The Wakefield Plays extra credit

At the Wakefield Mystery plays on Saturday, while the plots of the plays are all unusual and sometimes vaguely blasphemous interpretations of Biblical stories, the way the director and actors presented them made them fun and interesting. Also, as we learned in the post-performance discussion, the plays were originally intended to simply familiarize the general public with the stories, and they certainly do that. In order to interpret and modernize the stories, the actors added singing and dancing to many of the stories, usually fitting the style, for example the devil and his demons did a rap song and Adam and Eve did ballet.

In the post-production discussion, we discussed the history of the Wakefield Mystery plays and some of the changes the director made and the reasoning behind them. The character of God was always played by three actors/actresses at a time who would speak the lines separately and together, and these three actor/actresses alternated between almost the entire cast throughout the plays. The director explained that she didn’t want to have to choose one person to play God because it brings up all kinds of questions and would probably offend someone no matter who she chose. The three-person God represented the Trinity nicely, could have both actors and actresses so there weren’t gender problems, and meant that no one was limited to only playing one character.

I liked the way they modernized some of the stories, like Cain and Abel, so that they were a little more approachable to modern audiences. While moving the stories into a modern setting made them seem less like The Canterbury Tales, the slapstick style of the Noah story is similar to some of the more low-brow tales, like the Miller’s Tale. The Mary story, with its emphasis on her virginity and purity, reminded me of characters like Constance in the Man of Law’s Tale and Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale, or even Virginia in the Physician’s Tale.