Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 2002

Norman A. Bert

Theatre is Religion

At the beginning of a recent introduction to theatre course, one of my general education students posed the question, "Is theatre an art or is it just entertainment?" In its naïve way, this query raised a broader question, one that has been asked and answered repeatedly ever since Socrates: Just what is theatre, any way? How we answer this question impacts the way we think about theatre and the way we practice it. I'd like to propose an answer.

Before doing so, however, I'd like to point out that this question doesn't seem to trouble my colleagues in the "pure" arts—visual art and music. Oh, they may wonder where art ends and craft begins, but what art itself is doesn't come up. No one, for instance, asks if art is really a form of poetry or if it, instead, is a kind of music. At least not until words become a part of the visual or aural artifact. Then it becomes a problem. Which may suggest that theatre's constant identity crisis may come from theatre's hybrid nature.

Regardless of the reason for the persistent question which seems to side-step any permanent solution, I would like to argue that theatre is religion and that it is as religion—not as poetry, rhetoric, or entertainment but as religion—that theatre is best understood, practiced, and criticized.

Before developing this thesis, I'd like to survey, briefly, other answers that have been given to the question of theatre's identity. Aristotle, to begin with, considered theatre to be a form of poetry. Productive as this concept was for those of us who make it our business to analyze scripts, it led Aristotle (and his disciples) to separate the dramatic and theatrical elements of the art to the considerable disadvantage of the latter. His statement that "Spectacle . . . of all the parts [of drama] is the least artistic"(1) continues, understandably, to offend designers, technicians, directors, and actors and to embarrass those of us who otherwise admire Aristotle.

Horace further fouled the waters by his utile dulce formula that set theatre wobbling unsteadily on the two legs of rhetoric and entertainment, two legs that seem eternally bereft of a [page 2] unifying pelvis. The idea that theatre exists to teach and to please raises more problems than it solves: What does theatre teach, and how does it do so? Does a play exist for its themes? Because of them? And how does theatre entertain? And is entertainment—diversion— a worthy goal?

Medieval and early renaissance theorists, balancing precariously on one of Horace's legs, treated theatre as a subspecies of rhetoric. In this understanding, theatre's message was usually perceived in discursive, moralistic terms, and the message came to be valued over—and at the expense of—the medium. It would eventually become the fate of Thomas Rymer and his fellow neo-classicists to demonstrate—by their insistence upon the rhetorical nature of drama—how ridiculous this viewpoint could be.

The nineteenth-century realists reconceptualized theatre as science—a branch of sociology, medicine for human society. In their pursuit of medicinal theatre they attacked middle-class values and raised the fourth wall between the stage and the auditorium, with the result that they alienated their primary audience and drove them into the open arms of movie producers.

Meanwhile, Americans opted for Horace's other leg and pursued theatre as commercial entertainment. By so doing, we made escapism a virtue and treated theatre as a market commodity rather than an art form.

None of these understandings of theatre—as poetry, as rhetoric, as entertainment, education, scientific investigation, or industry—provided a suitable basis for the understanding, practice, and criticism of theatre. Realizing that theatre is actually religion does provide such a basis.

Let me explain what I mean by "religion." Simply defined, religion is the creation and reenactment of myth for the purpose of realizing—in both senses of that word as "perceiving" and "making actual"—and celebrating the relationship of human beings with supra-human, spiritual forces. In this sense, the human endeavor we call "religion" parallels two other major human endeavors—work and philosophy. Each of these three endeavors, philosophy, work, and religion, contribute importantly to human life. Philosophy (in both its pure form and its younger incarnation as science) understands and explains nature and human experience; work [page 3] manipulates nature and creates and distributes goods; and religion relates human beings to spiritual forces beyond their control.

A word about those super-human, spiritual forces: They certainly include the deity or deities, those spiritual personages or forces that transcend time and space. But they should also be understood as including more temporal and immanent entities such as the Zeitgeist, the organizational power we call natural law, the world-wide network of consciousness that Teilard de Chardin called the nousphere, and perhaps even national and ethnic "spirits" such as "el Raza." These forces form the context for our lives, and from the beginning of human consciousness we have used religion to relate to them. For some two thousand years, we've used theatre as a tool in this religious endeavor.

