Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

The first play I can ever remember seeing was A Christmas Carol. I imagine many of you can say the same thing. In my case, I went with my second grade class; my classmate Travis Neal was playing one of the Crachit boys and accordingly became a minor celebrity for the season. I remember three things about the show: 1) mild asphyxiation from the suffocating waves of stage fog rolling off the stage (I recognize this in retrospect as the exuberant excesses of a neophyte stagehand) 2) the terrifying Ghost of Christmas Future (I think he was about 13 feet tall and maybe an actual demon) and 3) crying just a little at Scrooge and the company’s joyously musical celebration at the end.

Since I know a lot of theatre people, I generally have to see at least one holiday play every year. By all rights, I should be jaded by now, rifling through my playbill with a bored knowing sigh and bolting from my seat the second the lights come up. But, honestly, I love the ritual of it all. There’s even something just a little bit spiritual about the experience. I think the holiday show is the purest modern incarnation of the medieval mystery play. (If you’re familiar with medieval theatre, please forgive me as I get a little Professor Theatre for a second here.) Mystery plays are a form of theatre that emerged from Catholic liturgy in the middle ages. These plays employed spectacle in the dramatization of biblical stories. While individual plays were diverse in subject and style, they were connected as a cycle by the Christian story of salvation: man’s sin puts him at risk of damnation, but through the twin miracles of compassion and repentance, he is offered the chance of redemption. Sound familiar?

You may wonder why I’m writing about this on the Steppenwolf blog. It’s true that neither of our current offerings—Dublin Carol and The Seafarer—fits the model of a typical holiday play. They don’t rely on pyrotechnics or sudden appearances, their stages are completely devoid of atmospheric fog, and if you go in hopes of hearing joyous holiday carols, you’re gonna be disappointed. And yet, both stories fit seamlessly into this tradition. Conor McPherson grounds Dublin Carol and The Seafarer in real, lived experience, but they’re set against the shadow of the eternal. Both plays tell the story of men whose many failings have poised them at the precipice of eternal loss. But while they fall within the holiday play archetype, neither man will be able to find redemption with the ease of storytelling. The spirits haunting them are less concrete—past regrets rather instead of a ghoul lurking under a gloomy cloak—and are therefore all the more difficult to exorcize. In order to earn the chance of redemption, these men must travel deep inside the hell mouth and face the demons inside, but the strength of the forces arrayed against them renders the outcome questionable. And so, Dublin Carol and The Seafarer are perhaps less soothing than traditional holiday fare. They’re not great plays to share with the second grader in your life. But if you’re looking for the profound experience buried at the ancient heart of the holiday play, I doubt that you can find it in a richer form.

This entry was posted by Joy Meads on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 2:05 pm and is filed under The Seafarer, Dublin Carol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.