THE BODY OF POWER AND THE POWER OF BODY IN SARAH RUHL’S PASSION PLAY

Abstract

The paper addresses the discourse of the body in the dramatic trilogy Passion Play (2010) by the renowned American playwright Sarah Ruhl. Each part of the cycle presents an instance of staging the Easter mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection in a specific temporal and spatial site (Renaissance England, Hitler’s Germany, Reagan’s USA). It is argued that, once she has chosen typical American nexus of politics, religion and theater as the ideational core of her plays, Ruhl to a large extent relies upon the body code in accomplishing her artistic goal. The analysis has revealed that the cycle blurs the boundaries between sacred and profane bodies, on the one hand, complying with postmodernist aesthetic prescriptions, and on the other hand, developing the age-old European cultural tradition of degrading and ludic treatment of sacred subjects. Ruhl also makes grotesque use of long-existing metaphorical topoi of the king’s/queen’s two bodies and of equalizing the ruler’s body with the state to portray the hostility of power represented by its recognizable icons (Elizabeth І, Аdolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan) to physical and spiritual human being in the world. The play-within-a-play technique enhanced by specifically theatrical presence of actors’ bodies on the stage provides for multidimensional somatic code operating in the trilogy.