If, as we hope, you will join us for The COVID Mysteries, you will see a contemporary and highly abridged adaptation of the so-called “mystery” or “Corpus Christi” play that was performed in York and other towns in England from the mid-fourteenth-century to their suppression by Protestants in the mid-sixteenth century.  Just as we perform the play in spring, and outdoors, the late-medieval cycle plays were performed on the moveable feast of Corpus Christi (varying between May 27 and June 24), at various outdoor sites or “stations” in the English towns.  We even have a specially built pageant wagon, modeled after the ones used by the medieval players; the difference is that instead of their forty-eight (!) short plays, each with their own wagon, arriving at each station to perform, we have one, splendid pageant wagon.  Still, by moving our playing space well outside our usual Mallinckrodt theaters, we are trying to capture the spirit of medieval theatrical mobility. We also follow the medieval tradition by casting highly skilled amateur actors. Whereas the medieval plays were each performed by guilds representing different crafts or “mysteries,” often appropriate for the play (the Shipwrights built the set and cast the play for “Noah’s Ark”; the Bakers for “The Last Supper”); we bring you the skilled non-professionals of the PAD. 

Whereas the medieval mystery play assumed a community of one, Catholic, religion, we of course do not, and intend our play for an audience of very diverse beliefs and backgrounds.   We treat “God” and the accompanying cast of characters with a fair degree of irreverence, even as we hope that certain core human and spiritual motifs carry through.  In fact, medieval drama was not without irreverence itself, and the devil could always steal the show.   The cycle plays included apocryphal, legendary material well outside the canonical Bible: our scene between Joseph and Mary, when she tells her very skeptical husband that she has become pregnant from the Holy Ghost, is closely modeled on the medieval original.  Other sources for the COVID Mysteries are eclectic.  For our spin on the Fall of Lucifer, we take a cue from the Koran, where Iblis, the closest spirit-being to Allah, refuses to bow down and worship Adam. Our dark version of the Abraham and Isaac story (a bit leavened by Bob Dylan) follows a passage from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.  In the medieval cycle plays, Jewish Bible stories operated as anticipations, or “figures” for the “new” testament: we suggest that God asking a man to kill his beloved son in order to demonstrate great faith is an overreach, which then moves God to do the same thing himself.  

The episodes regarding Jesus are inspired by recent scholarship on the historical Jesus that contextualize him and John the Baptist as Mediterranean peasants who spoke messages of radical egalitarianism, and who were both killed by the state because they were deemed to be subversive threats to order.  Our Jesus certainly leans to the left, although he is killed in our play for being a “moralist” as well as a “socialist.”   

In boiling the sixteen hours of the Corpus Christi play down to some eighty minutes, we very irreverently play through two questions: why does the divine being need humanity, and what does it mean to be a human being?   God’s very persistent angel advisors press him on three points: 1) How much should this new creature he wants to create admit of the divine?  2) Should the new human being live forever or be mortal?  3) Should humans be free or not free?  Big questions, probably not answered in the commedia dell’arte style of our production.  Still, at one moment in the play, God says that if human beings are going to be free, they can be free to do theater. On that point, we heartily concur, especially after this past year. 

Robert Henke, Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature

Production Staff

Production 

Sean Savoie*: Production Manager
Mike Loui*: Scene Shop Foreman
Emily Frei*: Scenic Charge Artist
Frieda Curtis: Costume Shop Manager
Amy Soll: Stage Management Supervisor
Benjaman Lewis: Asst. Production Manager/Master Electrician
Myles Hesse: Stage Manager, Production Assistant
Max Keane: Assistant Stage Manager
Payne Banister: Production Assistant
Jon Zielke: Sound Mixer
Sydnie Dillon, Sabrina Spence, Emma Thorp: Scenic Artists and Props Artisians
Rickea Coleman, Ethan Copland, Maya Dubno, Holly Gabelmann, Becca Katz, Sasha Kostenko, Marek Rodriguez, Bo Schmit: Scene Shop Crew
Charlie Bosco, Whitney Call, Vee Dols, Megan Orlanski: Costume Shop Crew
Joe Angeles, Julie Kennedy, Liam Otten: Washington University Public Affairs

Performing Arts Department Staff

Pannill Camp, Department Chair
Philip Durkee, Office Manager
Serena Carvajal, Administrative Coordinator
Mary K. Clemens, Marketing Coordinator
Jay Buchanan, Graduate Assistant
Payne Banister, Graduate Assistant

Edison Theatre Staff

Bill Larson, Operations Manager
Kyle Himsworth, Technical Director/Master Electrician
Robert Babcock, Assistant Technical Director