‘All my life, I’ve wanted to play Christ,” says a spunky Elizabethan actor at the top of “Passion Play,” Sarah Ruhl’s audaciously expansive Goodman Theatre deconstruction of the long and oft-inglorious history of depicting the Son of God on the stage.
You can’t blame the fellow. Jesus was the lead role in the passion plays of northern England. Fringe benefits — popularity, gorgeous women, temporary sainthood — accrued to the lucky actor, while the poor sap playing Pontius Pilate got the cold shoulder. The Prince of Peace also snared top billing in Oberammergau in 1934, even under an Austrian director who was a member of the Nazi party. And in South Dakota some 50 years later, Jesus on your resume was the best ticket out to Hollywood. In contrast to the role, though, the actors were always imperfectly human. Indeed, the entire biblical narrative has proved dangerously malleable in the historical petri dish of the theater.
Explored in Ruhl’s whimsical, quirky, post-modern style, but with a scope and thematic heft wholly atypical for this gifted, Chicago-bred writer, those fascinating ironies and hypocrisies lie at the core of the flagship production of the Goodman season.
This is not a show for the exhausted. It almost makes your head explode.
“Passion Play” runs in excess of 3 1/2 hours, and it feels as if Ruhl would have preferred still more time. It features myriad styles and a chronological span of more than 500 years. Mixing fiction and real life in the epic-theater tradition of “Angels in America,” it includes appearances by Elizabeth I, Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan. And despite a concept that you first think is going to be two planks and a passion, Mark Wing-Davey’s colossal and exuberantly staged production eventually reveals eye-popping (and occasionally gratuitous) quantities of scenery and self-referential special effects, including a full-on ascension into the heavens.
Produced only once before at Washington’s Arena Stage and revised for its Chicago premiere (which has a new director), “Passion Play” actually dares to try and blow up the complex, incendiary co-existence of the secular and the sacred in Western culture. If you weary of triviality and repetition in the theater, this is your show.
Indeed, “Passion Play” could be a great Anglo-American theatrical epic in the tradition of “Angels” or “The Coast of Utopia,’ for it homes in on the great, central struggle of our moment. “Angels” declared sex a political act; “Passion Play” wants to do the same for art. But Ruhl, a great American writer, has yet to wrestle her massive canvas into manageable cohesion.
Simply put, whenever this show fully commits to the truth of the three worlds it conjures — 16th Century England, 1930s Austria and 20th Century South Dakota — things work superbly. Thanks to a clutch of fine multicharacter performances from Joaquin Torres, who plays Jesus three times, and Kristen Bush, who keeps wrestling with the Virgin Mary, we become deeply involved with the life and times of these earnest actors. And we see the connection between the triumvirate of colorful authority figures (all played with great flourish by T. Ryder Smith) and those who toil and play in their shadow.
But this show keeps wanting to subvert its own rules. Actors switch without warning to archetype (the Achilles’ heel of Wing-Davey’s otherwise thoroughly exciting production). And then the theatrical world they’ve so carefully built suddenly goes haywire. That sense of esoteric but highly intelligent whimsy that serves Ruhl so well in her smaller, more defined plays sometimes trips her up here.
The otherwise charming and moving first part, for example, ultimately gets overwhelmed by the appearance of several giant fish on the stage. Granted, they’re part of an important dream metaphor (even if they reminded me of Tony Soprano), but they still undermine the truth of the moment and pull you out.
In current form, the section of the show set in Oberammergau is by far the strongest and clearest. Aside from Smith’s Hitler making the audience shake in its boots, Ruhl catalogs everything from anti-Semitism to British appeasement to the collapse of a simple villager unable to cope with being too old to play Jesus.
But whereas Hitler says things you don’t expect, Ruhl’s Reagan is a familiar stereotype. And as that easy joke prefigures, things go awry in the middle of the final segment, set, confusingly, in both the late 1960s and the 1980s, and mostly following an actor (played by Brian Sgambati) just back from Vietnam. The play veers off in too many esoteric directions, losing its focus. And the production goes with it. Allen Moyer’s otherwise cohesive design palette scatters into video, a huge cut-out ship and God knows what else, and Wing-Davey’s direction loses its anchor.
From the seats Sunday night, it was like this great, involving, unified, thrilling opus had finally slipped from your fingers after three hours of keeping it mostly in your grasp. You won’t be able to sleep for worrying about the loss, which is reason enough to see this show while you’re awake.
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cjones5@tribune.com
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“Passion Play”
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
When: Through Oct. 21
Running time: 3 hours, 35 minutes
Tickets: $20-$70 at 312-443-3800
