**1. Introduction**

I performed as audience in a strange play one night in 2016, one where the actor held the script and we discovered its meaning together for the first time. *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* told its story about time, obedience, and death (Soleimanpour 2017). I witnessed what I took to be a religious drama, one where the faithful might feel compelled to kneel in deference to the real presence of God. Others, perhaps, saw a raucous improvised comedy on the edge between a piece of theatrical drama and performance art. I wonder whether Nassim Soleimanpour ever thinks about his play as a work of dramatic Christian theology? Playwright Nassim Soleimanpour both is and is not the actor's voice in *White Rabbit Red Rabbit,* on analogy to how God the Father both is and is not God the Son. Like all analogies, an appeal to trinitarian theology to explain an experimental play falls short. Soleimanpour's rabbits are not Easter bunnies.

My aim, then, is not to explain but to think about Soleimanpour's play in the company of another sort of dramatic theologian, the Swiss-Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasar and his five-volume *Theo-Drama* (Balthasar 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1998). *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* exemplifies what von Balthasar imagines to be drama's contribution to a Christian philosophical theology. This essay attempts a "theodramatic structural analysis" of Soleimanpour's play.

For von Balthasar, theatrical drama aids investigation into the frameworks that undergird theological reasoning according to Christian religious symbols in response to God's self-revelation by participants in that real and ongoing drama. Drama foregrounds freedom, action, and presence, and these are also key theological themes for interpreting God's relationship to humans and the created world. But theatre also displays how philosophical theology might be presented to and shared by a mixed and public audience. If drama promises a structure (in Balthasarian terms, a "form") for seeing theology at play, then *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* demonstrates the importance of theatrical drama

for thinking about sacrifice, obedience, and the risks of a dramatic ending already written to be sent forward beyond time. Such themes reflect "dramatic resources for theology" even without the use of overt religious symbols, reportage of religious experience, or revealed knowledge derived from faith. Sacrifice, obedience, and writing about and across time are "theodramatic" categories—deploying von Balthasar's term for theological dramatic theory—that help clarify the stakes of Soleimanpour's still ongoing theatrical experiment.

But what could possibly be meant by my phrase "dramatic ending already written to be sent forward beyond time"? How does convoluted dramatic temporality unfold theological themes of sacrifice and obedience? For those interested in von Balthasar's theodramatic analogy for Christian theology, Soleimanpour would expand a theologian's theatrical canon to include more contemporary, non-naturalistic, non-European, and non-Christian drama.<sup>1</sup> Such a reading extends Jennifer Newsome Martin's distillation of von Balthasar's "principle of generosity toward the often ambiguous cultural contribution of the world, as Balthasar sanctions the mediatory or revelatory capacity of cultural products: music, art, drama, prose literature, and poetry, even those not explicitly or exceptionally Christian" (Martin 2015, p. 201). Particularly, *White Rabbit Red Rabbit*'s metatheatrical ruminations on the drama of history dovetail nicely with von Balthasar's own sense of the world's Christian salvation drama (Quash 2005). But this essay intends more than only a Balthasarian reading of an experimental play. Instead, it also looks to Soleimanpour's play as a model for highlighting the latent religious dimensions of theatrical hermeneutics, particularly in regards to temporality and texts and performing communities.<sup>2</sup>

Any given performance of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* self-consciously underscores its uniqueness in history. Soleimanpour's script has been played hundreds of times, but each and every performance demands a new actor to discover the drama for the first time alongside the audience. The performance thus underscores a singular, unrepeatable happening in the lives of its players (actor and audience) as well as the performance history of the world.<sup>3</sup> While the same "eph-hapax" quality might be said theoretically about every theatrical performance, the theatrical conceit of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* depends on theatrical drama's formally repeatable historical singularity (Balthasar 1988, p. 21).<sup>4</sup> In other words, any given actor can only play *White Rabbit Red Rabbit*'s script once, but that script can be and has been reused time and again by new and different actors. After generally tracing some of

<sup>1</sup> There is an undeniable Eurocentrism to von Balthasar's dramatic theory as a "product of the Western world . . . although originally [the world-stage concept] arises from an awareness of the world which is at least as Asiatic as it is European. Quite apart from the Greeks, countless other peoples have been acquainted with the cultic and mythic drama: Egypt, Babylon, China, Indonesia, and Japan with its Noh plays that survive to this day". (Balthasar 1988, p. 135). But von Balthasar contends that the exclusion of other religions and cultures reflects the finitude of a single reader enmeshed in a particular culture. He puts it explicitly in the "Foreword" to the first volume of the entire trilogy of which *Theo-Drama* is the middle part: "But the author's education has not allowed for such an expansion, and a superficial presentation of such material would have been dilettantism. May those qualified come to complete the present fragment" (Balthasar 1982, p. 11). The finite human can only interpret God from the standpoint of human finitude, and this includes social location and education as well as choices regarding the sorts of arts and cultures a theologian consumes.

