The Mysteries
Wren, Celia
Celia Wren PASSION PLAYS Brian Kulick's 'The Mysteries' anuary brings the doldrums to the New York theater world. The glitzy Broadway openings of the autumn are over; the spring's...
...Pointing to the uproar over Mel Gibson's movie about Christ's passion [see editorial page 5, and John A. Coleman, page 12], Kulick hypothesizes that people nowadays are "very freaked out about religion and representations of religion...
...The show's first half, relating Old Testament stories like Noah and the flood and Cain and Abel, drew from the York and Wakefield mystery cycles—biblical plays staged by medieval English craft guilds...
...And he suggests that, in general, "we're in a spiritually impoverished place as a culture"—a condition that, paradoxically, makes us want to run still further from spirituality—"put it in a box, leave it alone, as opposed to really being in dialogue with it...
...Directed by CSC's new artistic di-rector Brian Kulick—who staged Twelfth Night in Central Park with Julia Stiles and Jimmy Smits in 2002—The Mysteries fused medieval mystery play with contemporary revisionist retellings of the Christ story...
...On the one hand, the medieval plays affirm, and celebrate, traditional Christian teachings, where-as the Bulgakov, Pekic, and Fo selections opt for a more skeptical view: Bulgakov's Jesus complains that Matthew's Gospel is full of lies...
...With its evocation of an artisan's work-shop, the basic set—wooden tables arranged on a sawdust-strewn floor—seemed to defuse any simplistic interpretation of the Bulgakov-Fo-Pekic excerpts...
...It's that under-standing of drawing the audience in, having them for a moment root for the bad guys, ostensibly, that's the genius of these plays...
...Pekic imagines a repeatedly resurrected Lazarus trying to es-cape from both Jesus and the Sadducees...
...the spring's pre-Tony-deadline frenzy has not yet begun...
...Far from being blasphemous, these revisionist gospels felt like meditations aimed at facilitating an encounter—and a struggle—with the concept of the divine...
...I started trying to read every thing I could get my hands on," the di-rector recalls...
...With Cain and Able, you get a sense there's almost a political statement with Cain: he's almost like a proto-Lenny Bruce...
...A traditionalist might easily jump to the (unwarranted) conclusion that the show's second half is irreligious...
...they were stages in the work-in-progress that is belief...
...But just rereading the pieces wouldn't do it for PHOTO CREDIT: DIXIE SHERIDAN J Commonweal 19 February 27, 2004 him, he realized—he'd have to stage them...
...he's saying the things that shouldn't be said but we all think...
...Critics have summed up the previous year in top-ten lists, which have been yawned at and recycled...
...Excited by this idea, Kulick chose three twentieth-century writers who had worked in theater (both Bulgakov and Pekic wrote plays as well as novels), and he welded together a script whose components, in his view, share a "secret DNA"—namely, "a conversation between one who believes and one who doesn't, one who's open to the miraculousness of being and one who's closed...
...Tourists go home...
...In an interview half-way through the New York run, Kulick explained that the catalyst had been the birth four years ago of his son...
...So if these religious playlets are essentially such crowd pleasers, why aren't they staged more often...
...He cites the confrontation between Abel and Cain, who skimps on his sacrifice and insults God, to boot ("Who is that hob-over-the-wall...
...Why have critics raised their eyebrows at CSC's The Mysteries...
...At this point in his life, the medieval scripts dazzled him with their emotional dynamism...
...Given the frosty attitude toward Christianity in many theatrical circles, how could a risky proposition like The Mysteries come to be...
...In fact, The Mysteries turned out to be a spare, eloquent, and unusually moving production, inflected with comic moA work in progress ments and full of beautiful or unnerving images—a bushel of red apples tossed on the floor, in the Garden of Eden scene...
...At this point movie star Tim Robbins entered the picture...
...Cain jokes after the Divine Being makes a brief appearance in this excerpt from the Wakefield mystery cycle...
