Friday, October 19, 2007
A playwright's passion
Push from Pulitzer Prize winner the catalyst for a dramatic change in direction
Sarah Ruhl's passion for "Passion Play: a cycle in three parts" began at Brown University where as a student she wrote the trilogy's first two plays. But she didn't begin by studying theater. Instead she was writing fiction and poetry and thinking maybe she'd be a teacher.
Everything changed when she took a playwriting class with Paula Vogel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for "How I Learned to Drive." Ruhl had an idea to write a thesis on actresses in the 19th century and asked Vogel to oversee it. Vogel refused but said if Ruhl wrote a play instead she would be on board.
Vogel's suggestion changed Ruhl's life.
"I felt completely liberated," Ruhl recalled, in a conversation from her Manhattan home. "I thought 'How wonderful, I don't have to write my crusty paper about actresses, I can write a play.' I remember walking down the street feeling like a great weight had been lifted off of me."
The Goodman Theatre, which in 2006 staged Ruhl's wonderful drama "The Clean House," opens its season with the Chicago premiere of "Passion Play." The 3½-hour epic, under the direction of Mark Wing-Davey, features three plays all staged at different times in history, all dealing with the testy relationship between politics and religion and all based around the medieval tradition of the Passion play, a reenactment of Christ's passion and crucifixion.
The first takes place in 1575 England during the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth as she attempts to banish Catholic rituals; part two is staged in 1934 Oberammergau, Germany, where Hitler has endorsed the Passion play as a way to promote his anti-Semitic agenda, and part three moves to 1984 Spearfish, South Dakota, the home of the Black Hills Passion play, which gets a visit from a campaigning Ronald Reagan.
Wing-Davey has a long connection to "Passion Play" that goes back to its developmental days at the Sundance Institute in 2000. Two years later, he directed a workshop production of the first two plays at the Actors Centre in London.
"I was immediately struck by its scope and audaciousness," Wing-Davey recalled. "It's a richly textured work that has an innocence and enthusiasm about it. Sarah's voice is a mix of dry humor and a very particular take on the world that she creates within her own version of magic realism."
It was after re-reading a children's book about the Oberammergau Passion play that Ruhl began her research in earnest. With each new thing she uncovered, the momentum built.
"It was like those Russian nesting dolls," Ruhl, 33, said. "I kept uncovering new thoughts and ideas."
She was especially horrified and intrigued by Hitler's connection to Oberammergau.
"I was just stunned when I read his speech about how wonderful the Passion was because he felt it was anti-Semitic," the soft-spoken Ruhl said. "It just seemed like such a strange perversion of what was the original intention of the play."
Ten years after writing the first two plays, Ruhl returned to the cycle. She had discovered the Passion play in South Dakota and felt she had to continue the work. Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, where the trilogy had its world premiere in 2005, commissioned her to write a final play. She found it an interesting time to take on the intersection of politics and religion from the European Renaissance to modern American politics.
"We're living in a time when religion has been re-politicized," Ruhl said. "In America, we've lived through a long period in which religion and politics were kept separate. That was the whole point of living in this country. Now I think we're living in a time where people have merged the two as a political maneuver to take power. And I see that as so medieval, something right of the Renaissance."
Ruhl also was fascinated by the notion of role playing. A cast of 16 characters portray the same roles in each of the plays. These are characters who play the same role year in and year out with the Passion. Ruhl wanted to examine how that would seep into a person's identity.
"I started to think about a character who played the Virgin Mary who was actually not so virginal. Or an actor playing Christ who was drawn to the Nazi party. I think in a way it became a metaphor for questions about how fixed identity really is."
Ruhl, who grew up in Wilmette, attended New Trier High School and took classes from a young age at Evanston's Piven Theatre Workshop. She left college never sure she could make a living as a playwright. She returned to Chicago, worked odd jobs and had three of her early works -- "Orlando," "Eurydice" and "Melancholy Play" -- staged at Piven. But she found no other outlets in Chicago for her work and eventually went back to Brown where she earned a graduate degree in playwriting.
Today, Ruhl lives in Manhattan with her psychiatrist husband, Anthony Charuvastra, and their 1½-year-old daughter, Anna. She admits that becoming a mother and continuing with her writing has been challenging. So, when part of her just wants to be at home playing with her daughter, what keeps her focused on writing?
"I've had really good luck with babysitters," Ruhl said, laughing. But on a more serious side, she adds. "I think theater is a really important artform right now. Reality on television and in movies is distilled for you in a way that I think we're farther away from the real than ever before. So for people to experience art in a community in real time, knowing that they're getting the language directly from the source, is a really important relationship for me right now."
