Noah and his wife are having a mild domestic dispute.
She`s trying to hold house and home together and put food on the table in hard times. And what`s Noah up to? Off talking to God about the weather.
God, God, God-it`s always God with Noah. He deserves ”to be beaten until black and blue,” she screeches.
”Slut,” Noah barks.
So she belts him.
Welcome to Noah and Mrs. Noah as ”The Honeymooners,” say hello to the Nativity shepherds as ”Second City” rubes and take a look at Herod and Company as lounge lizards in ruffled tuxedo shirts.
Lucifer descends to hell in a toxic waste barrel, escorted by henchmen clad in radiation protection wear; God, in construction helmet and white denim overalls, ascends to heaven on a cherry picker. Eden is a carpet of Astroturf and a sprinkling of wood chips-a vision of perfection in a suburban landscape. These are biblical stories as fractured as any fairy tale from the old
”Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons, but not exactly due to modernist revisionism, contemporary horseplay or 20th-Century atheistic irreverence.
These plays are deadly serious in their theology, and they happen to be 800 years old.
From the standpoint of theater history, Court Theatre`s ”The Mystery Cycle: Creation,” which opened Thursday at Rockefeller Chapel on the University of Chicago campus, is as potentially enriching as repertory gets. The production features a script inspired by and adapted from a wing of Western drama virtually ignored by revival theater in our century, despite that wing`s key role in reviving the art of theater itself after 1,000 years of darkness.
The original mystery plays evolved and were written down between the 12th and 13th Centuries. In that time, they gradually reopened the theatrical door after a near total abandonment in the Dark Ages. Their restoration of the art of storytelling through drama, after more than 10 centuries of absence, eventually led to Shakespeare and the Western dramatic renaissance.
And yet these crude, simple, somewhat fun-loving versions of standard Biblical stories-Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity, Herod and the Flight into Egypt, to list Court`s selections, for instance-are rarely performed, while later Jacobean dramas with more obscure storylines (take ” `Tis Pity She`s a Whore,” for instance, or the convoluted goings-on in ”The Duchess of Malfi”) regularly show up in repertory programming.
Little is more seminal in Western drama than the medieval mystery play;
few works of our literature are less performed.
But that may be changing, beginning with a celebrated 1985 revival at the National Theatre of Great Britain, one that inspired the current enterprise by Court Theatre. What these productions are striving for is the everyday, visceral feel mystery plays had so many centuries ago. Instead of costuming the performers in medieval wear, trying to give the production an academically sound, dusty museum revisit, the plays have been completely rethought to bring back the contemporary feeling they had for audiences in the Middle Ages.
”For medieval audiences, God existed every day, he was a part of their lives year-round,” says Bernie Sahlins, who adapted the modern English script in use at Court from surviving medieval texts, in old English and Yorkshire dialect. ”God wasn`t walled up in the church on Sunday. That`s why they could be so free. Noah`s wife is a shrew; he`s a drunk; they use language you`d never associate with the Bible; and they tell their stories, though they use verse and rhyme, in a lower-class, almost non-literary way.”
They were populist entertainers, not court poets, in other words, or as Sahlins and company say to describe their acting company, ”We wanted beer actors, not champagne actors.” That feel of blue-collar ruddiness is all part of the historical truth of the plays. The mysteries were put on by the craftsmen`s guilds: the nailmakers, the butchers, the boatmakers, the bakers. Each had a Bible story assigned to them, one they worked at most of the year. ”What the British production achieved was a sort of liberation,” says Nicholas Rudall, Court`s executive director and Sahlins co-director on the production. ”It went back to the roots and featured working people, in contemporary working-class attire.”
In addition to the everyday attire and truckstop allegorical imagery, Rockefeller Chapel has been somewhat transformed to accommodate this unusual show. A band of six omnibus musicians, on violin, synthesizer, electric guitar and Haitian pipes and drums, among other instruments, chime in throughout the proceedings, with spirituals, blues, folk music and original melodies by composer Larry Shanker.
Two sets of bleachers, facing each other and overlooking the main stage area in the nave of the chapel, are arranged so that members of the audience can sit among the players themselves and actually wander about with the actors in what the British call ”promenade” theater. The idea of bringing the people back into the story, of making the audience look at these stories from a fresh, upfront, you-are-there perspective, has its payoffs; one child clutched her even younger baby sister in terror at a recent dress rehearsal as Abraham, right under her nose, raised a steely dagger to slay Isaac, as God tells him to do.
One might wonder if the Rockefeller Chapel setting isn`t a lot more of a champagne than beer environment. In fact, Court is celebrating two separate periods of mystery cycle history, which accounts for the setting. In the early days, the mysteries were actually put on inside the church. Later, and no one is sure exactly when or why, they moved outside and into street fairs.
The fun-loving festivity of medieval fairs is present here in the dancing, in the whirling eruptions of square-dance interludes and folk foot-stomping slyly designed by choreogrpaher Timothy O`Slynne to recreate the feel of an outdoor Appalachian holiday. ”There`s a sense that these aren`t actors in a play, but fellow members of the community telling stories precious to their lives,” says Rudall.
Ironically, bringing God back to the people, in the 20th Century, doesn`t turn out to be cheap. Court is spending $180,000 on this production, twice the usual budget. A lot of effort is going into making things special, down to the last detail. Some $5,000 alone went to a special post-show lighting design by architect Stanley Tigerman, a rainbow finale that mostly takes place after the mysteries are over, a kind of visual exit music.
There were other difficulties. The National Theatre used a fairly faithful extant text, its anachronistic language and Yorkshire words intact-terms that are meaningless to a modern American audience. Sahlins literally took to translating the scripts for his text, no easy feat, since, in trying to retain the spirit, he insisted on maintaining the frequent use of internal rhyme. ”Of course, as you might expect, all the rhyming words turned out to be the archaic ones,” Sahlins says.
Court`s half-dozen or so selections come from the more than 50 plays surviving in the York cycle. If all goes well, the theater will stage the rest of the cycle in future seasons, picking up where this one ends-with the slaughter of the innocents by Herod and the Flight into Egypt-and moving through the life of Christ, the crucifixion and even the apocalyptic visions of the New Testament. In revisiting the scripts he adapted, Sahlins says he discovered unexpected riches, working with the scripts from York cycle-considered the most sophisticated and literary of the various cycles of surviving mysteries.
”There`s really beautiful writing from these dramatists, who are unfortunately remembered only as anonymous authors by us today,” Sahlins observes. ”But their texts succeed in being pure drama, not just religious skits.”
Already, the show`s creators-no pun intended-are delighted with even more subtle effects. ”It`s not that people are having a religious experience,”
says Rudall. ”But to see these plays is somehow to get back in contact with the principal themes of Western thought. The idea of paradise and the fall of man, the idea of our imperfection, the event of the first murder (Cain and Abel) staged right before your eyes-these plays touch primal senses in us.”
”I think it`s pure theater,” crows Sahlins. ”It`s pure theater in terms of the transformation of everyday objects into magic. It`s pure theater in the way it draws the audience into its wonderful stories. And it speaks to us. When you go to Greek tragedy, you have to immerse yourself in someone else`s myths.
”Not here,” he says. ”These are our myths.”
