‘I think that the aesthetic and ethical end of art is ultimately charitable – art is meant to be politically, financially and spiritually free.’ Erik Ehn

Somewhere along the way of the project I picked up a second hand copy of The Saint Plays by Erik Ehn and as I read them I began to wonder what have we got here? From the Preface to the Song for the End the writing was both disorienting and fascinating, not quite what I was expecting.  Ehn described his work in the preface: ‘The Saint Plays are as broke, broken down and broken through as I can make them. The theology: Big Cheap Mysticism – here are little and poor vanishing acts.’ They are poetic, strange, elusive, alive, a small selection of his attempts to explore the lives of as many of Catholic saints as he can – ‘exploded biographies’ he calls them.

Others have spoken of his work as ‘abstract, experimental and avant-garde’ and Ehn once added ‘nutty’ to help the discussion along. He then went on to say that he thought these words were legitimate and that even people who knew him or knew the work really well had ‘a hard time cracking the nut.’ He suggested that if he could write more clearly he would, ‘but this is just how I write. I’m trying to write in a pre-verbal kind of language. I’m trying to write the character of the mind before it finds its language, the place where events are stored and where we create from.’

It’s one reason why his plays may be challenging to perform, but someone acquainted with Ehn’s work elaborated on this when he wrote to me about a performance of some of The Saint Plays that he’d directed, at one point saying the show went very well, but it was definitely too much for a few people. It seems one reviewer called it, ‘a night of earthly magic’, while a second called it, ‘another bizarre chapter to theatre history.’  This range of response is not unexpected when it comes to Ehn’s work, but for the director ‘the process of working on the show and living with these ideas/characters/plays was probably the most rewarding artistic journey of my life.’

In time I came to realize there are quite a few people involved in theatre in the US and elsewhere who find his work to be transforming and useful in this way – it opens up possibilities. You can see that in his writing, his teaching – he’s head of the playwriting program at Brown University – and his wide ranging theatrical involvements. What he’s interested in is an ‘openness to the world … and the capacity to receive inspiration…’  He once spoke of this openness, in the context of his using St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross in a playwriting seminar, suggesting that, ‘maybe I can open alternatives to the straightforward.’ What he’s hoping to do, as an artist, is ‘to make way for the world as the world is expressing itself’; which means ‘you’re not trying to make room in the world for your personal expression.’

And here’s how this openness might play out, working with him in the rehearsal room: ‘We clear our minds and allow images and questions in, then write on the images, our words spilling out messy and free: constantly opening to image, impulse, intuition, gesture, rhythm, imagination.’

‘Open them up for crying out loud’ has been a catchcry of 4 Mysteries Project from the beginning and the work of Erik Ehn has helped us be alert to it. The hope has been that we might discover different ways of opening up the gospels ‘because the usual ways of responding to them are so limited.’ More specifically, Ehn once suggested what matters is ‘how the gospels live inside the new writer or collective: or how the gospels live through the new writer or collective.’  Then he added a rider: ‘Too often we show up with what we’re making or doing, instead of nakedly present; without presence, in utter humility, art is bourgeois.’

Integral to this openness and his sense of theatre as a way of life, is his instinct for connecting up people, histories, disciplines, interests.  Quite a few people have spoken of it, among them the playwright and teacher Mac Wellman who once noted that ‘he was always doing things for other people, always connecting people to each other and to their own best ideals.’ He went on to say: ‘Maybe he’s one of the few theatre people I know who actually has a world ethic.’ There are many instances of what this might mean, but take the 2010 project in Brooklyn where he was involved with the Foundry Theatre,  inviting ‘theater artists to give food away to a community service organization.’ Ehn suggested that for him this was playwriting: ‘It is social collaboration. It is focused on an idea, which is charity. It is in the moment.’ Then he discovered in this action a question that bears upon all his work: ‘Item for item it is made of the same stuff that any theatrical performance is made of: how can we be together and give of ourselves? That’s the essential question in theater.’  It’s the question at the heart of his other involvements in the Tenderloin Opera Company, Arts in One World, The Engaged Scholars initiative at Brown, and his ongoing engagement in Rwanda and Uganda.

