“Pentecost” Peels Back The Layers

To produce British playwright David Edgar’s Pentecost, the team at the Yale School of Drama talked with a violist who played in damaged churches in war-torn Sarajevo. They involved clergy from multiple religions. So it makes sense that the Yale Repetory’s building — formerly a church itself — is central to the staging, said Lucie Dawkins, third-year director at the school, and Stephanie Cohen, her scenic designer.

The play, which had its U.S. premiere at Yale Rep in 1995, is set in a Romanesque church dating from the late 12th century, and the Rep production ​“built a church within the church,” Dawkins said. Likewise, Dawkins and Cohen have decided to use the contours of the existing church building as the basis for their design, so that the audience is ​“also in the church” where the action takes place.

Pentecost — which The New York Times called ​“an amazing play” and ​“limitlessly provocative,” runs from Oct. 3 – 7 at the Yale Rep on Chapel Street.

The story of Pentecost concerns the finding of a fresco on a wall of a church that could alter art history by predating famed painter and architect Giotto, who ushered in the Renaissance. The church with the fresco is in ​“an unnamed south-east European country,” and has undergone a wide range of uses since its original founding, including as a prison. The value of cultural artifacts for people trying to barter for their freedom — with a priceless artwork as both a spoil and a hostage of war — is one of the themes of this multifaceted work.

Dawkins said she has long been attracted to ​“political theater” in which ​“enormous problems are dropped in an audience’s lap and not solved.” Pentecost, she said, ​“questions liberal culture and nationalism.” The play grabbed her when reading it this past summer ​“right after Brexit.” Dawkins, a citizen of the United Kingdom who was born in Paris, found the result of the referendum vote ​“depressing.” The play’s thematic treatment of what Dawkins called the ​“lie of the primacy of Western culture” is even more germane to our time. The European Union is under much more duress than it was when the play was first produced, a few years after the Maastricht Treaty created the Union.

Meanwhile, Cohen’s design will allow the audience to see ​“the many levels added to the church over the years” so that ​“peeling back” reveals more of the fresco and the original church furnishings, some of which the team has restored to the Rep building.

For Dawkins, Edgar’s play has several tie-ins to our contemporary situation. One, which ​“sets the play slap-bang on New Haven’s doorstep,” is the recent situation in which immigrants, newly persecuted under current U.S. regulations, have taken sanctuary in churches in the area. In the play, the status of the church — spiritually and politically — is interrogated by the presence of a range of characters of different faiths, ethnicities, and languages, seeking refuge from war and from ethnic cleansing.

Dawkins sees a further relevance in the recent mob violence in Charlottesville, Va., in response to the tearing down of a monument to Robert E. Lee. ​“A mob turns up” in this play as well, she said, and the drama questions what purpose art as monument serves. It might even illustrate the point made by German theorist Walter Benjamin that ​“there is no document of civilization which is not also a document of barbarism.” Edgar’s play looks at the kinds of barbarism attached to cultural preservation.

The Trump administration’s foreign policy, Dawkins said, has made even more relevant the play’s ​“look at the American dream from the outside.”

“The first half of the play shows the absurdity of the American notion of freedom, and the second half shows it’s not about the U.S.,” Dawkins said. The hope of the U.S. as ​“a safety net” where ​“the cavalry rush in and save the day” is undermined in the play’s denouement.

Edgar, who has shared with Dawkins all his preparatory notes from the original British production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, based many of the characters on actual people covered in the press at the time. Dawkins and her team have been in contact with each one still living. This includes Dr. Dijana Ihas, a violist who played with the Sarajevo String Quartet throughout the siege of that city in the 1990s. She played in damaged buildings — churches, synagogues and hospitals. Ihas commented that she felt music ​“never had more purpose” than during the three and half years of the siege.

In recreating the world of the play, Dawkins and her team also have involved chaplains at Yale of all the religions represented in the play as well as native speakers of every language in the text. The cast, consisting of thirteen YSD actors, many double-cast, and three actors from outside the School, have had to master lines in a panoply of languages. There are only three native speakers of English in the play, meaning that there are a wide range of accents, use of patois, and native languages. Dawkins decided not to include subtitles for dialogue that isn’t in English, an intentional alienation of the audience from an English-centric view of the world.

But the multinationalism of language is also one of the play’s main dramatic features. Pentecost, in the Christian religion, is the feast day to celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit that allowed Jesus’s apostles to preach in the native language of each respective listener. In Judaism, Pentecost, or Shavuot, is known as the Feast of Weeks, occurring seven weeks after Passover. The different meanings of the ancient Greek word for different religions underscores the cultural relativism the play dramatizes.

Dawkins studied ancient languages as an undergraduate at Oxford and was also president of its dramatic society. She may be the best prepared and most personally concerned director currently in the U.S. for a revival of this witty, insightful, and powerful play. 

The Yale School of Drama’s production of Pentecost runs at the Yale Repertory Theater, 1120 Chapel St., from Oct. 3 to Oct. 7. Click here for tickets and more information.