It wasn’t always so, though. When Archbishop John Hughes founded what was then St. John’s College in 1941, the school was a haven of sorts in a city that was hostile to Irish immigrants, like him.

This year, in honor of the University’s Dodransbicentennial celebration, Fordham Theatre will perform four plays on its main stage that feature characters who, like Archbishop Hughes, cope with displacement—by creating their own reality.

The four plays that will be staged at Pope Auditorium are:

Electric Baby by Stefanie Zadravec, directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh
Oct. 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14
Cockfight by Peter Gil-Sheridan, FCLC ‘98, directed by Anna Brenner
Nov. 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19
The Luck of the Irish by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Geoffrey Owens
Feb. 23, 24, 25, March 1, 2, 3
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, directed by George Drance, S.J.
April 5, 6, 7, 20, 21, 22

Theatre program director Matthew Maguire said that the four plays share a comic sensibility; this year, there are no tragedies in the repertoire.

“Since it’s Fordham’s celebratory year, we wanted to celebrate with comedy, but comedy with teeth, and comedy that would be meaningful,” he said.

As is custom, students played a large part in the selections, which were discussed at five forums last year. Maguire noted that Electric Baby was brought to his attention by a student who’d seen it performed at the Two River Theater in New Jersey. The play is about a Nigerian and a Romanian immigrant who shape the lives of the Americans around them.

In Cockfight, a character is displaced both in the literal sense, having fled from Cuba, and in the emotional sense as well, as a gay boy trying to come out in a world dominated by his father’s machismo.

Luck of the Irish is the story of a black family who moves into a white neighborhood through an arrangement with an Irish-American ghost-buyer. They, too, are both literally and emotionally displaced, because they are made to feel that they don’t belong.

And in the classic The Winter’s Tale, Hermione is driven from her home by her husband’s insane jealousy, and Perdita, their daughter, is abandoned in a foreign land at birth.

In addition to striving to bring quality roles to students, Maguire said he also strives to stage plays whose creators are available to collaborate. This season, playwrights Peter Gil-Sheridan and Stefanie Zadravec will be present for rehearsals. As a graduate of Fordham’s theatre program, Gil-Sheridan, who now heads the MFA Playwriting Program at Indiana University, is a true success story, said Maguire.

“Their presence influences the way our students are going to get work down the road, because they’ve been in the room with these working artists. They may think a good role is John Proctor in The Crucible, and of course it is, but for an actor, it’s even better if you get to step into a role for the first time with the playwright,” he said.

“A good role is one where you can change people’s lives. Social justice is what this school is all about, and so our season emanates a sense of social justice.”

The play, *mark, is a solo performance of the Gospel of Mark, the oldest of the four Gospels, which was traditionally performed aloud—from start to finish—to give courage to what was then a “community of quiet rebels.” Father Drance will tell the Gospel under the guise of a street artist, in a reflection on early Christians’ use of graffiti—such as the ichthys, or fish symbol—to indicate where they could safely meet.

George Drance, S.J., performs in *mark  (contributed photo)

The play “allows you to have a little bit of a sense of the underground nature of what Christianity was in the first century,” Father Drance said. “Street art culture today is still a little bit of an underground movement. So using that equivalency, it’s kind of as if the world and the experience of first-century Christians were happening today.”

The asterisk in *mark symbolizes, among other things, another bit of ancient graffiti that it resembles: the first letters of Jesus Christ’s name, in Greek, superimposed on each other, he said.

The play is meant to capture the original urgency of the Gospel’s words.

“I’ve always been intrigued by the experience of what it must have been like to have heard the Gospel for the first time, and knowing that Mark was a Gospel that was traditionally performed, it’s always been kind of a desire of mine to explore that,” said Father Drance, who conceived the idea for the performance.

The show will take place Thursday through Sunday for three weeks, beginning Thursday, May 29, at the LaMaMa First Floor Theatre, located at 74A East 4th Street in Manhattan, between Bowery and 2nd Avenue. The show starts at 7:30 on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday.

Tickets are $18 general admission or $13 for students, and can be purchased at theLa MaMa website, or by calling its box office at (646) 430-5374 or (212) 475-7710.

The play is presented by La MaMa E.T.C., a world-renowned cultural institution devoted to supporting theatre artists, in association with the Magis Theatre Company’s Logos Project. Father Drance is the theatre company’s artistic director.

The show is directed by Luann Jennings, founder and director of the Church and Art Network, with original music by award-winning composer Elizabeth Swados.
— Chris Gosier

Members and former members of the Fordham Theater community turned out for a faculty fundraiser on March 29 to help raise money for the annual Fordham Alumni Theatre Company production, held on the Lincoln Center campus each summer.