...But even more interestingly, it allows you to get excited by and titillated by Cain, so you become complicit with Cain up to the moment where he kills...
...a blithe Pontius Pilate donning a snazzy suit after Jesus has cured his headache...
...The artistic director of L.A.'s Actors' Gang, Robbins invited Kulick, an old friend, to stage something for the company...
...If it's tough to start that dialogue on an L.A...
...And four weeks later, in three dimensions, I can start to understand something...
...WESTON JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY DEGREE PROGRAMS IN THEOLOGY AND MINISTRY Weston Jesuit School of Theology can help you prepare for a call to ministry or further develop your present ministry...
...Sure enough, some New York reviewers proved ridiculously close-minded: "The only mystery is how it came to be staged in the first place," the New York Times reviewer sniffed, while the critic for the Web site Broadway.com carped that the production failed to show why the medieval texts "matter to today's audiences"—this for scenes, mind you, that deal with such matters as free will and the origins of evil...
...The second half of Kulick's production showcased part of the Pontius Pilate section from Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece The Master and Margarita, besides a dramatized scene from the novel Time of Miracles by Serbian dissident Borislav Pekic, and two scenes from the play Mistero Buffo by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo, whose works have scandalized the Vatican...
...Master of Arts in • Doctorate in Sacred Theology Spiritual Direction • Master of Theology • Master of Divinity • Sabbatical Program • Licentiate in Sacred Theology • Certificate of Theology • Master of Theological Studies • Advanced Certificate of Theology WESTON JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AN INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL CENTER For information please contact: Office of Admissions • Weston Jesuit School of Theology 3 Phillips Place . Cambridge, MA 02138-3495 USA . Telephone (617) 492.1960 Fax (617) 492-5833 Admissionslnfo@wjst.edu • www.wjst.edu F I N A N C I A L A I D is A V A I L A B L E Commonweal 2 0 February 27, 2004...
...He said, 'The religious ones...
...The best way I know for me to understand things is go into a room with a text with a group of actors," he ex-plains...
...Why are we here...
...Though he himself is "congenitally agnostic," he says, he realized that he and his wife—both raised Jewish—would eventually have to decide what to tell their child about God...
...locals stay indoors...
...Yeah, those!' Long pause...
...and producers attempt to bolster their box office with bargain-ticket deals...
...Kulick proposed the mystery plays...
...This January, though, Off-Broadway's sophisticated Classic Stage Company (CSC) braved the gloom—and the perennial bah-humbug climate of secular New York—to launch a remarkable production...
...Nevertheless, Robbins agreed—"more out of friendship than producerial acumen," Kulick thinks—but suggested that the show's second half sample modem texts...
...I'm a big believer in what the nineteenth-century Russians used to call the 'accursed questions,'" he says...
...They always find a way to hook you...
...Fo depicts the Lazarus miracle degenerating into an entertainment circus, complete with gawking spectators and concessionaires...
...or New York stage, Kulick feels, it's worth it...
...There was this long pause," the di-rector recalls...
...And none of it was making human sense"—and then he stumbled upon the mystery plays, which he'd once read cursorily as an undergraduate...
...On the other hand, America's theatrical establishment takes Christianity seriously about as often as Taiwan gets chummy with mainland China, so CSC and Los Angeles's Actors' Gang Theatre, the ultra-hip theater that premiered Kulick's script last fall, took substantial risks in staging the piece to begin with...
...The conversations work theatrically, he adds, because they lure the audience into empathy...
...They were able to make these dilemmas—these abstract notions—human, bring them out of the clouds and down to the earth," he says...
...The scene culminating in Abel's murder, Kulick says, "takes you microstep by microstep through the human minefield of emotion that lead to that tragic act...
...How should we live?' Art is about not answering them but spending a period of time with them, in the hope that we'll walk out reoriented...
...This pairing of old and new was doubly provocative...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 4
