lives as the story unfolds. One actor in each play shines brightest but that is mostly because of their roles in the story line: Turnbull as the desperate pregnant but single woman in Part I, Appleman as the conflicted young man playing Christ in a time of upheaval in Part II, and Fumusa as the traumatized returning veteran in Part III. Also memorable is Polly Noonan as the simple-minded character known as “The Village Idiot” who often speaks the truth Cassandra-like that no one wants to hear. Keith Reddin has some fun as the tart-tongued Director in all three plays.

An extremely ambitious play, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play is often diffuse and overly dense. However, in Mark Wing-Davy’s insightful and lucid production, the play offers a meditation on religion, politics and community in our era in which religious differences have once again become barriers to understanding and to bringing people together. From any point of view, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play is a unique theatrical experience.

Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (through June 5)
Epic Theatre Ensemble at the Irondale Center, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, 85 South Oxford Street, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn
For tickets, call 866-811-4111 or http://www.epictheatreensemble.org