Sarah Ruhl excels at making plays that encourage the audience to suspend incredulity and logic. They are marked by enchanting stagecraft: rooms made of string and worms carrying letters between the living and the dead in Eurydice (2006); two women engaged in dance-like hand-to-hand combat in Dead Man's Cell Phone (2007). Perhaps her most ambitious venture to date is the triptych Passion Play, first staged as a complete cycle in 2005, which ran in the fall of 2008 at Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven. Here Ruhl essays a dramatic magical realism, as giant fish go parading around the stage and the sky turns red. It is in the context of this self-conscious and captivating theatricality that Passion Play presses, among other things, questions about performance—about how performing shapes performers, and what kinds of performances are most transforming.

Each act of Passion Play depicts a community performing a passion play. The first act—in some ways the most imaginative and absorbing—is set in a village in Elizabethan England. It is based on the real tale of a village in which the stars of the annual play took on the characteristics of the figures they portrayed—the actor playing Jesus became, over the years, more Christ-like, and the actress playing his mother more Marian. In Ruhl's retelling, the actress's conformity to Mary is sheer artifice. Mary gets pregnant and, rather than confess to fornication or have an abortion, claims she was visited by God and told she would have his baby. Jesus' becoming more Christ-like is a bit more complicated. The actor playing Jesus really does try to devote himself unstintingly to helping and aiding Mary. But near the end of the act he confesses this as a sin to a priest: "I believe I liked it a little too well, playing the role of Christ."

Act II, set in Oberammergau in 1934, is darker, explicitly engaged with the anti-Jewish violence that passion plays sometimes provoked. Another Mary, daughter of the man who for many years starred as Jesus, recalls that as a child, she hated to see her father's "side pierced and the blood running out … . I wanted with all my heart to run on stage and fight the Jews. I could not understand why all the people watching did nothing."

Throughout the first two acts, a character Ruhl calls the Village Idiot—but whom we might better call a holy fool—serves as a truth-teller. At first she seems like a simpleton, playing suggestively with a jack-in-the-box, making noise when the cast members are trying to rehearse. But she has magical powers—her pain, for example, is what makes the sky turn red. In the second act, the Village Idiot diagnoses, and tries to correct, the passion play's anti-Judaism. Feeding forgetful Jesus his lines, she prompts him to end his speech at the Last Supper with "And finally, I want everyone at this table, eating my blood and my body, to remember that I am a Jew." (How different the history of Christian violence against Jews would have been if the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper had in fact recorded Jesus saying those words.) Hitler, visiting Oberammergau, drives the point home: Oberammergau's theatrical performance shapes how the Aryans of Oberammergau behave toward Jews. The play, says Hitler, depicts the intellectual and racial superiority of Romans to Jews, and allows spectators and performers to "remain forever watchful in the knowledge of the menace of the Jews." By the very end of the act, the man who played Jesus serves the German army. He comes to take away the Village Idiot—who is, of course, a Jew. When she points out again that "Jesus was a Jew," this Jesus says, "Kind of. But not really."

The third act, moving from 1969 to the present, is set in Spearfish, South Dakota, which, in the summer 2008, hosted the 68th summer performance of the Black Hills Passion Play. (The Spearfish passion play's website quotes Time magazine saying, "The … success of The Black Hills Passion Play makes it appear that the US has … its own Oberammergau." The website doesn't mention that the article from Time which yielded this quote was published in 1940, or acknowledge that associations with Oberammergau might be troubling rather than thrilling.) This act—which, frankly, runs a little long—follows the South Dakota Pilate as he goes to Vietnam and is destroyed—and perhaps transfigured?—by the experience.

At issue in each panel of the triptych is the blurry boundary between performance and reality. This is most explicit in Act I, with Mary and Jesus' being transformed, or not being transformed, into the people they play. In Act II, Ruhl suggests that people in fact reject the prospect of being cruciformly reshaped by playing religious parts: early on in the act, one man says to another that, given the choice to live the life of one of the passion story's characters, he'd rather be Pilate than Christ: "Very unpleasant, the nails, the whipping, the blood … . No one actually wants to be Christ, they only want to admire him from a distance." Play-acting can be just that—except that the people of Oberammergau are deeply shaped by their annual performance.

Ruhl's subject is not just theatrical performance, but also religious performance; one could say that the actors' problem—especially in Act II—is that they fail to become sufficiently engaged in the performance of Christianity. Alternatively, the play may prompt those of us who seek to "perform Christianity" to recognize that "performing Christianity" is no fixed thing. But the players' inadequate performance of faith is inextricable from the various performances of the state. In each act, the state interferes, co-opting religion: Elizabeth I turns up at the end of Act I, declaring an end to all religious theater (which this very Protestant monarch disdains as too Catholic) and demanding to know if the villagers are hiding a Catholic priest (they are). In Act II, Hitler is welcomed to Oberammergau, and in Act III—emptying out the metaphor a bit—President Ronald Reagan, played by the same actor who depicted Elizabeth and Hitler, turns up, making a speech about his hatred of the homeless and the nation's hunger for spiritual revival. (In New Haven, Kathleen Chalfant was brilliant in this quite demanding triple role.) Reagan's cameo is a bit heavy-handed, meant, presumably, to show how the religious passions of the people of Spearfish have been taken over by the virulent passions of the state.

Occasionally, the characters in Passion Play can resist the lure of the state—the folks in Act I successfully keep that Catholic priest hidden and get him out of the country before the queen can track him down. But for the most part, the state seems capable of effecting transformations in people that religious performance cannot. In Acts II and III, the state's performances overpower—or, on Ruhl's terms, become inseparably intertwined with—performances of religion. In Oberammergau, of course, the actors are turned into Nazis. In South Dakota, the real power of the state is attested to not by Reagan's buffoonery but by Pilate. Back from Vietnam, he wants to resume his part in the play. Just as the Village Idiot of Oberammergau named the truth that Jesus was a Jew, so the Pilate of Spearfish names state power, departing from his script and proclaiming, "I, Pontus Pilate, an agent of the State, condemn this man to death. Not the Jews, not history. I will take responsibility. Now take him and crucify him." His own experience of being crushed in the vise of the state allows him to display Roman rule in the Crucifixion. For me, the question left hanging is this: Why do Christians in the United States, who have both the Cross and the subtle tyranny of state power at the center of our story, shield our eyes from the ways the state co-opts faith today?

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. Her study of 18th-century Anglicans in Virginia is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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