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Passion Play
Passion Play is Sarah Ruhl’s “biggest, most ambitious effort yet” (The New York Times), a three-and-a-half hour intimate epic, plunging the depths of the timely intersection of politics and religion. Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the Easter Passion in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergua, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, South Dakota, from the time of Vietnam through Reagan’s presidency. In each period, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics are never far in the background, as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan each appear, played by a single commanding actor.
Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Eurydice, and The Clean House, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been widely produced both throughout the country and internationally, and she is the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Eurydice, and The Clean House, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been widely produced both throughout the country and internationally, and she is the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
252 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
12 people are currently reading
516 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Ruhl
42 books577 followersSarah Ruhl (born 1974) is an American playwright. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career.
Originally, she intended to be a poet. However, after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001), she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. Her roots in poetry can be seen in the way she uses language in her plays. She also did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford.
In September 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated: "Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York City. Playwright creating vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war."
Originally, she intended to be a poet. However, after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001), she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. Her roots in poetry can be seen in the way she uses language in her plays. She also did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford.
In September 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated: "Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York City. Playwright creating vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
October 31, 2018
A masterpiece
February 24, 2017
My favorite Sarah Ruhl play. In what it attempts to cover and talk about, the word "epic" seems inadequate. I would love to direct this as the work presents an incredible opportunity for a transcendent experience for both audience and actors.
November 15, 2017
I would die for this play. Sarah Ruhl is ingenious, the language is gorgeous. What she lacks in subtlety she makes up in artistry. Also god knows I love homoeroticism in Catholic iconography.
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December 4, 2022This was brilliant! I wish I could see Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play play out on a stage!!! This dramatic work has it all: comedy, romance, tragedy, politics, and is even a bit naughty. I loved it!
I've not read a lot of Sarah Ruhl's plays, but Passion Play is great! I don't usually buy physical copies of brand new books that I haven't read before. In fact, I tent to only buy books new if I've already read them and know I love them. Yes, it's weird. However, there are certain circumstances when I'll happily purchase new books that I've never read: I love the writer; I love the writer's work; and/or the book is a gift.
After reading two of Ruhl's plays that I loved, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play and Stage Kiss, I didn't hesitate to purchase Passion Play, which was fantastic! The continuity of each part alongside issues of religion, politics, and the actors' relationships with the play and with one another was so well executed, that I'm going to prioritize rereading this either next year or in 2024. Oh, what a gem of a play! I want to see it live. Damn. So few plays that I read are ever in production at the time I read them.
If you love reading plays, Sarah Ruhl, and/or are interested in the history of the Passion Play, then this is a theatrical work for you!
[Physical, purchased from Chapters Indigo, London, Ontario]
I've not read a lot of Sarah Ruhl's plays, but Passion Play is great! I don't usually buy physical copies of brand new books that I haven't read before. In fact, I tent to only buy books new if I've already read them and know I love them. Yes, it's weird. However, there are certain circumstances when I'll happily purchase new books that I've never read: I love the writer; I love the writer's work; and/or the book is a gift.
After reading two of Ruhl's plays that I loved, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play and Stage Kiss, I didn't hesitate to purchase Passion Play, which was fantastic! The continuity of each part alongside issues of religion, politics, and the actors' relationships with the play and with one another was so well executed, that I'm going to prioritize rereading this either next year or in 2024. Oh, what a gem of a play! I want to see it live. Damn. So few plays that I read are ever in production at the time I read them.
If you love reading plays, Sarah Ruhl, and/or are interested in the history of the Passion Play, then this is a theatrical work for you!
[Physical, purchased from Chapters Indigo, London, Ontario]
October 7, 2019
I like this play more for what it shows about Ms. Ruhl’s potential as a playwright than the play itself.
More three longer one acts instead of one play, Passion Play looks at the performance of Biblical passion plays at three distinct time and places in history: Elizabeth England, Nazi Germany, and post-Vietnam America. Ruhl plays with a lot of interesting ideas – how character influences actor, how fiction mirrors fact – but the execution feels clumsy and lacks the light touch that I associate with her later work. Quasi-recommended.
More three longer one acts instead of one play, Passion Play looks at the performance of Biblical passion plays at three distinct time and places in history: Elizabeth England, Nazi Germany, and post-Vietnam America. Ruhl plays with a lot of interesting ideas – how character influences actor, how fiction mirrors fact – but the execution feels clumsy and lacks the light touch that I associate with her later work. Quasi-recommended.
August 27, 2018
Brilliant!
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February 13, 2021heartbreaking :(
March 5, 2021
Heartbreaking. Stunning. Imaginative. Vivid.
May 29, 2025
SOOOOOO GOOD i fucking love metastories like this, especially when they’re plays. cycles and histories and repetitions…. just so obsessed with all of this.
Hansel was scared.
Wouldn’t you be scared?
If someone wanted to push
you in an oven?
unspeakably chilling
thanks Max for lending this to me I’m sorry it took me so long to get around to it but it is precisely my shit!!
Hansel was scared.
Wouldn’t you be scared?
