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At our parish Lenten retreat this year, there were several impassioned skits representing Christ’s healing miracles and the miraculous catch of fish—you know the one, where Jesus godsplains fishing to lifelong fishermen: We’ve been fishing all night long. Okay, but really, trust me, the carpenter from landlocked Nazareth—just try the other side.
This small exercise in biblical imagination was performed in our humble parish soup kitchen. Our parish, St. Francis of Assisi, is a small church of just shy of 1,000 families built in 1905 in the Allison Hill neighborhood of Harrisburg, Pa. Despite the basement venue, the theatrical details were as enchanting as those of a Broadway production. The paper fish sparkled with their glitter-glue scales, a blue roll of plastic tablecloth represented the Sea of Galilee and a black square of plastic atop it demarcated the fishing boat. My imagination lingered on those simple representations. The blue plastic and the glitter fish attached themselves to a familiar tale whose grip had perhaps grown fuzzy with repeated tellings. Those simply crafted props made the story as sticky as it was for the disciples.
Representing a story on any stage—school gym or Broadway—begins by seeing more in the words of the story than just the marks they make on a page. Bringing each element of a narrative to life—the water, the storm, the boat, the net—through strange new elements (cardboard, plastic or glitter) demands you imagine them in a new way, more concretely. This imagination finds new dimensions in the images the words represent. These images thicken into a deeper reality: They become incarnate.
Drama can breathe a new spirit into a familiar story by giving it a new shape. And this belief—that there is a spiritual treasure to be mined by telling stories through theater—was, in brief, the underlying philosophy for a Zoom theater retreat I organized last year for Jesuit Media Lab, a new ministry of the Society of Jesus whose mission is to “gather, form, and unleash” Ignatian creatives.
Stanislavski as sacramental
Theater, I have always believed, has a unique formative power for the human person. Drama can teach us active listening and public speaking, yes; but on a deeper level, it can shape our spiritual disposition. Theater can help our hearts imagine or embrace uncertainty. Two actors in a scene strengthen their capacity for vulnerability and risk-taking.
On a deeper level, the actor, like a saint, forms what the theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar calls “disponibility”—a disposition of availability—toward the spirit of inspiration.
Balthasar was inspired by the method of acting developed by Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre at the turn of the 20th century. The aim of the Russian master was to train actors to fully embody a part—to inhabit a character and dwell in their reality.
Stanislavski’s method of character-building was organized around the character’s motive—what did they want and how did they try to achieve it? In Balthasar’s theological interpretation, he saw the Christian disciple’s role in the “theo-drama” as a total availability to their mission or vocation.
“The actor puts himself and all the powers of his soul, including his emotions [...] at the service of the part he is to play,” Balthasar writes in volume one of his Theo-Drama. “There is something sacramental about Stanislavsky’s method.”
In 2018, after studying Von Balthasar during my graduate studies in theology, I wanted to put his ideas about the spiritual formation of drama to a practical test. That summer, I read an article by the Rev. Thomas Berg—who was then the vice rector of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, N.Y.—about seminary formation and recognized a kindred thinker, equally concerned with human and spiritual formation. I met with Father Berg and received his permission to run a theater workshop at the seminary. One of my former college classmates was in his deacon year at the seminary, so I had a “man on the inside,” encouraging other seminarians to attend. (And perhaps giving me a little more credence with skeptical seminarians.)
Theater for seminarians
Our workshop met each week during the school year. We turned a small seminar room— an archetypal 1960s college classroom—on the first floor into a conservatory studio. Pushing the chairs and tables to one end of the room, we practiced the Stanislavski method exercises that inspired Von Balthasar’s ideas: breathwork, attentiveness, emotion memory. If you’ve ever been in a theater conservatory, you’ll know you spend a lot of time lying down, listening to your own breathing. And we did the same, just on industrial carpeted floors.
Breath is the foundation of the actor’s art; to breathe, to be connected with the interior ruah—the Hebrew word for breath. Ruah is the word frequently used for the Spirit of God in Hebrew Scriptures. One seminarian in the workshop remarked on how breathing, practically, helped him in his role as a preacher: helping him enunciate and project more easily. But he also told me that focusing on the connection to his breath throughout the day reminded him to “continually recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit within me and reach out to him at times, when I often wouldn’t even think of him.”
I dug out my copy of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” to provide us with some monologues and scenes to work with in our ersatz conservatory. The play imagines a young lawyer in purgatory appealing Judas’s sentence to eternity in hell. It is a passion play imagined as a courtroom drama—or dark comedy, depending on who you ask. Despite the expletive-laden dialogue of Guirgis’s re-imagined biblical urban underworld, the New York seminarians embraced the play’s exploration of humanity and grace with gusto.
In a white paper that Father Berg co-authored in 2023 during his tenure as a research fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, he and his co-authors noted the need for seminarian formation to train men in “trauma-informed pastoral care.” They noted the need for seminarians to accompany victim-survivors and become “agents of healing.” Several of the competencies they recommended were comfort with their own vulnerability, ability to encounter emotional discomfort in themselves and others, and an ability to be present for uncomfortable or difficult encounters.
When we ended the workshop, I asked the seminarians for their feedback on some of the spiritual or interpersonal insights they had gathered from our weekly sessions. One man said he appreciated performing scenes with classmates and learning how “to communicate in ways that I am not used to or comfortable with.”
