Drama linked to the sacred

Review of Theatre, Peace, Justice: Collected Essays Toward a Mennonite Dramaturgy, Lauren Friesen (Pandora Press, 2024)

It has been a great honor and privilege to read and review Lauren Friesen’s latest book. It is not my intention to provide a scintillating summary but to place Friesen’s work within a larger body of work by scholars such as Bertolt Brecht, Rene Girard, Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner.

Theatre, Peace, Justice is divided into three sections. The first two chapters provide the reader with an overall theoretical framework that explores the linkage between drama and a religious existentialist condition. Simply put, Friesen points out that theater is about two distinct realities merging into one but at the service of the reality of the empirical.

In the second section, chapters 3-5, Friesen examines the role drama has played within the context of the Mennonite community. In contradistinction to music, Mennonites, by and large, have devoted little time to the dramatic arts as a fitting artistic expression of their faith, which is not to say that Mennonites have not played an important role in the world of the theater.

Section three, chapters 6-8, is devoted to Friesen’s profound understanding of theater as an agent for justice. Here, Friesen explores justice as expressed artistically in the form of a sharp critical rebuke of power structures in the shape of a Brechtian satire.

There is a deep well from which to draw upon in Friesen’s work, but as with authors, reviewers are also restricted to length. With that in mind, I shall examine Theatre, Peace, Justice within the framework of three key areas: Theater as a transcendent mode; theater as a mediator of justice; and theater as a vehicle of the comedic.

It is important to note here that, as such, the comedic device is in keeping with the Brechtian satire which envelops a narrative voice speaking up for the cause of justice. I would argue that Friesen’s work reveals that all three subjects have a common theme, that is, theater is as Victor Turner notes in his seminal article, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” a social drama transformed into a stage drama that articulates the community’s shared values and strategies to maintain a just and civil society.

It is highly noteworthy that Friesen’s scholarship extends beyond a confined artistic Mennonite context, yet it exists within that context. Mennonites have long been recognized for superb renditions of the musical masterpieces of Bach, Handel, Brahms, and Mendelssohn. But as Friesen notes, “Ethnic theatre has flourished because it provides a community with internal cohesion and external identity. Inside this context, theatre … serves as a vehicle for memory and expression while enabling those beyond the ‘pale’ to gain knowledge of ethnic life and tradition.” Within the ethnic world of the Mennonites, theater has thrived in the shadow of their musical brilliance. Theater as a Mennonite artistic expression, Friesen contends, deserves recognition, front and center. There is, Friesen writes, the contemporary work of John Friesen, an actor and playwright from Winkler, Manitoba, who holds 60 acting credits; his play, Benched, a parallel to Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, is set to go before the camera in September 2024.

Apart from John Friesen, drama, Lauren Friesen notes, has been very much a part of the Anabaptist tradition. Mennonite dramatic writing flourished during the Dutch Golden Age (1600-1700). Mennonite playwright Joost van den Vondel was called “Holland’s Shakespeare” due to the elegant nature of his writing. Vondel’s work, as Friesen notes, had a profound influence on John Milton, who “borrowed heavily from this work for his epic poem, Paradise Lost.” Ben Jonson as well as Voltaire referenced Anabaptists in their work: Jonson, The Alchemist; Voltaire, Candide.

Aside from the writers just mentioned, Friesen points us to the importance of one Herman Suderman (1857-1928). The importance of his place in the world of theater cannot be overstated. Emma Goldman said of Suderman that he was “the first German dramatist to treat social topics and discuss the pressing questions of the day.” His play Heimat and others had long performances in Berlin, London, Vienna and New York. He was, Friesen notes, heralded as the new Ibsen. After seeing a production of Suderman’s Heimat, which opened with Sarah Bernhardt, George Bernard Shaw had this to say: “There really was something to roar about this time.”

