**6. Whose Line Is It Anyway?**

With these themes in mind, I conclude with a brief analysis of the unique instance of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* where I performed as a member of its audience. As part of a gift to a friend, I attended a performance of its off-Broadway run in 2016.<sup>54</sup> This run featured celebrities playing the role of the actor on stage. The contradiction of a singular event in an ongoing commercial run off-Broadway confirms the importance of the play's production history. A single "production" (that is, the same producers—Tom Kirdahy and Devlin Elliott—with the same scenic design and props) could be realized through as

<sup>49</sup> Rejecting God is sinful, so the forsaking of the Son *as sin* by the Father could only be done by God. "This is the central mystery of the theodrama: God's heightened love provokes a heightened hatred that is as bottomless as love itself (John 15:25)" (Balthasar 1998, p. 285).

<sup>50</sup> Critics, on both von Balthasar's right and on his left, have cautioned against such swift movement from divine love to trinitarian generation to kenosis to death to descent into hell and its theological and ethical implications, as in (Tonstad 2016, p. 38).

<sup>51</sup> Here, von Balthasar, somewhat controversially, follows language drawn from Adrienne von Speyr's visionary writing. The confusing phrase "laying up"—presented in scare marks in both English and German—is a literal translation of "*Hinterlegung*", a word that carries a range of economic connotations: deposit, escrow, filing, lodgment.

<sup>52</sup> Kenotic "laying up" also refers to the Christ's veiled God-consciousness (in Fredrich Schleiermacher's turn of phrase), including von Balthasar's position that Jesus the Christ did not have access to perfect self-knowledge of himself as the Son of God throughout the experience of the Passion. On Christ's knowledge and mission, see (Balthasar 1992, p. 149ff).

<sup>53</sup> Theodramatic structures, whether in von Balthasar or Soleimanpour, are dangerous precisely in the ways they might be misread in praise of suicide. A poisoned cup also recalls the double suicide at the end of *Romeo and Juliet*, but kenotic self-sacrifice gives over for the sake of another. *Romeo and Juliet*'s ending, some "reconciliation of the hostile families over the dead bodies of their children", receives no endorsement (Balthasar 1988, p. 472). A more theodramatic conclusion—and one that follows Soleimanpour's warning to audience-rabbits who mindlessly obey political and social pressures—includes the mission to *act* differently. Such a take on theatrical suicide appears at the end of Shakespeare's play in the version described in (VanZandt Collins 2020, p. 7).

<sup>54</sup> Thanks to Jewelle Bickel for the tickets and to Justin E. Crisp with whom I saw the play and enjoyed much conversation that first formed the ideas in this essay.

many different interpretations of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* as there were performers and performances. I attended on 4 April 2016, with master improvisor Wayne Brady as our actor. I cannot remember my number (perhaps 34?), but Brady complimented the gusto and volume in my vocal projection.

Meaning cascaded onto the play through free obedience to coincidences unimaginable to the writer. When the day's date was correctly given as 4 April 2016 by a member of the audience, a voice rapidly followed proclaiming something like "the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination". The date changed the meaning of the play. The Blackness of the actor's body bestowed layers of significance onto Soleimanpour's text previously illegible (at least to me) as racialized. Should the colored rabbits of the title—white and red—point toward something about race? Do its scenes of playful cruelty to animals evoke systemic racism? Brady paused and took stock of the situation. The play (billed as a comedy) generates all sorts of what Ricoeur might call "surplus meaning" in its performance. Brady balanced a night of improvisational silliness with palpable reverence for the play's themes about the *spectacle* of death, self-sacrifice, playful freedom, and obedience. Following the production's established convention to signal when breaking from the script, Brady raised his hand to ask "Do you see what he's saying here?" The play never stopped being funny, but its meditations about the danger of absolute obedience took on specificity in surplus meanings created by the interpretive work of a famous Black actor in the United States guiding his room full of players on *this* anniversary.

One section of Soleimanpour's script enumerates seventeen "ways to commit suicide", perhaps meant to be improvised (Soleimanpour 2017, pp. 46–47). The page can be elongated and played for laughs by miming each item as a theatrical prompt. In some ways, that suicide list in *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* (far from its only reference to self-sacrifice or self-caused death) recapitulates rehearsal improvisation games that heighten melodrama to the point of absurdity. Brady refused to play the suggestions in order to underscore the seriousness of the play's questions. (He made one exception for a slip of the tongue—I cannot remember exactly, perhaps from "hunger strike" to "hunger shark" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 47)—and consented to improvise death by shark attack. Brady made a hilarious squeaking noise as he donned a mimed "swimming cap".) Brady made no special emphasis to the phrases "hanging" or "provoking the police" in his performance (Soleimanpour's suicide options number seven and seventeen, respectively). But the spectacle of a Black man's death (even if it is "very probably FAKE") to entertain the (predominantly) white audience can turn the focus of theodramatic interpretation. The text connects this singular performance with the moment of composition, but the context of the memory of King's assassination and the persistence of anti-Black racism and violence in the United States situated the play's Showtime in a third crosscurrent of history. As James H. Cone puts it, "The lynching tree is the cross in America" (Cone 2011, p. 158.) The play's freedom for interpretation beyond its textual boundaries finds in this actor, theatrically "poisoned" and sacrificed in obedience to the plot, an image of the lynched Christ.<sup>55</sup> Brady's performance brought, in M. Shawn Copeland's term, enfleshed theological meanings to rupture expectations about the play's theodramatic form (Copeland 2009).