I like to think saints are involved in this sort of connecting up and that it’s why religious traditions exist, to join heaven with earth. This is one reason why you might write Saint Plays, and it’s why you get a linking, in his theoretical writing, of a 20th century American saint with the alternative theatre scene in the United States.  Someone involved in it commented that this link was helpful because no one had come up with any reasonable answer as to why you would devote your life to working in the non-profit theatre in the US.  He noted Ehn had ‘made a connection that would never have occurred to anyone else, going back to the liberal Catholic tradition of Dorothy Day. That theatre really needs to be considered as a spiritual exercise, not as a job.’  The tradition referred to involves prayer, the making of peace and the practice of caring for people – offering them food and hospitality – which Erik Ehn got to know first hand during the 1980s.  It’s a reminder that, for him, the reference to theatre as a spiritual exercise means it’s also a hands-on experience, a practical spirituality, and his previous reference to ‘Big Cheap Mysticism’ is part of that.  It means ‘he’s as interested in the process of theatre as he is in the process of writing for theatre.’

A remarkable instance of this sort of interest and the different connections that emerge from it, was the 2012 performance of Soulographie: Our Genocides, a commemorative cycle of plays, at La MaMa NYC. It involved 17 plays by Erik Ehn, written over the last twenty years, that looked at ‘20th century America from the point of view of its relationship to genocides in the States (the Tulsa Race Riot), in East Africa (Rwanda, Uganda), and Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador)’. They were produced independently throughout the United States, and in Poland, Rwanda and Uganda by small companies that had some relationship with Ehn, before coming together at La MaMa to be performed through a week, then in a marathon, over a weekend. It was quite an event with the performances opening onto a range of other events which aimed ‘to create channels of dialogue through art and conversation … as well as the creation of art and poetics as acts towards social change.’ What happened was the fruit of relationships built up over many years and Ehn has suggested it was an attempt to develop a ‘new producing model … something that’s broad in structure, social in purpose, and familial in medium.’

If opening and connecting up characterize his work so too does this – keeping the mystery in everything.  It comes from something said by Greta Gundersen, formerly the director of a visual and performing arts centre in Brooklyn.  She thought his dramatic voice was not so much religious or spiritual, but philosophical, ethical, an undogmatic voice which asked an audience to ‘really think and evaluate their own moral responsibility in the world.’  She concluded by saying: ‘He keeps the mystery in everything.’

To be alive to the mystery is one of the challenges with any reading of the gospels, which is why this project calls them mysteries.  As the FAQs suggest: ‘Not in the Dan Brown sense … not the great unsolved or medieval mystery plays – what it means is there’s more to this than meets the eye.’ It may come as a surprise to some of us, but riddles, paradox, the unspeakable, are all part of the language of the gospels so that things aren’t always as they seem. Central to this is the person of Jesus, who is stranger than we care to imagine. At one point in the FAQs he’s spoken of in this way: ‘A living God astride both the spirit world and human world, at moments he can be quite frightening. Everything he does is paradoxical and unsettling. Everything he says is that.’ This is one element of the mystery which deepens as he becomes we – as Jesus’ identification with small groups becomes a ‘he/we’ that takes shape differently through each gospel – a transformation that’s at the heart of the project.  It’s why we call them re-creation stories. We need to be reminded of this and guard against wanting to make the gospels and Jesus too familiar, too straightforward, so that we might enter the world the gospels imagine. It’s a way of learning to respect the ‘mystery in everything’ and beginning to live in it – then inviting others to share in this. It’s why I refer to the mystery of the charity of Erik Ehn. It’s not that you’d want to write like him – you can’t – but you might be encouraged by his work to imagine other possibilities.