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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."
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