BRATTLEBORO — Composer Paul Dedell and puppeteer Finn Campman found inspiration for their new work, “Three in the Wilderness,” in an early form of dramaturgy, or medieval mystery play.
Based on Gospel stories of the three temptations of Christ, “Three in the Wilderness” combines words, song, and dance to tell its tale. The show features original puppets designed and built by Campman, who will “bring them to life” with fellow puppeteers Helen Schmidt and Kirk Murphy.
Other performers include singers Tony Barrand and Zara Bode, violinist Kathy Andrews, and percussionist Stefan Amidon. They'll play original music and new arrangements of traditional American songs of temptation by Paul Dedell.
Campman teaches language arts and fine arts at Hilltop Montessori School. He worked at Sandglass Theater in Putney as technical director and associate artist while forming his own theater, Company of Strangers, with which he has performed and taught worldwide.
The composer of “Three in the Wilderness,” Dedell is the director of Hilltop's middle school in Brattleboro. He has worked in professional theater as a production manager, music director, and designer, and in the world of music as a guitarist and composer. He's also run a historical restoration company.
This year, together with his wife, Susan, Paul Dedell formed Winged Productions, an organization the pair say is dedicated to presenting a series of events aimed at exploring spiritual questions that lie at the heart of the human experience.
Paul explains that it was his wife's idea for Winged Productions to revive the medieval mystery play, or miracle play as it is sometimes called.
Susan notes that “mystery” comes from the Latin mysterium, which means divine miracle.
“Mystery plays are dramatic representations of scriptural incidents or the anecdotal lives of saints which developed and flourished from the 10th to 16th century in both England and continental Europe,” she explains.
Originally, clergy presented mystery plays on church premises. But that changed in the latter part of the 11th century as lay people began producing their own plays in the common language at sites removed from church property.
Paul notes: “In a time when most of thepopulation of Europe was illiterate, these dramas were a way to teach the people the stories of the Bible.”
Susan adds a detail: these often quite-primitive plays told a simple story from the Bible with a moral lesson and a social commentary. “But mystery plays could vary a lot, and while often the dramas might be serious, other times they were comedies or even musicals.”
The couple say that, at their height in the 15th century, mystery plays could be elaborate in their productions. Mechanical devices, trap doors, and other artifices were employed to portray flying angels, fire-spouting monsters, miraculous transformations, and graphic martyrdoms.
“Almost every town of some size held week-long festivals of plays, with the town craft guilds each producing their own play,” Susan adds.
Paul contends that mystery plays were the basis for modern playwriting - from Shakespeare and beyond. “Soon these plays were banned by the Church because they were too much fun for religion,” he says.
Many mystery plays have survived and some are considered literature. Finn and Dedell have written a play that Dedell suggests is quite literary. It's based on the story of Satan's three temptations of Christ in the wilderness.
“This story appears in three of the four gospels, but we have chosen to use the version in […] Matthew 4. Each version varies a little, and Matthew […] is packed with totally inventive and powerful language.”
“The passage is really short in the Bible [Matthew 4:1-11],” says Campman. “We have a narrator recite the whole thing during our show.”
In Matthew's version, as in all of them, the story is simple: After Christ is baptized, he is led by a spirit to the desert where he fasts for 40 days. Then the devil tempts (or tests) him three times, and each time he resists easily.
Campman finds little drama in this encounter, and sees a good challenge. “There is no struggle there,” he says. “After those days of fasting, Christ is purified, so when the devil tempts him, he answers quickly and clearly, as if there is no challenge for him at all.
“To put it another way, this story functions as a spiritual lesson, but not by example. Our job as as creators of a drama is figuring out a way to make it interesting to an audience.”
The writers address the iconic nature of the story by using objects and puppets to engage the spectator. Here, Christ and the devil are absolutes represented by puppets. The devil, a fallen angel, is played not so much as evil but rather as what Campman calls “a counterforce to Christ.”
“In this idealized world, these two figures are both in full being, as they do a ritualized dance,” Campman says.
And to heighten the sense of the struggle of temptation for the benefit of the audience, Campman and Dedell introduce a third presence in the wilderness: a fool, also represented by a puppet.
The fool watches from below stage as Christ resists the devil's temptations. When Christ and the devil leave the stage, the fool rises to the object of the temptation and makes his own choice. Because he is a fool, his decisions are not as perfect as Christ's.
“He comes from a simple place,” says Campman, “and as such, he will choose for instant gratification - and his choice will have consequences he has not foreseen.”
Campman says he envisions the fool as one who acts as an intermediary between the divine and the human. “For unlike Christ, he really does struggle, makes real choices with temptation, and sees the outcome of his decision.”
He adds: “Like Papageno in Mozart's 'The Magic Flute,' who is on another spiritual quest, the fool every time will make the wrong choice but every time he will be forgiven.”
Campman says he hopes that, through this character, the drama draws away from perfection “and toward something which most of us relate to more easily.”
Although Campman does not define himself as a traditional Christian, he says he finds this story engaging because it is about the power of choice. “It asks us to remember we do have a choice in life, even though we may still wonder if our action is right.”
That said, he denies the play is moralistic. Rather, he says, “it is a drama about man's right to choose.”
Dedell agrees: “The fool can show us that a bad choice need not necessarily be evil. There is a large range of gray area in choice between the poles of right and wrong.”
Although “Three in the Wilderness” stems from a story in the Bible and will be performed at St. Michael's Episcopal Church during the Lenten season, Dedell says it is hardly limited to a Christian audience.
“Any human can come,” he says, laughing. “Versions of the story of a divine figure going through a series of temptations appear in Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and many other traditions. [We] certainly deal with the sacred, but ultimately our mystery play is a celebration of humanity.”