A rare find -- a theatrical production that moves me gut-deep.  But I have found one in The Mysteries, produced by the Classic Stage Company here in New York, and conceived and directed by Brian Kulick, CSC's new artistic director.  Kulick has taken plays from the York and Wakefield Cycles of medieval mystery plays (adapted by Tony Harrison) and tossed in some texts from Dario Fo, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Borislav Pekic.

I've seen the production twice, and each time I, the defiant atheist and the (apparently) thorough  (post)modern man, have finished the evening in tears -- not tears from being emptied out by tragedy but from something closer to a longing bordering (but never quite crossing over into) bliss.  Bliss -- what an odd, almost foolish feeling to have in 21st-century New York/America. I've thought hard and long about why this feeling, why now -- and doing so has brought me back to the heart of theatre.

We may pay lip service to the religious origins of our craft but, in reality, we trace our theatrical roots back to the realists, naturalists, symbolists, and romantics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  That is, the sources and impulses for theatre-making are grounded in a search for "reality," and that reality, no matter which shape it takes in whatever decade or even hour, is thoroughly materialist.  This is not to say that people don't speak about things like "spirit" or "soul," but that language usually refers to the ineffable whimsies and darknesses that can't yet be nailed by the reigning vocabularies of science or economics or psychology.  In the end, we believe, there is nothing but us, nothing outside of us, and our arts and crafts dedicate themselves to a constant explaining of ourselves to ourselves.

I can't dispute the liberation that such a materialist approach to the world offers -- but, as with everything in life, that liberation comes with a price: we have no way to explain, and thus blunt, both suffering and the fact of our coming deaths.  And this leaves us moderns hungry for anything that can do what faith used to do for the creators and performers of the Cycle Plays: give reason, give comfort, give hope, give light.  

The Cycle Plays chronicle, in part, this human hunger to find a home where suffering ends and peace begins.  We start with Creation, our childhood, where we have all that we would ever need for happiness yet lack the self-awareness to know what we know and thus "sin" our way into freedom and its attendant suffering. Equipped with both our loss and liberation, we blunder our way toward Christ, who offers a second Paradise, not through the passive gift of a garden to hapless children but through the active loving of self and others.  Or, more accurately, I think (and as Camus said), an ethic of loving bred from our common suffering creates fellowship, and fellowship may the only bulwark we will allow ourselves as moderns against the deluge of the world and the inevitability of our deaths.  (Though our veneration for individualism and its isolating freedom gives fellowship a hard run for its money.)

Kulick's production ends by moving out of Dario Fo's piece about the fool at the foot of the cross into the Cycle Play dealing with Christ's harrowing of hell, where he goes, in short, to gather back to him his fellow sufferers and bring them upward into the fragile warm light of peace.  Whatever this particular Cycle Play meant to its medieval viewers about renewing faith or affirming the nature of the divine, it meant something quite different to me.  Stepping into the light, chronicling our hungers, seeking what solace we can in fellowship (actor to actor, audience to actor, technicians to audience), and then stepping out into the unavoidable night -- this is theatre doing its very best to help us harrow our own personal and collective hells in order to bring to light the better selves lurking among our discards and disappointments and murderous designs.  I didn't leave the theatre changed or transmuted or "re-faithed" -- much better, I left it reminded.  I left it remembering what I didn't even know I'd forgotten about the possibilities open to this flawed and fluid creature called "human," which means I left it equipped with all that any art in these dry secular times can hope to pass on.

Or, to say it another way: I left the theatre humanized.  And how rare and delightful a thing that gift is.  And how important it is to me, as a playwright, that I always aim for an art that will do the same for the audiences seeking some moments away in light and camaraderie.

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