A Woman of Passion

In a few short years, Sarah Ruhl has become one America’s most produced playwrights, thanks to such works as The Clean House, Dead Man’s Cell Phone — which will begin on September 21 at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa — and Eurydice, which opens the season for the Victory Gardens Theater in her native Chicago on October 13. But her current focus is Passion Play, a three-plus-hour work which will be receiving its third full production (after initial runs at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage and Chicago’s Goodman Theater) at the Yale Repertory Theater starting on September 19, with a cast headed by Drama Desk winner Kathleen Chalfant (as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Ronald Reagan). Ruhl took time from her busy schedule — including being mother to two-year-old Anna — to discuss this provocative work.

THEATERMANIA What originally brought Passion Play about?
SARAH RUHL: At the beginning, it was a fairly straightforward idea about a guy who plays the role of Pontius Pilate in a passion play in England and wants to play the role of Christ which is being played by his cousin. In that sense, it started out really being about actors, identity, typecasting, how we’re perceived and role-playing. The more I learned about passion plays and their darker political history, the play began to be about how political icons used or misused theatricality to their own political ends.

TM: The first time we see the character of Queen Elizabeth she speaks about her makeup. How is makeup and theatricality significant to the political process?
SR: I’m always fascinated watching makeup in elections. This is a good year for makeup — watching Hillary Clinton’s makeup evolve, occasionally seeing Barack Obama wear too much makeup, and now watching Sarah Palin and the obsession with how she looks. I think politicians on some fundamental level are actors. They use acting coaches; they use rhetoric. Queen Elizabeth used costume and pageantry when she went on these massive tours because there was no television. I think now in the age of television the speech-making and pageantry is different. It was interesting to watch the furor over Barack Obama’s “Greek temple,” or whatever you want to call it during his acceptance speech. That was pageantry. Plus, Barack Obama has been attacked for essentially being a good speaker, when for years and years that was one of the tools of the trade. I chose to include Ronald Reagan because he was an actor and I think the way he was able to use theatricality set the stage for the political moment that we’re in today.

TM: One of the lines in the play is “Likability is tantamount to tyranny.” How have you seen that play out this year in this election?
SR: It’s interesting how the play continues to resonate politically for me. When I first wrote that line, it was more pointed toward George Bush, who seems like a really likable guy and probably someone you’d love to have a barbecue with, yet I felt that he was morally wrong. As Americans, we seem to have fallen into this weird slippage between likability and what someone’s actual moral positions are.

TM: Why was it important for you to have the character of a Vietnam veteran in your play?
SR: It was terribly important to me because at the time I was writing the third act there were so many veterans coming home from Iraq for the first time. I didn’t feel that I could write about Iraq in a direct way because I didn’t have enough distance from it. At the same time, Vietnam was coming up again and again in terms of whether we had learned the lessons from that war and whether or not veterans were going to get the resources they needed when they got home. My husband is a psychiatrist and he had been working at the VA in Los Angeles, so I had been talking to him a lot about veterans who were coming home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

TM: Did you find it daunting to attempt a play of this scope and magnitude considering the costs of producing?
SR: It is a huge undertaking and I was really grateful that Yale was willing to take it on. Not many theaters want to do big plays. Especially in New York, I think there is a huge trepidation about big plays. In fact, I think regional theaters are often better equipped to do bigger plays, perhaps because the financial risks are not quite so great.

TM: How would you say this play has evolved over its last two productions?
SR: I think it’s getting more and more streamlined. The third act was the most unwieldy because I wrote it in the least amount of time; it was actually commissioned by Arena Stage and the deadlines were pretty tight. I might have written it too quickly, but I think, in general, it takes me about three productions to finish a play. Also, I think I was really angry when I wrote Act Three originally. Virginia Woolf writes about Charlotte Bronte writing angrily and how it was bad for her writing. I don’t know if I agree with that for everyone. I think there have been some wonderful, important angry rants in the history of literature. But I do think it’s important for those rants to be specific, and we’ve done that for this production.