Performance generates meanings beyond what might be presumed to be intended. These include von Balthasar's presumptions about directors that impose the politics of the present onto drama (or theology).<sup>56</sup> "Now our creaturely becoming has a share in the ineffable 'becoming' of the Divine Being" (Balthasar 1998, p. 131). The play performs its own theatrical inverse of theodramatic reality: the play stages what one dares to hope is a *virtual* (Soleimanpour's "fake") manifestation of the actor's

<sup>55</sup> Dolores Williams, by contrast, calls into question the notion of kenotic substitution of the Christ's death for the sake of the world as "surrogacy". Williams critiques the image of surrogacy that rhetorically connects the historical experience of Black women in the United States with Christian theologies of substitutionary atonement. (See Williams 1991, p. 9ff.) See also Williams discussion of the rhetorical power of theological symbols in (Williams 1993).

<sup>56</sup> "Here the director meets his hardest task: he must be committed enough to make the play relevant and at the same time civilized enough not to equate this here-and-now relevance with a narrow doctrine of society. The theatre *is* a political reality, in a lofty and noble sense, but it should not be misused for political party propaganda" (Balthasar 1988, p. 303, emphasis original).

forsakenness by the playwright in *potential* self-sacrifice. Dramatic art operates in Soleimanpour to disclose reality in the drama of history. *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* makes present a threat for theatre's madness and violence to become real. But such is the threat of free obedience to *any* script. One never knows for sure until after making choices. The play concludes with an audience exiting while the actor lays *and* lies "dead". Brady remained still, and the room of audience-players departed in a reverential silence usually reserved for the sacred.

Alejandro Garcia-Rivera argues that theological aesthetics in the tradition of von Balthasar can become a means for "lifting up the lowly" (García-Rivera 1999, pp. 187–96).<sup>57</sup> Time and bodies confront Soleimanpour's text to tell complex and ambiguous stories: Iranian political oppression, anti-Blackness in the United States, a cosmic theodrama. *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* questions the closure of theatrical or theological interpretation in obedience to a singular vision of possibility. Brady's improvisation can be one way of enfleshing what Ashon T. Crawley calls "otherwise possibility" (Crawley 2017).<sup>58</sup> But the singularity of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* carries with it the melancholy of a loss. Like von Balthasar's notion of the history of the world illumined by the fact of the Christ's incarnation, the play can only be played once as an actor without knowledge of what comes next. Now, with awareness and dramatic irony, the play opens for participation in infinite numbers of *other* credible interpretations. Players return to participate in yet another instantiation of its "eph-hapax" meaning. Anyone who has seen or read the play now can produce it with Soleimanpour's permission included in the script (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 55).<sup>59</sup>

*White Rabbit Red Rabbit* aims for some real connection via the timelessness and spacelessness of words made present. Even after its performance, *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* gestures toward creaturely invitation to resurrected life as something akin to von Balthasar's theology of all creature's ability to participate in the Christ's, the Actor-Son's death. Death's "non-time" has been engulfed by God's eternity.<sup>60</sup> Perhaps it can be better put in the language of Blanchot's "feeling of lightness" of "the infinite opening up?" when writing the experience of a halted execution: "I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. 'I am alive. No, you are dead'" (Blanchot 2000, pp. 8–9). Blanchot's phrase now applies to Brady (still alive and still working as an actor, at least at the time of my writing, still alive and still working on this essay) and to everyone else complicit in a production of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit*. So too is the confrontation between Blanchot's phrase and the work still left to do for every player in a social drama so tacitly complicit in anti-Black violence. *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* calls attention to present and active bodies, especially those whose surplus meanings fail to obey arbitrary genre expectations. The play's theodramatic Showtime displays religious and theatrical co-present and co-presence to be freeing even if already written: "I did not see you, but in a way, I met you. And I am happy. The end" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 63).

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

<sup>57</sup> An experience of the Beautiful—in community—lifts up the lowly because "The aesthetic sign 'calls' the heart to discern original Beauty so that it may orient itself towards a Beautiful end" (García-Rivera 1999, p. 190).

<sup>58</sup> For Crawley, "enfleshment [is] distinct from embodiment . . . enfleshment is the movement to, the vibration of, liberation and this over and against embodiment that presumes a subject of theology, a subject of philosophy, a subject of history" (Crawley 2017, p. 6).

<sup>59</sup> There can be no easy *legal* identification of the play's writer, called Nassim Soleimanpour, and the owner of the play's intellectual property, presumably the same Nassim Soleimanpour. The print version contradicts the play's text; its copyright page asserts "All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made . . . to Nassim Soleimanpour c/o Oberon Books. No performance may be given . . . and not alterations may be made . . . without the author's prior written consent". But is such consent not already contained within the play's text?

<sup>60</sup> "In his Resurrection, Jesus has already taken the whole of transitory time (including life and death) with him into eternal life which was the source of his constant obedience to the Father's commission. This means he also recapitulated the 'non-time' of the dead. It also means that the Risen One does not live in some 'intermediate time' before the 'end of the world'" (Balthasar 1998, p. 128, with internal references to Adrienne von Speyr). Due diligence notes that while von Balthasar also appeals to the poetics of wideness, he more frequently invokes military-sexual metaphors for God's relationship to the world and its time. For example, "God intends not only to dominate creaturely time from above but to embed it, with all its created reality, in his eternal time" (Balthasar 1998, p. 127).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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