Religion works by creating and reenacting myths. Myths, very simply, are the complex of what we know and believe about ourselves and our world, perceived and expressed as stories. Because they capsulize our understanding of ultimate reality, myths—far from being untrue fables—are essentially true. As Christopher Vogler put it in his Writer's Journey, "A myth, as Joseph Campbell was fond of saying, is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching profound truth".(2)

We honor the level of truth in myths by calling them "sacred"—not because they are connected with any specific, formal religion, because they need not be so connected, but because they penetrate to the heart of what we know and believe. As philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, "Myth narrates a sacred history . . . . [M]yth . . . becomes the exemplary model for all significant human activities . . . . The myth is regarded as a sacred story, and hence a 'true history,' because it always deals with realities".(3)

And while myths may be communicated through narration, formal religions have typically communicated them most characteristically by reenacting them. Whether these reenactments are as simple as a Baptist communion service, as stylized as a Catholic high mass, as imitative as a Native American hunting dance, as sensuous as a Canaanite fertility ceremony, [page 4] or as violent as a Santeria sacrifice, they underline the basic dramatic nature of myth. Judaistic scholar Raphael Patai wrote: "Myths are dramatic stories that form a sacred charter either authorizing the continuance of ancient institutions, customs, rites, and beliefs . . . or approving alterations".(4) (Emphasis added.)

So, to recapitulate: Religion relates us to the supra-human forces that surround us by creating and reenacting myths. Theatre, no matter how "secular" its content, is in this sense of the word, religion.

The many parallels that exist between theatre and formally practiced religion justify considering theatre as religion. To begin with, theatre has all the parts of religion. At the core of formal religions lies the cultus, the system of religious performance. The cultus reenacts the myth through words or liturgy and actions or ritual. The personnel who execute the cultus, the clergy or priests, frequently wear specific clothing to emphasize their function (vestments), and use various objects to perform the rituals—vessels, symbolic weapons, wands, censers, candles, and the like. The priests execute the cultus on behalf of, and frequently in the presence of members of the community, the worshippers. And the cultus typically takes place in a sacred space constructed or at least enhanced for the purpose, the temple.

It takes no mental leap to find each of these elements present also in theatre. The myths executed in the theatre take the form of plays, and they are performed through spoken word and action—dialogue and business—,which parallel religious liturgy and ritual. In place of clergy, the theatre uses actors who wear the vestments we call costumes and utilize props in place of the tools of religious ritual. The whole performance takes place in the presence of, and on behalf of a community, the audience, and typically occurs in a theatre specifically constructed for the purpose-—the temple of this religious endeavor.

As the myths are central to religion, so plays are central to theatre, and further, the manner in which plays come into being parallels the creation of myth in religion. Religious myths—as well as liturgy and rituals—are created, imported, lost, phased in and out, and modified. While this mobility of myth may be less apparent in religions of the book like Judaism, Islam, and Christianity it nevertheless functioned in them at pre-written stages. And even these religions whose basic myths are frozen in scriptures constantly reinterpret them in the [page 5] oral retelling. In a similar manner, each season of theatre creates new plays while borrowing, reviving, reinterpreting, and laying aside others. In both theatre and religion, the principles that govern the interplay of inertia and change in material are the same—the received tradition and the current needs of the community.

Which brings us to the matter of the community: Like religion, theatre is practiced in a community for a community. Rarely in either religion or theatre does the entire population of an area attend the reenacted event; but those who do attend come out of the larger community, bring with them a consciousness of the larger community, and return to the larger community where, subtly or overtly, they share the effect of their participation in the cultic event. Just as religion typically requires or implies the presence of worshippers, so theatre requires the simultaneous presence of performer and audience.

The degree to which the laity actually participates in the cultic event—whether in formal religion or in theatre—shifts depending on the time, the place, and the culture. Worshippers in present day charismatic, African-American congregations contribute significantly to their services both vocally and physically, while medieval Catholics might step into the church only momentarily to observe the Elevation of the Host before going on about their business. Elizabethan audiences participated enthusiastically in the presentational plays they attended, but neoclassicism and realism diminished audience participation by eliminating asides and soliloquies and by establishing the fourth wall convention. But regardless of the nature of lay participation, theatre parallels religion in the importance the community plays in the artistic event.

Furthermore, theatre, like religious cultus, always takes place in the present. In religious worship, the point of the liturgy and ritual is to reenact the myth in such a way that it becomes part of the worshippers' current experience. In similar fashion, regardless of the time frame of the events portrayed on stage, the audience perceives them as occurring in the present. As Susanne Langer pointed out, theatre differs in this respect from fiction: In reading a novel—even one written in the present tense—we perceive the events as having taken place in the past.(5) Theatre has a religious immediacy. It should not be surprising, then, when plays that [page 6] deal with formal religious content, such as the medieval cycle plays, use anachronism to reinforce the audience's experience of the myth as current event.

I wish to dedicate this paper to two of my teachers: Norman J. Fedder, who taught me how to express my religion in dramatic terms and Sam Smiley, who taught me how to distill a play’s universal truths from its dramatic structures.

Norman Bert teaches playwriting at Texas Tech University. His published books include Theatre Alive! and One-Act Plays for Acting Students. Before turning his hand to theatre, he graduated from the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries and served his denomination as a pastor and as a missionary in Zambia.