There are many reasons the pope is good material for a play, but the only one that counts is his funny hat. Of course, he does not know his hat is funny. That would kill the joke.
Yet writer/director and Tufts alumnus Jeremy Goldstein has not only two Pope Hats in his new play, Pope and Anti Pope, but he also has seven different actors playing the Pope. Well, Popes. That's part of the problem and the gimmick of the play: In 1378, the Italian cardinals returned the papacy to the city of Rome after 100 years of papal residence in France. The French, not to take a challenge lightly, went ahead and elected their own pope, beginning the Great Schism, a time when two (and occasionally three) popes lived in Europe and frequently excommunicated each other.
Goldstein has taken this bizarre chunk of history and twisted the knife a bit more. The French Pope is actually Emperor Caligula (Richard Arum, a strong local talent), the ancient and sick Roman tyrant who is still very much alive and insane. The play starts with a war of words: "Dear Urban," Caligula dictates, "It may interest you to note that the pope resides in Avignon and his name is Caligula. I am Caligula. I reside in Avignon. Thus, I am the pope." No one is more surprised to hear this than the anti-Pope, Urban (Tufts alum Jeremy Wang Iverson).
"There's definitely a thought in the back of my head that gee, people might be offended by this," says Goldstein, "We take pretty hefty liberties with history, and the four-letter Anglo-Saxons abound, but I'd be very surprised if anyone who watches from beginning to end finds the moral to be anything less than uplifting." He stops. "Well, maybe uplifting is too strong. How about nice? It's a nice ending."
The play has a feeling of casual absurdism, as the Pope(s) kill and poison their way to wearing the funny hat. The cast includes Alumni Chris Walters and Senior Evan Weinberg as a father-and-son team working for Pope Urban, Jonathan May as Caligula's very nervous attendant and Alum T.J. Derham as yet another not-quite-dead-but-still-insane figure of history.
Goldstein's play weaves anachronistic fact and fiction to deliver some great one-liners. Much is made of characters looking at their wrists for the time, only to learn that the watch hasn't been invented yet. When someone asks Caligula how he can be a thousand years old and still kicking, his response ranks somewhere in the history of one-liners. Also, the play has a nice twist at the end, a sort of Pope face-off over who gets to finally wear the funny hat.
The play is followed by another piece, a shorter and more serious scene called The Confession of Emmanuel. Chris Walters shines as a troubled young Jewish man who has come to give confession to a Catholic priest (Richard Arum again) to spite his mother. Initially funny but quietly moving, the piece is different in tone but similar in content. Both pieces ask questions and poke fun at religious conventions that, according to Goldstein, no longer seem to apply in today's world.
"My own religious background isn't that ambiguous," says Goldstein. "I'm Jewish, I'm not some weird kind of hyphenate thing. I just happened to go to Catholic High School, so that's affected how I look at things. It's colored a lot of what I'm interested in."
"The idea has been with me for a while -- when I first learned about the Great Schism, when I heard that at one point there were two popes, even three, that excommunicated each other, I knew -- just KNEW I had to do something with that."
Yet for all the real issues it addresses, the play goes back to the simple and funny idea of grown men killing each other over the right to wear the hat. And every character gets to wear the hat... even if the confirmation is followed directly by a knife in the back.
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