<sup>2</sup> Many Christian theologians have identified the productive resonance between theological interpretation and dramatic interpretation. (See, among many, Vanhoozer 2005, 2014; Vander Lugt and Hart 2015) For von Balthasar, "All theology is an interpretation of divine revelation. Thus, in its totality, it can only be hermeneutics" (Balthasar 1990, p. 91).

<sup>3</sup> On the uniqueness of historical events in theatre history, see (Balthasar 1988, p. 301).

<sup>4</sup> Repeatable historical singularity shows why von Balthasar's believes drama, an event that unfolds in time characterized by free action, must become a preferred mode of Christian theological interpretation. All the more so if there is "a biblical answer to the question" of human existence that might be "intelligible to human beings". The "human dramatic question" of existence receives God's "divine dramatic answer". God's *definitive, unique, and singular historical action* in and through the person of Jesus the Christ "is relevant in all ages". Von Balthasar coins the neologism "eph-hapax" from the Greek *eph*- (as in the "all over" quality to skin in "epidermis") and *hapax* ("once") to describe this universally applicable "unique answer to all instances of the question" posed by the drama of human existence. "Eph-hapax" alludes to the technical term from literary and biblical criticism: *hapax legomenon*, a word that appears only once in a given text. Ironically and poetically, von Balthasar's term "eph-hapax" appears three times in the five volumes of *Theo-Drama* but *only* in the single cited paragraph on (Balthasar 1988, p. 21) ("ephhapax" in the German, cf. Balthasar 1973, pp. 20–1). The paragraph clearly proceeds with the Bible in mind, but the three-fold singularity of "eph-hapax" in the text and its object of reference (i.e., the *action* of God in the Christ "most acute" when "Good Friday turns into Easter") perhaps also means to invoke von Balthasar's trinitarian Christology.

the play's themes "in abstract", I will turn to the particular performance of the play I witnessed as a participant-observer and its productive frictions between history, text, performance, and interpreting community. *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* calls attention to theatrical drama's situatedness within and in response to a much wider story, including stories that actors, audiences, playwrights, and producers may never have intended to be told.

It is best to include, however, a warning. Scholarship about contemporary theatrical drama risks spoiling the plot. For some, the "spoiler" is a kind of ruin to the fun of discovery that prematurely releases dramatic tension; for others, "spoilers" empower critique.<sup>5</sup> In the case of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit*, such "spoilers" necessarily transform the object of consideration for the uninitiated. To already know the contents of the play's next page changes the play's theatrical possibilities and player's theatrical choices. Indeed, Soleimanpour *prohibits* foreknowledge about that which is unrelentingly destined by the printed script: "Give the actor the instructions below 48 hours before their performance. DO NOT give them a copy of the play. Ask them not to see the play, nor to learn anything about it before" (Soleimanpour 2017).<sup>6</sup> Such rules do not govern the audience; it is certainly possible to see this play again and again, night after night. Soleimanpour explicitly directs this prohibition to the performer alone. But *all* first-time witnesses to *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* play along in their own role. In a qualified sense, *everyone* who does not already know the play's script shares the actor's experience of time. The end has already been written, printed, given, and held by the actor, but its contents are not yet fully revealed or realized. I contend that this structural dynamic makes the play evocative of Abrahamic religious temporality. The entire book of history has been written and remains known to God in God's providence, but the world's story unfolds with human freedom and under the author's divine command against divination and soothsaying. Obedience to tradition, too, becomes a motif in *White Rabbit Red Rabbit.* I dutifully commend my reader to follow Soleimanpour's instructions and consider watching or reading the play for the first time prior to continuing this essay to get a sense of the play without the "spoilers" necessary for my writing. Already, theatrical obedience and timing become complicated themes.
