The Art of the Acted Word
In October I had the honor of moderating a panel at the University of Notre Dame’s truly wonderful Catholic Imagination Conference, which was centered around how to understand the arts and implement them to nourish the soul. As a long time high school drama teacher, my panel was about theater. I was thrilled to see the discussants approach my beloved artform not as so many do, trotting it out as an afterthought like some Goth-clad stepchild, but as a way for the Body of Christ to bring together gifts large and small to produce the play, the thing, the vehicle of praise. I left South Bend hopeful that theater might truly claim its place among the other arts worthy of the Catholic imagination.
Not long after, I learned about Adeodatus, Dr. Alex Lessard’s exciting project to renew Catholic education, and its upcoming Winter Forum, which will conclude with… an original play by two young Catholic playwrights, staged by a ragtag troupe of Catholic actors! My hopes were already coming true! Remembering how enthused I’d been by my conversation with the panelists in October, I caught up with Alex, the playwrights, and the players to keep that conversation—and the flame of drama—alive.
“Adeodatus is focused on supporting the renewal of Catholic education and culture,” Alex tells me. “We gather the best resources from the Catholic tradition through the best contemporary students of the tradition, and communicate this retrieval and its contemporary reformulation through conferences and publications.”
Alex knows well that every Catholic renaissance has left its mark on the arts. Art is always an embodiment, but especially so for Catholics: we are an incarnational people! “Everything we do on the educational front is tied into Catholic cultural renewal,” says Alex. “We see the appreciation, performance, and patronage of the fine and sacred arts as integral to that renewal.”
But, my inner drama teacher’s prejudice aside, why commission a play? Why not a film, a painting, an oratorio? Thereby hangs a tale.
Last year, Alex, a father of alumni from Catholic colleges across the nation, attended a staged reading of a play set at a small Catholic liberal arts college, but penned by a very secular author. “Its characters were unrecognizable to me,” he says. “Because my experience was so different from the world of that play, I was tempted to have a group of recent graduates read it together and let their unfiltered conversation flower into something dramatic.” As providence would have it, he knew just who to ask for help.
Every summer, John Turrentine and Benjamin Trull stage plays with a group of friends, and in 2022 they had a crazy idea. “In a fit of wild surmise, the two of us volunteered to write a play for our little troupe,” laugh the writers. “The result, which we performed in 2023, was good fun, and not half bad—but left us itching to write more and write better.”
That was when they heard from Alex. “He wanted a play loosely connected to Catholic education,” recall John and Ben. “Since we were loosely connected both to Catholic education and playwriting, he thought we should take a stab at it.” After their initial conversation, Alex decided against his original idea of dramatizing a discussion. “Thinking better of the nature of artistic production,” he says, “I asked them to write whatever they were inspired to craft, as they cope with the possibilities of their given talents in this time and place, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor.”
The writers’ gears were already turning. “We were intrigued by the uncomfortable adjustment period which seems common to graduates of liberal arts colleges,” John and Ben tell me. “Everyone takes a different road after school, and we wanted to see what sparks would fly when those roads converged again. Could friends still connect with each other, or had their different experiences made them mutually unintelligible? Could they count on faith and friendship to keep them united if life and reason seemed to divide them? That, as the saying goes, is the question.”
In February, the playwrights’ gave Alex their answer to the question in a script entitled Passion’s End. According to Adeodatus, “the play weaves a compelling narrative of recent liberal arts graduates navigating the challenges of ‘real life.’” Alex read it, and happily greenlit a performance for January.
But having a finished script in hand was only half the battle: with the writers set to act, they roped in Ben’s sister, Madeleine, to act and direct, as well as a few other friends from shows past. Rehearsals have been underway since early September, with everyone eager to see the new drama come to life.
It does my drama teacher’s heart good to note that none of the players are professionals. They rehearse via Zoom between busy work schedules and, for some, the hectic disarray of being first-time parents. They persevere for the same reason I kept going back to drama, semester after exhausting semester: for the sheer love of acting.
“I’m drawn to drama because it’s an art I know I can do,” laughs John. “I’ve never had much of an ear for music, and painting or drawing requires a level of precision in hand and eye that I’ve never had the patience to develop. But drama uses the human body, and everyone has one of those!” Adds Madeleine, “I loved playing pretend in the backyard with my brothers when I was little, so when I realized that theatre was simply imagining yourself in all these fun roles, I was hooked. It was only later that I realized it could be a profession.”
But while founded on the joy of performing, the love of theater has a deeper motivation. “Live theater can express, more than most art forms, the uncomfortable reality of ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’ as Faulkner puts it,” says Ben. “This is especially important for audiences, Catholic and otherwise, living in our troubled post-Puritanical age, when big ideas and strong emotions are either never analyzed, because it’s unseemly to discuss them in public, or analyzed in such gratuitous and clinical detail that they lose their savor.”
Madeleine agrees. “Many people dislike theatre because it's uncomfortable to watch humans tousling with their humanity up close and personal. Many people blush and turn away from it—I’ve definitely done that before. But that is the ‘Aha!’ moment, confronting our discomfort—whether it be with certain aspects of our humanity or a choice we've made in the past. It’s our fight with our free will that shows us both the truth and beauty of the world.”
Easier said than done: as the players are discovering, there isn’t a tidy overlap between art and faith. “One must be careful of making art so Catholic that it ceases to be authentically art, and slips into evangelization or moralizing,” says John. “On the other hand, art of all kinds benefits from being placed in the proper context—when virtue and vice, the passions, or any kind of human action are presented according to a right anthropology. The Faith gives us new eyes which allow us to see the world, ourselves, and God as they are.”
Ben concurs, adding that “a lot of what goes by ‘Catholic art’ fails because the artists are afraid of compromising their Catholicism by lingering with the dirty laundry of less than saintly decisions—or else by exaggerating the dirt.” Sensitive to that danger, he and John were keen to find a middle way in writing Passion’s End. “We drew constantly on our own experience,” they explain, “which kept us from slipping into caricature or resorting too much to symbolism.”
That fidelity to experience is central to achieving what Madeleine thinks could be the chief outcome of the theatrical revival I hoped for at Notre Dame, and which Alex and Adeodatus are helping to inaugurate. “I want to see a meeting of the minds between the Catholic and postmodern worldviews,” says Madeleine. “It’s possible to hash out, through theatrical representations, what both agree and disagree with. Catholicism has done a great job of isolating itself into its own artistic bubble; as Catholic theatre makers, our job is to burst that bubble.”
On January 4, Madeleine, John, and Ben will launch their opening salvos at the bubble. The drama teacher in me hopes to see them and others launch fresh volleys for years to come!
