Spring 2025 · Vol. 54 No. 1 · pp. 143–145
Book Review
Theatre, Peace, Justice: Collected Essays Toward a Mennonite Dramaturgy
Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2024. 273 pages.
Theatre, Peace, Justice is a compilation of essays on theatre written by Lauren Friesen, playwright, director, and David M. French professor emeritus of theatre and dance at the University of Michigan and formerly professor of drama at Goshen College. These pieces, previously published in Mennonite Quarterly Review and elsewhere, are organized in three groups. The first two chapters provide the reader with an overall theoretical framework that explores the linkage between drama and a religious existentialist condition. Friesen points out that theatre is about two distinct realities merging into one but at the service of the empirical. In the second group, chapters 3 to 5, Friesen examines the role drama has played within the context of the Mennonite community. Chapters 6 to 8 are devoted to Friesen’s profound understanding of theatre as an agent for justice.
There is a deep well from which to draw in Friesen’s work, but after some historical background, I shall restrict my comments to brief mention of three areas: theatre as a transcendent mode; theatre as a mediator of justice; and theatre as a vehicle of the comedic.
Friesen’s scholarship extends beyond a confined artistic Mennonite context, yet it exists within that context. The Mennonite community has long been recognized for its superb renditions of musical masterpieces such as those by Bach, Handle, Brahms, and Mendelssohn. In comparison with music, the Mennonite community overall has devoted little time to the dramatic arts as a fitting expression of their faith. But as Friesen notes,
Ethnic theatre has flourished because it provides a community with internal cohesion and external identity. Inside this context, theatre . . . p. 144 serves as a vehicle for memory and expression while enabling those beyond the ‘pale’ to gain knowledge of ethnic life and tradition. (53)
Within the ethnic world of the Mennonites, theatre has thrived in the shadow of their musical efforts. Yet theatre as a Mennonite artistic expression, Friesen contends, deserves prominent recognition. Presently, for example, there is the work of John Friesen, an actor and playwright from Winkler, Manitoba, who holds sixty acting credits; his play, Benched, a parallel to Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, was set to go before the camera in fall 2024.
In certain periods, drama has been more evident in the Anabaptist tradition. Mennonite dramatic writing flourished during the Dutch Golden Age (ca. 1588–1672). Mennonite playwright Joost van den Vondel was called “Holland’s Shakespeare” because of the elegance of his writing. Vondel’s efforts had a profound influence on John Milton who “borrowed heavily from this work for his epic poem, Paradise Lost” (57). Friesen also points us to the importance of one Herman Sudermann (1857–1928). Emma Goldman said of Sudermann that he was “the first German dramatist to treat social topics and discuss the pressing questions of the day” (65). His play Heimat as well as others had long performance runs in Berlin, London, Vienna, and New York, and he was heralded as the new Ibsen. After seeing a production of Sudermann’s Heimat, George Bernard Shaw remarked, “There really was something to roar about this time” (127). Interestingly, Ben Jonson as well as Voltaire referenced Anabaptists in their work: Jonson in The Alchemist and Voltaire in Candide.
Many of the dominant themes in Anabaptist/Mennonite theatre are religious in nature; they concern human relations and relationship with God. This mode of expression Friesen calls transcendent. There is a tendency in modernist theatre to fall away from this form of transcendence, and yet
the arts have the potential to contribute to religion because they explore the expression of feeling, imaginative process, sensual awareness and the distinction between surface and depth perception. When art functions in this manner it contributes to religious understanding because it participates in the journey toward fulfillment and hope. (188)
Friesen explores justice as expressed artistically in the form of a sharp critical rebuke of power structures in the shape of a Brechtian satire. Friesen explains how use of the comedic device in theatre aligns with such satire when the narrative voice speaks up for justice. Theatre is a social drama transformed into a stage drama that articulates the community’s shared p. 145 values and strategies to maintain a just and civil society (as Victor Turner notes in his seminal article, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them”).
Friesen’s treatment of the comedic is well-illustrated by a brilliant discussion of Friedrich Durrenmatt, the Swiss dramatist and essayist, who takes the story of the Münster rebellion and transforms it into an Anabaptist play of the darkest satire. Friesen notes that the script, a grotesque comedy (“Black Comedy”), pulls out all the stops of the grotesque, which translates into an attack on injustice.
Theatre, Peace, Justice is a serious work of profound scholarship. It deserves to be required reading in university drama departments and especially in Mennonite colleges and universities that have come to understand there is a sacred quality to drama. Drama in the context of faith and the Christian faith in particular has always been linked to the sacred. It isn’t without cause that Catholics regard the celebration of the Mass and Eucharist as sacred drama. For this reason, Friesen’s book deserves a deep reading. Indeed, as Friesen points out, the reasoning behind his scholarship is to reveal that works that are not religious in an obvious way do indeed portray the human condition and express something of the divine presence in the human condition (252).
