Der Weg der Verheissung (The Eternal Road), and: York Millennium Mystery Plays (review)

Der Weg Der Verheissung (The Eternal Road). By Franz Werfel and Kurt Weill. Adapted by Gerhard Müller. Co-Production of Chemnitz Oper, New Israeli Opera, Opera Kraków, BAM. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York. 4 March 2000.

York Millennium Mystery Plays. Adapted by Michael Poulton. York Minster, York, England. 24 June 2000.

While fin-de-millénium anxiety led to concern about the impending end of the world, theatrical productions exploring the history and mythology of Judeo-Christian religion abounded. From the fully revamped decennial production of the Oberammergau Passion Play to a plethora of local adaptations of medieval cycle plays, many directors chose Western mythologies as source material to explore the role of religion in contemporary society. Although the medieval York cycle has been produced periodically since its twentieth-century debut at the 1951 Festival of Britain, for the first time ever an adaptation was produced in York Minster. New York, meanwhile, witnessed the return of Kurt Weill's massive 1937 biblical opera, Der Weg der Verheissung (The Eternal Road), produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a coproduction between the Chemnitz Oper and the New Israeli Opera. Both of these plays were produced with a conscious regard for historical traditions of iconographic representation; the York adaptation was clearly driven largely by Christian imagery and the Judaic production sought an iconography different from that accreted through two millennia of Christianity.

The world premiere of The Eternal Road is remembered primarily as the production that financially ruined Max Reinhardt. Since that 1937 run, the opera has never been fully staged. Treating the Old Testament historically as the paradigmatic example of Judaic suffering, Weill and Franz Werfel wrote an extremely prescient play for Germany in the mid-1930s. Gerhard Müller translated and slightly adapted the material, setting it in a German town with a small Jewish population who seek sanctuary within their synagogue on what passes for Kristallnacht. Since the community seeks solace, the rabbi begins to re-tell the story of the scriptures. Staged at first ekkyklematically, the biblical characters gradually begin to overtake the space of the synagogue, lending the stories an intense sense of present-day parallelism as temporally separated characters begin to interact.

From within the world of the contemporary synagogue, characters out of Judaic tradition emerge: the true believer, the man who has rejected his faith, the wealthy man who returns to his faith out of fear for his five houses, the questioner, and the new man--a boy who has just turned thirteen and discovers the faith of his ancestors. These characters emerge from biblical narratives and are primarily one dimensional, bringing to mind the four children (wise, wicked, simple, and ignorant) whose story is recounted annually in the Passover seder.

The Biblical stories Weill used are some of the best known Old Testament tales--Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Rachel, Moses' reception of the ten commandments and forty years in the wilderness, Saul, David (and Goliath), culminating in the destruction of Solomon's Temple. The western visual tradition has treated these stories so frequently as episodes in Christian history that most members of a contemporary audience have them stored in visual memory in forms conveyed largely by church carvings and medieval and Renaissance paintings. Within this production, director Michael Heinicke and designer David Sharir made a clear attempt to avoid this Christian iconography; only the biblical patriarchs retained their similarity to historically mediated images. Angels became space-age figures, their reflective silver gowns adding a new spin to the predictable tight-fitting skullcaps, but replacing the expected wings. Isaac was not bound in the moment preceding Abraham's attempted sacrifice; the false prophet Chananjah and the idolators of Canaan became ahistorical hedonists clad in brightly colored outfits. Sharir's sets and costumes for the biblical figures were playful story-book images, appropriate for what unfolded before the eyes of the thirteen-year old...