To be sure, many of the dominant themes in Anabaptist/Mennonite theater are religious in Nature; i.e., the human connection and relationship to God. This mode of expression Friesen refers to as “transcendent”. There is, however, Friesen notes, a tendency in modernist theater of an overt falling away from this form of transcendence, and yet Friesen is quick to note that “the arts have the potential to contribute to religion because they explore the expression of feeling, imaginative process, sensual awareness and the distinction between surface and depth perception. When art functions in this manner it contributes to religious understanding because it participates in the journey toward fulfillment and hope.”

What is Friesen talking about here? One cannot help but make the connection between Friesen’s understanding and Rene Girard’s idea of a horizontal transcendence where the Brechtian idea of Epic Theater, his Fourth Wall, completes the action in which alienation plays a dominant role. The audience, much like Friesen’s argument above, identifies with the hero, specifically with the hero’s resentment setting up the occasion for Nietzschean alienation. The experience of vicarious suffering through identification with a tragic hero (see Friesen) is the meaning of catharsis as defined by Aristotle, which Brecht identifies as empathy.

“The spectator comes away purged of worldly resentment. In real life, we may resent the hero, but in stage drama, we are able to put aside our resentment because of the hero’s formal otherness. This is what allows the audience to identify with heroes, kings and tyrants and such. In the world of theater, we can imagine ourselves in the sacred place at the center of public attention, which is the locus of desire. Beyond mere escapism, dramatic catharsis reorients the emotional life of the beneficiary and temporarily lessens the need for vengeance in the real world. The solidarity that is felt among the audience is a consolation for resentment. The relief is real though short-lived; it is what we feel when leaving a great performance en masse” (Ernest Ewert, Reflections on Resentment, 2021).

Theater, as Friesen understands it, is about the Girardian horizontal transcendence or deviated transcendence; in the case of theater, the dramatic event removes the violence inherent in the ontological madness that is Girard’s mimetic desire. Aristotle’s notion of empathy is by the Brechtian approach transformed by catharsis.

Let me say a few words about Friesen’s treatment of theater concerning the comedic. In a brilliant discussion of Swiss dramatist and essayist Friedrich Durrenmatt, the writer takes the story of the Münster rebellion and transforms it into an Anabaptist play of the darkest satire. Friesen notes that the script, a grotesque comedy (“black comedy”) character type, pulls out all the stops of the grotesque, which translates into an attack on injustice. For a time, the play Es steht geschrieben, languished, but then, as Friesen notes, the student rebellions that swept across Western Europe in the ’60s revitalized Durrenmatt’s vision. Rewritten, the play becomes Die Wiedertäufer (The Anabaptist). Durrenmatt’s hero (of sorts) is a failed tailor, who becomes a failed actor, who is denied admission into the profession. In the original, the hero has fallen into a drunken sleep in a manure wagon and, when arrested for vagrancy, builds his defense around the supernatural, claiming an angel picked him up in Leiden and flew him to Münster to rescue the city. In the rewrite, the failed actor becomes a noted orator and leader. The allusion is clear and obvious. The failed painter is Hitler, and Münster is Hitler’s Germany. One certainly cannot miss what Friesen is alluding to – here the parallel to Bakhtin’s Menippean Satire is clear. “The abstract idea,” Bakhtin argues in Rabelais and His World, “distorts this nature of the grotesque image. It transforms the center of gravity into a ‘moral’ meaning. Moreover, it submits the substratum of the image to the negative element. Exaggeration becomes a caricature. The beginning of this process is found even in early Protestant satire, and later in the previously mentioned ‘Menippus Satire.’”

Theatre, Peace, Justice is a serious work of profound scholarship. It deserves to be front and center and required reading in university drama departments, and in particular in Mennonite colleges and universities that have come to an understanding that there is a sacred quality to drama. Drama in the context of faith, and the Christian religion in particular, has always been linked to the sacred. It isn’t without cause that Catholics regard the celebration of the Mass and Eucharist as sacred drama. For this reason, Friesen’s book deserves a deep reading. Indeed, as Friesen points out the reasoning behind his scholarship is to reveal that works “which are not religious in an obvious way” do indeed “portray the human condition and express something of the divine presence in the human condition.”