Goodman Theatre Presents ‘Passion Play’

Passion Play runs September 15 - October 21, 2007; a detailed schedule of performance dates, times and prices appears at the end of this release. The Boeing Company is the Exclusive Corporate Sponsor.

"With Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play, we proudly begin our season with an eloquent, entertaining and very affecting piece of work from an important new voice in American theater," said Artistic Director Robert Falls. "Director Mark Wing-Davey, who shares a long relationship with Sarah and this project, brings an expansive vision to this stunning, imaginative play, full of big ideas and questions pertinent to our time."

Playwright Sarah Ruhl began what would become a three-act play after re-reading a childhood book accounting the Oberammergau Passion play (Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace), and the blurring of the line between performance and reality that actors experienced when portraying Jesus or Mary. Using the medieval tradition of the Passion play as a framing device, a cast of 12 characters explore very personal and contemporary questions (sexuality, identity, responsibility and faith) and larger community issues (power, citizenship and war) during three times of war in history.

Part One takes place in England, 1575; a small town is staging the Passion play just as the Protestant Queen Elizabeth is banishing Catholic rites and rituals, forcing the play to cease production. In Part Two, the play travels to Germany in 1934, where the man playing Christ in the famous Oberammergau Passion play is slowly drawn to the Nazi party. Hitler, who has endorsed the dramatization of the death of Christ as a way to promote his anti-Semitic agenda, attends the play. Part Three moves forward in time to Spearfish, South Dakota, the home of the Black Hills Passion play. The man playing Pontius Pilate has returned from the Vietnam War and discovers his part in the play has been given to a professional actor. Ronald Reagan visits the town while campaigning for the 1984 election.

"I'm thrilled that Passion Play will be produced by the Goodman. I'm from Chicago, and grew up going to theater at the Goodman, so working here feels like coming home to me," said Sarah Ruhl. "It's rare to find a theater that is unafraid of scale and epic-and that also embraces second productions, which is often where the playwright manages to do another crucial push in the writing process. I'm so happy that Mark Wing-Davey is returning to Passion Play-he did an incredible workshop production of the play in London, and he deeply understands what the play is trying to do."

Wing-Davey was an early, avid supporter of Passion Play, having first encountered Ruhl and the project in a reading at Sundance in 2000. Two years later, Wing-Davey directed a small-scale workshop/production of Parts One and Two at the Actors Centre in London. The Goodman production reconnects the playwright with a director known for shaping major works by some of today's leading writers: Caryl Churchill, Anna Deavere Smith, Craig Lucas, Naomi Iizuka, Tony Kushner and José Rivera.

"With Sarah's work, you think you know where she might be heading, but there are so many delightful twists and turns, you're constantly surprised. I am fascinated by her mix of sexuality combined with a sort of soft, whimsical imagination-all put in balance by a unique intellectual rigor that is fast becoming her signature." said Wing-Davey. "It's a joy to return to Passion Play, a 'theater's theater' type of play that peeks backstage and makes a much larger statement about human beings and our relationship to our own kind of performances."

A native of the Chicago area and recent winner of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, playwright Sarah Ruhl is "among the most acclaimed and accomplished young playwrights on the contemporary scene" (The New York Times). A 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Clean House (seen at the Goodman in the 2005/2006 season), which also won the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Ruhl's other plays include Eurydice, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Melancholy Play, Late: a cowboy song, Orlando, Demeter in the City (NAACP image award nomination). Her plays have been performed at Lincoln Center Theater, Second Stage, Yale Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth, Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Wilma, Cornerstone Theater, Madison Repertory Theater, Clubbed Thumb, and the Piven Theatre Workshop, among other theaters across the country. Her plays have been produced internationally in London, Canada, Germany, Latvia and Poland. She is the recipient of the Helen Merrill Award, the Whiting Writers' Award and is a proud member of New Dramatists and 13P.

Mark Wing-Davey first came to prominence in the United States with his Obie Award-winning production of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest at New York Theatre Workshop in 1992, which transferred to Manhattan Theatre Club where it enjoyed an extended run. In 1996, Wing-Davey directed the U.S. premiere of Churchill's The Skriker at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater, which was nominated for six 1997 Drama Desk Awards including Best Director. Other U.S. and U.K. credits include Owners by Churchill (New York Theatre Workshop); The Lights by Howard Korder (Lincoln Center Theatre) which received seven Drama Desk nominations including Best Director; Angels In America by Tony Kushner (American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco), winner of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award as Best Director; Oleanna by David Mamet (Seattle Repertory Theatre); King Lear (NYU); The Castle by Howard Barker (NYU); The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt (Milwaukee Repertory Theatre); Mongrel's Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov (Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh); Star-Gazey Pie and Sauerkraut by James Stock (Royal Court Theatre, London); Silence, Cunning, Exile by Stuart Greenman (New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater); The Beaux' Stratagem by George Farquhar (Berkeley Repertory Theatre) for which he received a Bay Area Critics Circle nomination for Best Director; Troilus & Cressida (New York Shakespeare Festival, Delacorte Theatre in Central Park); the world premiere of Greensboro by Emily Mann (McCarter Theatre Company) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Nottingham Playhouse. -- www.goodmantheatre.org