If someone wanted to push
you in an oven?
unspeakably chilling
thanks Max for lending this to me I’m sorry it took me so long to get around to it but it is precisely my shit!!
March 30, 2012
The section circa World War II is the only part of this play that had the narrative drive, contrasts and necessary character stakes to hold my interest here. Ruhl creates beautiful images, but often I don't know what story they belong to, or what story they're telling. The culmulative effect of this string of plays adds up to little for me because of that, but if you're a fan, you will find this anthology of interest.
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October 10, 2019Still processing this trip of a play. It's stuffed with deliciously weird, fish-y layers. But on a first read, the strangeness sticks out more than specific meaning to hold onto. Practically demands to be seen rather than read. Still processing, but it's fun to see Ruhl stretch surreally across eras and find dark political commonalities (and what's it mean that things felt apocalyptic under Bush compared to now...? To stage this in 2019?)
January 7, 2024
Poignant and absolutely gut-wrenching meditation on the nature of acting and storytelling. Does every character leave a mark? How do our stories shape us as a people and a nation? How do we shape the stories?
Is this a perfect play? No, but its perfectly strange. Perfectly imperfect and even clunky at times. 4.5 Stars/5
Is this a perfect play? No, but its perfectly strange. Perfectly imperfect and even clunky at times. 4.5 Stars/5
December 24, 2018
Reading Sarah Ruhl is very dangerous for me; everything I read of hers makes me only want to become a playwright.
June 14, 2025
I was lucky enough to get to see Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play in its Chicago production at the Goodman. This was in Fall 2007, when major theaters were still producing ambitious epic dramas by young-ish playwrights, and I was a senior in college hoping to eventually have those kinds of opportunities as a playwright myself. Passion Play featured so much of what I loved most about the theater then (and still do): it’s a large-cast, large-scale backstage drama that engages deeply with big themes of history, community, politics, and religion. Indeed, at the time, I was working on my own backstage drama set in 1934, just like Part Two of Passion Play—although my play took place in the relatively less fraught setting of FDR’s America, rather than Hitler’s Germany.
This was my first time revisiting the play since 2007; I would love to see another production now that it’s been nearly two decades, but hardly anyone seems to be producing this kind of theater in the scaled-down post-pandemic landscape. There’s also the grim irony that, per Ruhl’s introduction, Part Three of the play arose from her sense of powerlessness and despair as a liberal during the George W. Bush administration, and, well, in 2025, things are much worse on that front!
I went back to my old blog to see what I’d written about Passion Play in 2007, and I still agree with a lot of my youthful judgments: “The Elizabethan first act is terrific—funny, intelligent, moving, with characters that you care about and Ruhl's trademark poetic dialogue. In fact, I'd even call it a perfect 55-minute play […] The second segment of the play (Nazi Germany) is much weaker, and that's a pity, because it probably has the richest material to explore […] Thankfully, Act 3 is a lot better. Spanning several years in the 1970s and 1980s, it feels like a bit of a departure for Ruhl: more contemporary and with plainer dialogue than she usually writes.” Yes, yes, yes!
I ended that 2007 blog post by complaining that the play had a “pasted-on happy ending” that “seems to come out of nowhere.” This judgment now feels a little unfair to me because, after all, Parts One and Two of this play do end with a devastating cataclysm, it’s just Part Three that doesn’t. So I think Sarah Ruhl was trying to conclude with a message that there is hope, that cycles of violence can be broken… I just don’t think she fully convinced me of why the cycle finally got broken this time, in this little town in South Dakota.
The most astounding thing about revisiting Passion Play is that I now believe it made an even deeper impression on me than I realized at the time. Because, I’ve now written historical dramas that overlap with all three time periods Ruhl covers here! Besides my 1934 backstage drama, I have a play set in 1971 that deals with the Vietnam War and PTSD; and a play set in the 1500s that deals with Catholicism.
Not everything about Passion Play works, but I’m so grateful that it exists, and that it came into my life when it did—and so sad that the big forces of politics, economics, religion, and history have made it ever more difficult for artists to come together and produce work like this.
This was my first time revisiting the play since 2007; I would love to see another production now that it’s been nearly two decades, but hardly anyone seems to be producing this kind of theater in the scaled-down post-pandemic landscape. There’s also the grim irony that, per Ruhl’s introduction, Part Three of the play arose from her sense of powerlessness and despair as a liberal during the George W. Bush administration, and, well, in 2025, things are much worse on that front!
I went back to my old blog to see what I’d written about Passion Play in 2007, and I still agree with a lot of my youthful judgments: “The Elizabethan first act is terrific—funny, intelligent, moving, with characters that you care about and Ruhl's trademark poetic dialogue. In fact, I'd even call it a perfect 55-minute play […] The second segment of the play (Nazi Germany) is much weaker, and that's a pity, because it probably has the richest material to explore […] Thankfully, Act 3 is a lot better. Spanning several years in the 1970s and 1980s, it feels like a bit of a departure for Ruhl: more contemporary and with plainer dialogue than she usually writes.” Yes, yes, yes!
