Akin to Death: Mary Stuart

I recently saw a fantastic production of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Adapted and directed by Mark Jackson, the language was clear and direct without losing the dense, poetic force of the 19th century original. It was blessed with a slick contemporary design and actors to die for, and so expertly paced that the two hours traffic never lost its urgency.

This play chronicles the last few days in the life of Mary Queen of Scots before she's put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. The confrontation between two immensely powerful queens in a deeply patriarchal world is fascinating, and the one scene in which they share the stage is the keystone of any production of this play. Lucky to even get an audience with Elizabeth in the first place, the imprisoned Mary's passionate nature gets the better of her. Instead of begging for mercy, she calls her cousin the Queen a bastard and reiterates her claim for the English throne saying, in Jackson's powerful translation: "I am your king!"

Ooops. Not the way to avoid a beheading.

From that moment on, while our sympathies lie with Mary and we hope for her rescue, we know she's doomed. Death, like the presence of the actress who never leaves stage, looms.

Playwright Jean Genet, in his letters to his director Robert Blin, says, "If we maintain that life and the stage are opposites, it is because we strongly suspect that the stage is a site closely akin to death, a place where all liberties are possible."

Schiller's play is about bondage and freedom. The chains that bind us sometimes take the form of politics, sometimes of patriarchal systems, sometimes of the will of the public, and sometimes they're just the outcome of the tangled mess we've made of our life. Death is sometimes a gateway to freedom, to a place where "all liberties are possible."

In Schiller's version, Mary is given her last rites in secret from her Lord Chamberlain, who has been ordained as a priest, before she mounts the scaffold. In Jackson's production however, all of Mary's attendants have been cut, leaving her desperately alone in Elizabeth's world. The last rites scene is done solo: this passionate, beautiful force that is about to be extinguished plays her own father confessor.

The hope for absolution - the dream of utter grace - lies somewhere at the border of death. At this boundary between the freedom offered by the void and the meaning that only exists in the land of life's living interpreters, forgiveness is possible.

I'm not a Catholic, so no personal mystic associations arise for me as I watch the actress playing Mary take the imaginary host into her mouth. But I feel the dream of transubstantiation as I'm held spellbound by her performance. In the mouth of the stage, the host of the actress's body becomes Mary Stuart, becomes Christ, resonates with every person facing the imminent truth of their own death, overcome with longing to return to communion with the dark quiet everything that grows closer and closer with each breath.

Genet called for a theatre that was "so strong and dense that it will, by its implications and ramifications, illuminate the world of the dead." He called on his artistic collaborators to "break down whatever separates us from the dead." I believe he'd be proud of how this beautiful production reaches a quivering hand out across that boundary.