Word: scripts
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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During a recent visit to Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, the Open Theater demonstrated its traditional expertise at oldfangled script-drama with a superbly subtle production of Endgame. Chaikin himself counterpointed Beckett's black doomsplay with a singsong, smiling-Buddha portrayal of blind, crippled Hamm. Beckett's line, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," might have served as production motto...
...only a folk festival. The actors beneath their specially grown beards and long hair, are simple Bavarian villagers. The script is amateurishly florid. Yet the once-a-decade production of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, Germany, has long been a byword for Roman Catholic piety−and a major international tourist attraction. Ticket demands for this season's 98 performances exceed the supply by about 1,000,000. The 500,-000 or so visitors who will throng the area are expected to spend more than $10 million−enough to keep Oberammergau going through the next nine lean years...
...defames the role and character of Jews. This spring the American Jewish Committee termed the play "fundamentally hostile to Jews and Judaism" and released a 24-page critique to support the charge. In a separate statement, seven U.S. Christian scholars−including Catholic Raymond Brown−agreed that the script "reveals the sin of anti-Semitism." Jewish groups demanded that Munich's Julius Cardinal Dopfner boycott this year's opening. The cardinal attended anyway, but at a Mass for the actors he said: "We are all agreed that the text today needs a new version...
Actually, this year's script was itself intended to be a new version. After the 1960 performance, which used a century-old text, the Oberammergauers decided to modernize and recast the whole conflict between Christians and Jews in the play. Stephan Schaller, a Benedictine headmaster in the neighboring village of Ettal, was commissioned to do a rewrite. Consulting with Jewish groups, he labored to bring the play into line with Catholic teaching since the Second Vatican Council, which decreed that the guilt of some Jews in Christ's crucifixion cannot be applied to all Jews, then...
Cackling Caiaphas. When Schaller submitted his script to Oberammergau's 26-man Passion Play committee, it was rejected as too bland and muted. By then there was no time for another revision, so the committee merely used bits of Schaller's version for a cosmetic touch-up on their old one. The result last week was an uneasy jumble. Some of the sweeping references to the guilt of all Jews were deleted. Others were toned down, but almost imperceptibly: the crucifixion is demanded by "the whole of Jerusalem" instead of "the whole nation." God condemns "these sinners" rather...