I ended that 2007 blog post by complaining that the play had a “pasted-on happy ending” that “seems to come out of nowhere.” This judgment now feels a little unfair to me because, after all, Parts One and Two of this play do end with a devastating cataclysm, it’s just Part Three that doesn’t. So I think Sarah Ruhl was trying to conclude with a message that there is hope, that cycles of violence can be broken… I just don’t think she fully convinced me of why the cycle finally got broken this time, in this little town in South Dakota.
The most astounding thing about revisiting Passion Play is that I now believe it made an even deeper impression on me than I realized at the time. Because, I’ve now written historical dramas that overlap with all three time periods Ruhl covers here! Besides my 1934 backstage drama, I have a play set in 1971 that deals with the Vietnam War and PTSD; and a play set in the 1500s that deals with Catholicism.
Not everything about Passion Play works, but I’m so grateful that it exists, and that it came into my life when it did—and so sad that the big forces of politics, economics, religion, and history have made it ever more difficult for artists to come together and produce work like this.
June 8, 2018
"P: I'll play Pontius Pilate the way he was meant to be played.
VA: And how's that?
P: Like a hung-over politician in a God-forsaken province who took stupid orders on a really fucking bad day."
Possibly my favorite line from Passion Play.
Of the three time periods in the play, I preferred the one set in Germany in World War II; the rest are ambitious but too disjointed to fully develop all the ideas set up by the play. Maybe it's that I find Sarah Ruhl's approach to religion here a bit simplistic, or a play like this is better performed in a theater rather than read in one sitting. I'm a huge fan of Ruhl and her oeuvre, but I didn't think this was one of her best works.
VA: And how's that?
P: Like a hung-over politician in a God-forsaken province who took stupid orders on a really fucking bad day."
Possibly my favorite line from Passion Play.
Of the three time periods in the play, I preferred the one set in Germany in World War II; the rest are ambitious but too disjointed to fully develop all the ideas set up by the play. Maybe it's that I find Sarah Ruhl's approach to religion here a bit simplistic, or a play like this is better performed in a theater rather than read in one sitting. I'm a huge fan of Ruhl and her oeuvre, but I didn't think this was one of her best works.
September 1, 2017
I don't need to add much to what others have stated about the scope of this play. In addition to the political themes that it addresses, I also very much appreciate the discussion of how our personalities are performative. Are we who we think we are or are we who others think we are? Do we eventually become what people think of us? Will it always be a self-fulfilling prophecy?
There's a lot to dissect in this epic play, and I'll be thinking about it for a long time.
There's a lot to dissect in this epic play, and I'll be thinking about it for a long time.
November 16, 2019
This reads very well and is so powerful on the page that I think it would be stunning in performance -- three different times and places, very similar groups of people doing the same sort of play, and how the play reflects and refracts the politics and concerns of the time. But that is not a good enough description, because Ruhl weaves things together so well in trebling the parts across time. It was not an easy read, especially as it moved toward the modern day, but I am glad I read it.
March 1, 2024
Her magnum opus. I have no notes. Read all of this now.
It’s a exploration on why we tell stories, from the individual to the national level. Why do we return to certain myths and traditions? How do the meanings of those stories change over time and government? It’s also so much more. I’m not doing it justice. Why are you still here?! Go and read the damn play.
It’s a exploration on why we tell stories, from the individual to the national level. Why do we return to certain myths and traditions? How do the meanings of those stories change over time and government? It’s also so much more. I’m not doing it justice. Why are you still here?! Go and read the damn play.
February 22, 2018
What a stunning play. Really beautifully rendered characters against very potent time periods. I loved each act for itself, and I also thought they all work so well together—really playing off each other in effective ways. I loved capturing the air in a jar.
April 1, 2019
Super ambitious which I respect and there are some images I really love (red sky of judgment was done better here than in Scarlet Letter I think) but I’m not sure it all hangs together...? Really good still though
March 11, 2022
This is an exciting play about actors putting on the passion play but to me, it's not my favorite Sarah Ruhl play. Sara is a very talented writer and playwright, but it seems a bit all over the place with the different time periods. I still appreciated it though and I have mad respect for her
November 22, 2023
stunning work
ruhl’s writing is pure poetry. it’s beautiful and never fails to make me see the beauty in the mundane. if you want tragic religious-coded romance this is the place for you
ruhl’s writing is pure poetry. it’s beautiful and never fails to make me see the beauty in the mundane. if you want tragic religious-coded romance this is the place for you
November 24, 2023
i will NEVER get tired of sarah ruhl. this play is one more that i have read of her and i can’t get rid of my obsession. this play is unbelievably beautiful. each part is so different yet you can see the connections. i wish i could reread this for the first time. AMAZING!!
July 10, 2018
Magical play! I loved how ambitious and raw it was. So political so impactful wow
December 27, 2022
Sarah Ruhl has yet to disappoint. This span of this trilogy of plays is ambitious and she succeeded. I would love to see these plays performed or, even better, be in them.
April 14, 2023
A very well written script regarding three different historical Passion Plays, and love, and politics.
April 8, 2024
omg? justice for eric and foot soldier
February 4, 2025
what if i refused? what if i saved you from the mob — took you home with me, bathed your wounds with warm water?
impossible.
impossible.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews