Theater | Religion | Ritual
Theater, Religion and Sacred Space
The Similarities May Surprise You
“This is my church,” they say, but you’re not standing in one.
“This is synagogue/mosque/Buddhist/Hindu Temple,” they say, but it doesn’t look anything like one.
They are standing on a stage when they say these things, or behind stage, or near it. They may be marking up a script with highlighter or they may be in the audience, watching a friend perform.
If you spent any time in a theater community — and by that, I mean actors, writers, directors, and everyone who makes a show run — then you know what I am talking about.
You may be on a rehearsal break outside. You may be in a corner with your dramaturge (if you’re a playwright), discussing an especially tricky moment in your play. Or you may have just finished a performance and then hear the audience call you out onstage one more time, with the sound of applause so loud you can hear it in your dressing room.
Is that a church? Is that a mosque or synagogue? Buddhist or Hindu Temple?
You can only answer truthfully if you’ve been in one — but if you have, I think you would agree that yes, theater and religion have a lot in common — starting with sacred space.
I don’t say that cynically, though I don’t think most theater people say it aloud when they’re outside of the theater. But if you look at what goes on in your church/mosque/synagogue/temple, you might see there are more similarities than you think.
Take Easter vigil, aka the Great Vigil of Easter. This tradition is mostly celebrated in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox churches. It arrives at the end of a forty-day-long observance of Lent, which asks believers to give up a habit or item in self denial. So it’s already theatrical right there, since you have to sacrifice something to get to it.
Easter Vigil is celebrated after nightfall on the night before Easter, or right after the Good Friday service in Eastern Orthodox churches. Though I am not Christian, a friend brought me to the Easter Vigil at a cathedral some years ago, and it really felt like I was watching something. I guess by something, I mean a play.
The service celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It begins with the congregation rising and either going outdoors to stand around a blazing fire, or watching from their pews as one is lit on the altar. That’s what I saw at the cathedral.
It’s been many years, but I still remember that fire, blazing past midnight. I remember thinking (and telling my friend), “Some of the best theater in town is going on in houses of worship.”
One of my favorite traditions involve the Sukkot holidays at Jewish homes and synagogues. Sukkot marks the fall harvest and commemorates the forty years Jewish wanderers spent in the desert after fleeing enslavement in Egypt. Sukkot (plural for “sukkah,”) means booths or huts in Hebrew.
Jewish people assemble sukkot on this holiday and then eat and even sleep in their sukkot. At synagogue, four species of plants mentioned in the Bible are waved around during services: the lulav (palm branch), etrog (citron), myrtle and willow branches. If that’s not theatrical, what is?
Still don’t see how alike religion and theater can be? Listen to the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer at a mosque or watch Muslims praying as they kneel on prayer rugs to Allah. If the muezzin’s call alone doesn’t stop you in your tracks just for its beauty, nothing will.
Now think about what you see or do in a theater company. The company members rehearse a play for weeks before they allow the audience to see it. They dress in costumes (like clergy often do).
What theater does best though, is go beyond physical rituals to the moments in our lives where we are ready to risk everything for our beliefs, ideals, and love. Theater (and other live performances, concerts, and opera) give us a way to be vulnerable, to risk, to transcend the everyday worlds we live in and find something more. Movies do too, but may not affect us as deeply as live shows and rituals.
Are theatrical productions and religious services rivals? They shouldn’t be, but some people may believe they’re in competition with each other. I have to wonder if that feeling leads to theater being banned by certain religious authorities. I do not understand why that should ever be the case.
Because religious services offer us the art of ritual in some of its purest forms, while theater offers rituals transplanted directly from life experience so we can see ourselves mirrored in what we see onstage.
For instance, there might be a couple onstage, struggling to save their marriage. They might be screaming at each other, and you might remember doing the same. Or there may be someone who betrays everything she/he knows about themselves for money or power or love, and we recognize all those emotions and how they play out in our lives.
Theater and music ask us to take a journey to the ends of the earth, only internally. Religion does too, and when each one is done right, you know it. That’s what theater is, and what worship is, and both give us the same opportunities in similar ways. Do we really need to give one up to experience the other?
I believe each one enriches the other. Which is why it’s not surprising that people who dedicate their lives to theatrical careers, which often take years of discipline, often come from religious backgrounds, where dedication is a given.
Because religion teaches us what theater means, and theater teaches us how life can be exalted religiously, even when life feels boring or mundane. I’m saying that with a smile, because it sounds like I know a lot more than I do. I’m just trying to sort out my thoughts about this. That’s all.
What I do know (from living it) is that we all need something that takes us away from boredom and work and all the things that hold us back from ourselves. Theater and religious services are one way to get there — and I like that we have the choice of where to go and what to create. May those choices continue bringing us to sacred space.
