**1. Introduction**

Theatrical drama is a hybrid genre of live performance before a live audience and a story or script composed with the aim of enactment. A feature of theatrical drama that may prove pertinent to religious experience is metatheatre. Notice, in the first epigraph, how the Stage Manager speaks to us,

<sup>1</sup> Wilder 1957; Sondheim and Lapine 1986; future page citations parenthetical. As both plays employ ellipses (. . . ), my ellipses in all quotations are bracketed [. . .].

the audience, about the play in which he also performs various minor characters—here, a minister at a wedding. Since we are also witnesses at this wedding, there is a sense in which we are among the "ancestors," and so the significance of *our* role in this wedding is enlarged pretty seriously. Metatheatrical relations in the second passage are more complex. The elderly Marie gestures to a large painting in Act II, which defined the social world of Act I, a century before. She claims to have been "in" the painting as an infant, and now she plans to visit what remains of its world, her ancestors, in Paris. Although addressing Elaine, her "you'll see" addresses us as well. *Seeing*, as perception and involved discernment, is crucial to the theatrical forms and revelations of both plays.

This essay explores drama and metatheatre alongside aspects of religious dimensionality David Tracy analyzes in terms of limit experience, limit language, and limit questions.<sup>2</sup> My claim for theatrical drama will be that metatheatrical forms can correlate with 'limit dimensions,' a correlation that may prove as pertinent as ritual for linking drama with religious experience, thought, and practice.<sup>3</sup> *Metatheatre*, or theatre reflecting itself as theatre, entered the critical vocabulary with Lionel Abel (1963) in reference to what he termed *metaplays*, especially by Shakespeare, Calderon, and the modernist Luigi Pirandello.<sup>4</sup> While Abel was at pains to distinguish metatheatre from an Aristotelian view of tragic realism, I find it difficult to locate theatrical drama in any period that is not at least implicitly meta. Metatheatre also jibes with but predates modern self-reference and postmodern intertextuality, with which it is often conflated.<sup>5</sup> Play, audience, and players are always *there together*, generating reflexive references.

Here, I further define and nuance metatheatre and limit dimensions in respect to Thornton Wilder's 1938 play and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1984 musical. Just as Wilder consternated American drama by banishing naturalist staging and foregrounding metatheatrical relations, Sondheim and his collaborators "reinvented" the American musical.<sup>6</sup> The analogy is complicated, however, in that musicals have always foregrounded metatheatre through their 'numbers'—that is, their featured songs which address the audience as much as the characters in the story. Sondheim takes the integrated musical (a fusion of song with plot and character) and makes it self-reflective of its own existential realism<sup>7</sup> and, I would add, idealism, much as does Wilder's metatheatre. In particular, in *Our Town* and *Sunday in the Park with George* we enter social spaces inhabited by commonplace yet archetypal persons. Both plays culminate in moments where the audience is to discern past and present in simultaneous proximity to something like eternity. Thus, despite their different contents and forms, these are good plays for elaborating relations among metatheatre, limit experience, and religious dimensionality. If *Our Town* is a paradigm case for these relations, it may be that *Sunday in the Park* serves as a 'limit case' or, better, a 'case of limits.'
