Drama by Exhortation: The Beams Are Creaking
Matt Shimkus as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Photo by Erik Stuhag
Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Portraying religion on stage is a great weakness of American drama. Our major American playwrights have seemed a trifle embarassed by the whole matter. From Eugene O' Neill to Nilo Cruz and Suzan-Lori Parks, the distinct lack of religious argument in America's most acclaimed plays is notable. Religious beliefs remain tattered but intact in our modern world. Two-fifths of Americans regularly attend services and three-fourths of Americans believe in angels. The difficulty for dramatists comes when one tries to portray these beliefs on stage. How does one stage faith? Or more accurately, how does one stage faith in a way that is dramatically meaningful? Why does this seem to lie beyond the interests if not the abilities of America's most renown playwrights?
Taproot Theatre's production of Douglas Anderson's The Beams Are Creaking shows the difficult problem of handling religion well on stage. Very few human beings are as enigmatic and fascinating as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer's life as a theologian alone is filled with ideas that can be discussed for decades and still sharply divides Christians of all denominations. Add to his remarkable writings the events of his remarkable life as an attaché for the German Abwehr during World War II who smuggled Jews out of Germany into Switzerland and passed German intelligence information to Allied Forces, and there is more than enough material for drama.
Instead the drama has gone begging. The problem with The Beams Are Creaking is there is no discussion of Bonhoeffer's ideas. There is no real discussion of anything, merely indomitable statements, speeches, exhortations. Mr. Anderson's play intends to use the character of Bonhoeffer as a mouthpiece to deliver a message about the good Christian life, why people no longer believe in the Church and how to recover the religious spirit within all humanity. And certainly, with his tour de force of acting, Matt Shimkus portrays Bonhoeffer as a courageous pacifist amid the various forces working against his ethical principles and essential morality. All this is meant to contrast clearly with the German Church whose allegiance is not to God but rather to Der Führer. But drama requires ode and antipode, strophe and antistrophe; in short, an argument. Here there is no argument. This is the realm of pure melodrama, of absolutes, of axioms.
The play takes for granted that Nazis are bad, bad people with absolutely no redeeming qualities of intellect, ethics or spirituality, and the German Church is simply their façade. As George Jean Nathan noted when discussing plays about Nazis:
"Surely not all the quiet, intelligent, studious old family-loving Germans are Jews; there must also be at least a few such in the Nazi ranks. And surely not every German, young or old, who believes in Hitlerism is a Jack-the-Ripper. Let the playwrights show the other side as well and then may the best team win!"
But there is no other side and therefore no match. The environment of Nazi Germany is omnipresent throughout the play, but Nazi ideas are presented only once and even then they are not presented as ideas of belief - which clearly they must be, as Hitler had millions of believers - but simply as "politics," as if somehow politics did not also include convictions. Even if that be true, it is poor drama. Drama needs tension. If one argues that nothing else can be done with the story I refer them to Tim Jorgenson's play, Bonhoeffer, where the author has quite fairly represented the Nazi view of the German Church in the person of Sonderkothen, the SS officer and even offered the perspective of Winston Churchill. This is dialectics. This is the lifeblood of drama. Mr. Anderson's timidity in addressing any possible counterargument unfairly removes the drama from an arena of conflict into the pulpit of a sermon. Sermons may be necessary - especially insofar as one believes that religion is missing from life - but the theater is an inefficient place for them.
It is perhaps that very problem that keeps intelligent plays about the faithful life off the stage. Perhaps there is a fear of argument, a notion that faith cannot be questioned. In a country increasingly divided into factions that, as Tocqueville put it, are joined not by opinions but merely by interests, questioning faith may seem fruitless. Yet faith thrives and strengthens when it is shaken, like a tree from which the rotten fruit fall and the healthy fruit hold fast to flourish. To quote the Catholic philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, "Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself." Doubt makes for possibility of change, and for drama. It is the duty of the dramatic artist to shake faith and strengthen the tree. The theater is, after all, religious at its roots.
