Passion Play

Local communities and amateur actors have come together for centuries to perform Passion plays, theatrical celebrations of the life and death of Christ. Inspired by this tradition, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play transports audiences first to 16th-century England, where the Protestant Queen Elizabeth threatens to shut down a small town’s production, then to 20th-century Germany, where Adolf Hitler seizes an opportunity to use the famous Oberammergau Passion Play to promote the Nazi agenda, and finally to Spearfish, South Dakota in 1984, as a local production becomes a campaign stop for a famous actor-turned-President running for re-election.