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    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play"
    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play"
    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play"
    Ebook52 pages40 minutes

    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393890
    A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play"

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      A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play" - Gale

      14

      Passion Play

      Sarah Ruhl

      2010

      Introduction

      A passion play is a story of the death and resurrection of Christ, originally a part of medieval Catholic liturgy. Sarah Ruhl wrote Part One of her Passion Play as an undergraduate thesis at Brown University, telling the story of people who put on this play and its effect on them. She was inspired by a childhood book that told about the famous passion play at Oberammergau in Bavaria. The whole town participates, and parts are traditionally passed down in families for generations. She wondered what it would be like to play the character of Pontius Pilate, for example, year after year. Ruhl's Passion Play follows reincarnations of the same players in three different locations and eras—England during the Elizabethan era, Oberammergau in Hitler's Germany, and the Black Hills in the twentieth-century United States. Ruhl's play focuses on the actors playing the main characters, especially the one who plays Pontius Pilate and his obsession with the figure of Christ.

      Part One of Passion Play was Ruhl's first staged play at Trinity Repertory in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1997. The first two parts of Passion Play were put together in London in 2002. The third part was commissioned for a production of the entire cycle at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, in 2005. It was revised in 2007 and published in 2010.

      Ruhl has become well known as a feminist playwright on the American stage in the twentyfirst century, having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice and the recipient of many awards. Ruhl likes to return to the roots of theater in ancient storytelling, using myth, fantasy, and Eastern theater techniques to produce a drama, as she points out, not of human psychology, but of the inner life of the soul.

      Author Biography

      Ruhl was born to Kathy Kehoe Ruhl and Patrick Ruhl in Wilmette, Illinois, on January 24, 1974. Her mother directed highschool plays and earned a PhD in language, literacy, and rhetoric. Ruhl's father marketed toys before his death. He loved puns and language and history. Her older sister is a psychiatrist. Ruhl was raised as a Catholic but left the church as a teenager because of what she felt was its bias against women.

      Ruhl was telling fantasy stories before she could write, dictating them to her mother. She spent time in the theater from childhood when her mother was directing school plays. She began taking classes at the well-known Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois, in fourth grade. This workshop has turned out many famous actors, including John Cusack and Aidan Quinn. It specializes in the improvisa-tional work of Viola Spolin, using stories, myths, fairy tales, folktales, and such authors as Anton Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor, with an emphasis on language and transformation.

      Ruhl's father died of cancer when she was twenty, affecting her profoundly. The play Eury-dice is an expression of her grief. She graduated from Brown University in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in English; she had also spent an undergraduate year at Pembroke College of Oxford University. After teaching in public schools for two years, she returned to Brown for a master of fine arts degree in play writing in 2001 under her mentor, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel. Ruhl married Anthony Charuvastra,

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