Theatre faculty acted on stage while former students aped their favorite (or least favorite?) faculty members in a roast that was all in good fun. Displaying a unique talent, Elizabeth Margid, teacher of acting, took on student challengers in several games of ping pong, and emerged (largely) victorious.

Performing from some of their favorite plays are, from top to bottom: Chad McArver, director of design and production, reading from “I Am My Own Wife;” voice teacher Elena McGhee and acting coach Tina Benko, doing a scene from “Top Girls”; Eva Patton, teacher of acting, in an original autobiographical monologue, and; a faculty ensemble featuring George Drance, S.J., artist in residence, Patton, Margid, and Matthew Maguire, chair of the Theatre Program, in a scene from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” (Photos by Kate Melvin)

J.S.

Those were among the sticky questions that a panel debated on March 2 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“Religion and Madness: Spirituality and Pathology,” a forum co-sponsored by the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and Fordham Theatre, dwelled on the prominent role that madness plays in theatre and—to a much more controversial degree—in religion.

A packed Pope Auditorium was treated to scenes from the four plays in Fordham Theatre’s 2009/2010 season, dubbed a “Season of Madness” because of the thematic thread that ran though the pieces. They included: The Day Room, Mrs. Packard, Sarita and Hamlet, which will be performed in April.

Matthew Maguire, director of the theatre program, moderated the panel, which featured:

• George Drance, S.J., Fordham’s artist-in-residence and author of Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003),

• James Jones, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and professor of religion at Rutgers University, and

• Broadway actress Julie White, who won a 2007 Tony for her performance in The Little Dog Laughed.

The scenes provided a jumping-off point to discuss madness as a social construct. The panelists also debated whether the same external forces that drive a person mad might also lead to a state of spiritual bliss in another person, provided the second person had a stronger psyche.

Father Drance noted that in contemporary culture, questions of madness and spirituality are viewed primarily through the lens of empiricism, which relies on observable evidence to frame reality.

“We tend to reject that which goes against what can be verified empirically,” he said. “In our culture, we find ourselves mistrusting unverifiable aspects of our lives. Imagination, emotion, intuition and revelation—these are precisely the places where religion and madness play.”

Jones said that symptoms of madness can be understood as cultural constructions.
“Is it madness to encounter the blessed Virgin Mary? Is it madness to be aware of the presence of, and converse with, a beloved spouse or parent who died recently? Is it madness to pray for a sick person with a profound expectation that they will recover?” he asked. “Forty years ago, the local family shrink was taught that such things were signs of illness and required medical intervention.”

He also wondered if theatre can be a container for a maddening impulse that otherwise might have been channeled exclusively toward religion. Regardless, he urged more compassion for those on the ends of the mental health continuum.
“Mental health and pathology, like physical health and pathology, exist on a continuum that we all move back and forth along,” he said.

“Under stress, trauma and shock, we may all slide toward the pathological end,” he said. “If we get enough social support, perhaps even a spiritual discipline, we might move toward the healthy end.”

It was Maguire, however, who made the most explicit connection between the religious fervor behind the ritual and sacraments of the Mass, and the madness inherent in drama, which is the driving factor of a theatre production.

“When I learned as an altar boy about transubstantiation, I realized that there was a mystic difference between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics believe that the bread and the wine literally become the flesh and blood of Christ,” he said.

“I think that’s what happens with the stage. There’s a transubstantiation—that what we put on the stage is just lumber and hardware and Fordham theatre students. But because we believe, it transforms, and it becomes the thing itself. We impart in a mystical action, and it’s so important that the audience is here, because it’s a communal event.”

“Fordham is fortunate to be able to celebrate the conclusion of the Ignatian Anniversary Year with the world premiere of a major work by Daniel Berrigan, S.J.,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “Since Father Berrigan is the most accomplished Jesuit poet of our time, I am confident that this poetic tribute to Saint Ignatius, Saint Francis Xavier and Blessed Peter Faber will long be remembered as the most significant artistic achievement of the Ignatian Year.”

Father Berrigan has combined his life as an outspoken, internationally renowned peace activist with a career as a teacher and prolific poet. He has published 15 volumes of poetry and his first book of poems,Time Without Number (MacMillan, 1957), won the prestigious Lamont Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was nominated for the National Book Award. In 1989, Father Berrigan received the Pax Christi USA Pope Paul VI Teacher of Peace Award for outstanding work in promoting the culture of peace and non-violence. His new poem commemorates three historic events in the Jesuit community: the 500th anniversary of the births of St. Francis Xavier and the Blessed Peter Faber, and the 450th anniversary of the death of St. Ignatius Loyola.

The dramatic production of Father Berrigan’s poem will be produced, directed, and acted by George Drance, S.J., artist-in-residence, Department of Theatre and Visual Arts.

– Janet Sassi