Guirgis’s play is straightforwardly theological-–grace, mercy, redemption, forgiveness. It is a winning candidate for exploring spirituality through theater. And it is wickedly funny. Saints are rendered into ordinary form, as someone you might sit next to on the subway.
Encountering Judas
Naturally, when attempting a Zoom theater retreat—reading through a play in three nights over Zoom as I did with Jesuit Media Lab last year—I selected Guirgis’s play as my helpmate once again.
In March 2024, Monday of Holy Week, 15 men and women logged into a Zoom meeting. The retreat started off like many in-person and virtual retreats,with introductions and prayer; and then I invited retreatants to warm up their bodies by swinging their arms like windmills and to warm up their voices by sighing up and down the octave like a whale. Believe it or not, everyone came along for the ride.
Then we assigned roles and began reading the first scene. St. Monica—yes, the mother of St. Augustine—began an R-rated monologue about the power of prayer, sprinkled with a few dozen f-bombs and a racial slur.
One of the retreat participants, Noella Poinsette, a Sister of St. Francis, Oldenburg, in Oldenburg Ind., enjoyed every second. Sister Poinsette (she gave her age as “over 70”) has been a member of the Sisters of St. Francis for nearly six decades, and for the past six years, she has served as the director for justice, peace and integrity of creation at the sister’s motherhouse in Oldenburg.
She has always expressed her relationship with God through art: through piano improvisation, poetry and—on special occasions—theater. She once directed a cast of her sister religious in performing “Twelve Angry Women.” But, in general, she said, she hungers for artistic co-conspirators.
Sister Poinsette had never encountered Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play before the retreat, but it resonated with her.
“I just connected with Judas the most,” she said. She has always had a passion for the underdog, the immigrant, those suffering from racism, she said. “I’ve always thought that Judas gets a bad rap,” Sister Poinsette added. “He’s made out to be the bad guy.” But, she said, Judas just wanted justice.
After the three days of retreat ended, Sister Poinsette wrote a final monologue for Judas and shared it with the group by email.
“Why was [Jesus] taking so long to turn things upside down?” her Judas said. Jesus’ stories, she wrote, promised a reversal of mourning to gladness, hunger to feasting, justice blossoming forth—
“So, when?” Judas asked.
Taking the unconventional view
Another of the attendees, Brett Alan Dewing from Warren Center, Pa., said that a friend sent him the announcement for the retreat because, he said, Dewing’s “passions were written all over it.” Dewing, 44, said he saw a chance to have “intelligent discourse on theater” and connect with other Christians interested in the arts.
“Mainly, I was/am starving for theater out here in the middle of farmland,” Dewing said, writing from his home in the small township in northern Pennsylvania. Dewing is Christian, but not Catholic, and he said many Christians in his orbit are suspicious of artists. Artists can be disconcerting prophets, he said. But to Dewing, the wildness of artists is a small whisper of the wildness of God. “There is no predicting what God is going to do or say,” he said.
Robert Petrus, 85, a writer and retired schoolteacher, also appreciated the “truth told slant,” as Emily Dickinson might put it, in Guirgis’s play.
Petrus joined the retreat for “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” in part because he thinks the first three days of Holy Week get short shrift. He was delighted to spend the “triduum” before the Triduum reading a play.
He had never read Guirgis’s spicy take on a passion play (“More obscenities than even I was used to in some of the summer jobs that I had,” he said), but his brief stint as a novice in the Society of Jesus in the 1970’s had taught him to expect the unexpected from Jesuits. “It did what Jesuits teach us to do, to look at things unconventionally, look at them uniquely, like you’ve never looked at them before,” Petrus said.
He loved talking through the play—through the mystery of Judas and his betrayal, and some of the playwright’s raunchy renditions of grace and mercy—with fellow artists from Vancouver to North Carolina. “That’s why I came back,” he said.
Petrus was one of the few repeat attendees for the Lent and Advent Zoom retreats. He participated in the Advent retreat, which used “The Humans,” by Stephan Karam, a dark comedy about a family Thanksgiving dinner in New York City.
Petrus said the play challenged him because he did not like any of the characters. Unlike Judas, whom he empathized with, the characters in “The Humans” did not earn his sympathy.
“I realized that my failure to empathize with them was a failure more on my part than their part,” Petrus said. “Because they are human beings.”
Inviting empathy
He felt this was an appropriate meditation for Christmas. The Christmas message, Petrus said, is to empathize with other humans: to see the sacredness of human history, of which they, too, are a part. The Incarnation—God’s explosion into human history—invites us to ponder the sacredness not just of the God-in-the-manger, but stinky shepherds and broken people.
During Holy Week this year, I led another Zoom theater retreat for Jesuit Media Lab, reading Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Wilder’s classic play is often associated with apple-pie Americana but the play veers into the uncanny, perhaps more so than most high school stagings of “Our Town” let on. Like Petrus said, it makes the rituals of small town life strange again, reading our everyday life through a prophetic gloss.
Bringing something to life, incarnating it on a new stage makes it strange, makes it foreign, like you are hearing it for the first time. I see the glitter-glue fish stuck to the net in the blue-plastic sea in the church basement soup kitchen. Suddenly, something we have all seen before—a Bible story, a small town tableau, a familiar face—becomes extraordinary. Practicing this re-incarnation teaches our hearts an openness both to the surprising, uncomfortable or even dangerous dimensions of our own experiences—and others’ as well. As we enter into someone else’s story, whether in Scripture or theater, we make ourselves vulnerable to the mystery breathing through each moment.
