TWO years ago, at the urging of its pastor, David Dyson, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church welcomed a resident theater company into the largely unused interior of what was once its Sunday school. Named the Irondale Center after its new tenant, the Irondale Ensemble Project, the soaring space now serves as a home to a wide array of performances and community events in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
When another New York troupe, the Epic Theater Ensemble, began the search for a theater for the first New York production of “Passion Play,” Sarah Ruhl’s bold 2005 triptych about religious history, the center’s 19th-century ecclesiastical interior seemed perfect. Moving from Elizabethan England to Hitler’s Germany to Reagan-era South Dakota, the work draws on the devotional tradition in which villages staged the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. This being a play by the sardonic writer of “The Clean House” and “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” though, there are drop-ins from a not-so-good Queen Bess, the Führer and the Gipper.
Yet Zak Berkman, one of Epic’s executive directors, approached Irondale gingerly. He wanted to be sure that Mr. Dyson and his congregation, which takes pride in its commitment to social justice, understood that the play was a critical, even irreverent exploration of Christian pageants, their historical associations with anti-Semitism and the treatment of women in conservative cultures.
“It sounded intriguing,” Mr. Dyson said in an interview. “This church is sort of like a town hall for this part of Brooklyn, and the play is a new twist on a complicated concept.”
So intriguing that a new name, and related marketing plan, was born. Now billed as “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play,” the work — three connected plays, at three and a half hours over all — is at the center of a festival of related events intended to bring together believers and nonbelievers to investigate the intersections of faith, ritual, belonging and performance.
“I’ve been obsessed with the Passion play since I was a child,” Ms. Ruhl said in a telephone interview. “Maybe it was being raised a Catholic, but I was definitely also interested in how whole towns would get involved, or religiosity could be used as a cloak for other things. In that sense my play is much more about theater than it is about religion.”
The festival began on March 27 with a convocation centering on different forms of devotion and songs from the church’s Lafayette Inspirational Ensemble gospel choir. The play is to begin previews on April 27, and on Sundays during the run audience members will be invited to gather for locally supplied dinner fare and discussions around the table that plays a mysterious role in “Passion Play.” Bread and wine will be served at all intermissions.
Inside the Irondale Center one day recently Mark Wing-Davey, the director, put the company through rehearsal paces involving giant crosses and a highway tollbooth. Mr. Berkman sat outside on the sunny steps, working out the logistics for the festival and the 40 or so participating groups, which organizers are calling the Passion Coalition.
The festival fits with Epic’s mission: to stage politically conscious work and to create programming directed at New York City’s public schools and their underserved communities, said Mr. Berkman, who co-founded the company in 2001 with Melissa Friedman and Ron Russell.
Yet “Passion Play” is by far the most ambitious production the young company has undertaken. Ms. Ruhl’s name recognition further raises expectations; her latest work, “In the Next Room, or the vibrator play,” had its premiere on Broadway in 2009 and was a finalist for Pulitzer Prize. A Mellon Foundation grant will help keep ticket prices low, but Epic is still requiring many of its regulars to travel to an unfamiliar corner of Brooklyn for a marathon-style event.
If it works, the production, which opens on May 12, could rise to the must-see status of an “Angels in America” or “The Coast of Utopia.” But it could also flop to earth like one of the human-size fish puppets in the fantastical story Ms. Ruhl tells.
Mr. Wing-Davey also directed the more elaborate and well-funded productions of “Passion Play” at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2007 and at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2008. In agreeing to work with Epic, he stipulated that the Irondale Center be rented for eight weeks of rehearsals. “It’s exciting and important to rehearse a production that is going to have this kind of roughness in the space where it’s going to be,” he said. “The room you make it in is part of the process.”
For the festival, though, that also brings a benefit; the play readings, panel discussions, children’s events, political debates and musical performances can be in the space free (and not charge admission), since the space is already paid for.
Epic has also reached out to more established theater companies putting on productions with similar themes. And the Center for International Human Rights at John Jay College is helping to support the mini-conference surrounding a staged reading of Sanjit De Silva’s play “Grace” on May 25. Epic will share audience data and exchange discount ticket privileges with other presenters, Mr. Berkman said, and those organizations have sent out e-mail blasts promoting Ms. Ruhl’s play to their audiences.
In part, Mr. Berkman said, Epic hopes “to see if we could defy the competitive nature that sooner or later can infiltrate” the Off Broadway theater scene.
“I missed the sense of community religion gives you growing up,” he said. “Theater should feel like a secular church.”
