Theater on the Cross

TRILOGIES ARE ALMOST impossible to pull off. Most playwrights simply give up after two (Tony Kushner, Lillian Hellman), but even when all three are done, the results are rarely consistent: The Godfather films, anyone? Playwright Sarah Ruhl deserves credit for actually writing the final third of her Passion Play, but the outcome is so comparatively poor to what came before, that having a full trilogy seems negligible. Far better to have stopped at two; the lack of a finale hasn’t hurt Angels in America, after all.

Still, for more than half of the nearly four-hour running time of Passion Play, Ruhl and director Mark Wing-Davey are marvelously inventive. Taking three vastly different communities, all of which have a long history of producing a yearly Passion play (the productions that have portrayed the life and death of Jesus Christ since the year 925), Ruhl turns her usual meta-theatrical gaze onto the power—and danger—of theater.

The first act is set in Elizabethean England, as a village defies Queen Elizabeth’s ban on Passion plays and commences with its rehearsals, even as the actors begin to fall apart under the strain. The second is set in 1934 in the Bavaraian town Oberammergau, whose Passion play was so renowned that Adolf Hitler himself attended. The fi nal act is set in South Dakota over the course of several decades, a device that robs the act of the power of the previous two.

Until that third act, however, Ruhl’s play is as smart, playful and serious about the idea of theater as we’ve come to expect from her. Juggling the concept of how communities and governments use religion as a ways to further their own means, Passion Play is both an endearing comedy about the power of community theater and a deadly serious look at the dangers of ardent religious belief. The actress playing Mary in 1575 (Kate Turnbull in one of her three juicy roles) commits suicide when she finds herself unwed and pregnant; there’s an unleashed fury when the village idiot (Polly Noonan, who gives the kind of stunning performance throughout that billboards were made to advertise) tricks the befuddled actor playing Jesus into repeating after her that Jesus was a Jew in 1934 Germany.

Still, there is that pesky third act, leaving audiences with a sour taste in their mouths. Trying to pick up the threads of her two previous acts a decade after writing them (the final third was commissioned by D.C.’s Arena Stage, which may be partly to blame), Ruhl goes overboard, crafting a windy story about a Vietnam vet returning to Spearfish, S.D., where his family is embroiled in a Lifetime TV movie and he begins to lose his mind as he takes up his old role of Pontius Pilate. As in the previous two acts, a world leader arrives on the scene, but T. Ryder Smith, so exquisite as Queen Elizabeth and Hitler, seems at a loss as Ronald Reagan. Partly it’s because Ruhl is clearly having too much fun at Reagan’s expense, peppering his dialogue with plenty of “Wow, can you believe people bought into that?” quotations; partly it’s because Reagan just pales in comparison to Elizabeth and Hitler.

But the third act also simply loses the momentum of the previous two. Coming on the heels of a memorably chilling second-act curtain, there’s no way the denizens of Spearfish can compete for our attention the way proto-Nazis did. And Ruhl shoehorns in too many references to the previous plays, hitting us over the head with them when they should be subtler. In no way are the performers to blame, all of whom prove themselves adaptable, imaginative and idiosyncratic—and all of whom are clearly having a ball. Ruhl herself has ended her play with a whimper, proving yet again that she’s a strong starter, but weak at the finish.

>>PASSION PLAY Through June 5, Irondale Center, 85 S. Oxford St. (betw. Lafayette & Greene Aves.), Brooklyn, 212-352-3101; $42.50-$62.50.