PASSION PLAY:
Local actor in epic role
Anyone up for some Cecil B. de-Mille-sized theatre?
That’s the term used by Calgary actor Brian Jensen, who plays John the Apostle in The Canadian Badlands Passion Play, to describe the epic story of the life of Jesus that unfolds on a venue unlike any other in Alberta.
That would be a natural amphitheatre carved out of the earth in Drumheller Valley, which the show’s producers have transformed into a 2,500-seat theatre featuring natural light, that unfolds on a multi-level playing space the size of several Canadian football fields.
It needs to be big, too, to accompany a cast of more than 200 ranging in age from nine to 78. There are also horses, sheep, 30 doves — and a donkey named Zeke.
They’re outfitted in period costumes that DeMille — who famously ran Paramount Studios in Hollywood, where he oversaw the production of such swordand-sandal epics as The Ten Commandments (twice), Cleopatra and Samson and Delilah — would be impressed with.
For Jensen, a big guy with a booming baritone who does most of his acting in venues such as Theatre Calgary (he regularly performs in A Christmas Carol), Vertigo (12 Angry Men), as well as tiny Motel and the Joyce Doolittle at the Pumphouse, this Passion Play is an opportunity to perform in a much, much bigger sandbox.
“I remember auditioning,” says Jensen, “and thinking, do I want to do this? Do I want to go out to Drumheller? What is this?
“And (then),” he adds, “going to their website and it was the first time I saw it — it was a Roman (soldier) on horseback on the set — and I thought, yeah, I want to be in that show. “It’s an actor’s dream.” Jensen is one of 40 professional actors in the production, which combines Equity actors with close to 200 passionate amateurs, who remind Jensen of the beauty behind the term amateur.
“It’s people who have been doing it — some of them — for 15 years,” he says. “Some of them longer” — including 78-year-old Walter Albrecht, who is in his 20th Passion Play this year, acting alongside his four-year-old granddaughter, Starla, who’s in her first.
“The enthusiasm they bring,” says Jensen, “especially as we get closer to opening, and have runthroughs (of the show) and they realize how fast the show moves, the energy (they generate) — because is amateur, for the love of it — they just pour their hearts and souls into it.
“A lot of professional actors,” he says, “could take a cue from that.”
Despite the show’s epic quality, for an actor, it’s quite a bit more intimate.
“I might be speaking to more people,” Jensen says, “but at the same time ... it’s got to be personal and got to be truthful, or else it just comes across as fake.
“In some ways it’s as challenging as doing a show in the Joyce (Doolittle) or at Motel where there’s absolutely no hiding in a small space — people can see if you’re faking it.”
Partly, that comes from turning the character of John — the show’s script was inspired from the Gospels of John — into something more than a passive narrator, Jensen says.
“He’s a man re-examining his youth, re-examining choices he’s made, second-guessing himself.
“I’ve always seen it,” he adds, “as this is (the story of) a man who, in these circumstances thought he failed. He was there for the whole thing (the persecution of Jesus).
“He could have stopped it any time,” he says. “Why didn’t he stop it? Why?
“And it’s taken his whole life,” he says, “to realize that the whole point wasn’t stopping it because it wasn’t stoppable — the point was being there. The point was being brave enough to go into the places where Jesus was being tried, to go into dangerous places with him. And that’s the point. To be a witness.”
And make no mistake: The Passion Play, like any well-told drama, isn’t shy about taking the audience to uncomfortable places.
“There’s some brutality,” he says. “He doesn’t shy away from the dark side of what we are as individuals and as mobs. It’s quite dark in some places, but that’s kind of the point, that this light can shine into the dark places of our hearts.”
It’s a story, Jensen says, will appeal to all theatregoers.
“It’s kind of surprising,” he says. “With the Christians, it’s the gospel, but with a re-examination that’s full of spirit.
“For non-Christians,” he says, “it’s a wonderful exploration (of) the nature of drama that explores those themes, in a way that’s not postulating. It’s not preaching. It’s not that kind of experience.”
Jensen says this part is an opportunity that most of us will never have, namely, the chance to dress up, time travel, and explore the mystery of what it means to be human.
“When I (first) read the audition notice,” says Jensen, “I was like Passion Play, yeah. I want to see one of those. Just from — again — a theatre perspective, to see something on that scale.
“And then to be a part of it — and then to be right at the centre of that tornado.
“As an actor,” he says, “it’s one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever been a part of.”