'PASSION PLAY: A CYCLE IN THREE PARTS'When: Opens Monday, to Oct. 21
Sarah Ruhl's passion for "Passion Play: a cycle in three parts" began at Brown University where as a student she wrote the trilogy's first two plays. But she didn't begin by studying theater. Instead she was writing fiction and poetry and thinking maybe she'd be a teacher.
Everything changed when she took a playwriting class with Paula Vogel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for "How I Learned to Drive." Ruhl had an idea to write a thesis on actresses in the 19th century and asked Vogel to oversee it. Vogel refused but said if Ruhl wrote a play instead she would be on board.
Vogel's suggestion changed Ruhl's life.
"I felt completely liberated," Ruhl recalled, in a conversation from her Manhattan home. "I thought 'How wonderful, I don't have to write my crusty paper about actresses, I can write a play.' I remember walking down the street feeling like a great weight had been lifted off of me."
The Goodman Theatre, which in 2006 staged Ruhl's wonderful drama "The Clean House," opens its season with the Chicago premiere of "Passion Play." The 3½-hour epic, under the direction of Mark Wing-Davey, features three plays all staged at different times in history, all dealing with the testy relationship between politics and religion and all based around the medieval tradition of the Passion play, a reenactment of Christ's passion and crucifixion.
The first takes place in 1575 England during the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth as she attempts to banish Catholic rituals; part two is staged in 1934 Oberammergau, Germany, where Hitler has endorsed the Passion play as a way to promote his anti-Semitic agenda, and part three moves to 1984 Spearfish, South Dakota, the home of the Black Hills Passion play, which gets a visit from a campaigning Ronald Reagan.
Wing-Davey has a long connection to "Passion Play" that goes back to its developmental days at the Sundance Institute in 2000. Two years later, he directed a workshop production of the first two plays at the Actors Centre in London.
"I was immediately struck by its scope and audaciousness," Wing-Davey recalled. "It's a richly textured work that has an innocence and enthusiasm about it. Sarah's voice is a mix of dry humor and a very particular take on the world that she creates within her own version of magic realism."
It was after re-reading a children's book about the Oberammergau Passion play that Ruhl began her research in earnest. With each new thing she uncovered, the momentum built.
"It was like those Russian nesting dolls," Ruhl, 33, said. "I kept uncovering new thoughts and ideas."
She was especially horrified and intrigued by Hitler's connection to Oberammergau.
"I was just stunned when I read his speech about how wonderful the Passion was because he felt it was anti-Semitic," the soft-spoken Ruhl said. "It just seemed like such a strange perversion of what was the original intention of the play."
Ten years after writing the first two plays, Ruhl returned to the cycle. She had discovered the Passion play in South Dakota and felt she had to continue the work. Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, where the trilogy had its world premiere in 2005, commissioned her to write a final play. She found it an interesting time to take on the intersection of politics and religion from the European Renaissance to modern American politics.
"We're living in a time when religion has been re-politicized," Ruhl said. "In America, we've lived through a long period in which religion and politics were kept separate. That was the whole point of living in this country. Now I think we're living in a time where people have merged the two as a political maneuver to take power. And I see that as so medieval, something right of the Renaissance."
Ruhl also was fascinated by the notion of role playing. A cast of 16 characters portray the same roles in each of the plays. These are characters who play the same role year in and year out with the Passion. Ruhl wanted to examine how that would seep into a person's identity.
"I started to think about a character who played the Virgin Mary who was actually not so virginal. Or an actor playing Christ who was drawn to the Nazi party. I think in a way it became a metaphor for questions about how fixed identity really is."
Ruhl, who grew up in Wilmette, attended New Trier High School and took classes from a young age at Evanston's Piven Theatre Workshop. She left college never sure she could make a living as a playwright. She returned to Chicago, worked odd jobs and had three of her early works -- "Orlando," "Eurydice" and "Melancholy Play" -- staged at Piven. But she found no other outlets in Chicago for her work and eventually went back to Brown where she earned a graduate degree in playwriting.
Today, Ruhl lives in Manhattan with her psychiatrist husband, Anthony Charuvastra, and their 1½-year-old daughter, Anna. She admits that becoming a mother and continuing with her writing has been challenging. So, when part of her just wants to be at home playing with her daughter, what keeps her focused on writing?
"I've had really good luck with babysitters," Ruhl said, laughing. But on a more serious side, she adds. "I think theater is a really important artform right now. Reality on television and in movies is distilled for you in a way that I think we're farther away from the real than ever before. So for people to experience art in a community in real time, knowing that they're getting the language directly from the source, is a really important relationship for me right now."
'PASSION PLAY: A CYCLE IN THREE PARTS'When: Opens Monday, to Oct. 21
Comments:
Post a Comment
