Wednesday, November 18, 2009

THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS from Nag Hammadi have apparently been adapted into a musical:
Mary of Magdala” a thought-provoking musical

by Elysia Conner (Casper Journal)
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 4:54 PM MST

As the apostle Peter lowers his friend from the cross, he should show understanding and redemption, playwright James Olm said. No, director Richard Burk countered, the redemption shouldn’t come for another three days. A theological discussion ensues, with a few opinions from other collaborators.

It’s just another night of rehearsal for “Mary of Magdala,” written by Casper College music professor James Olm and New York actor Shad Olsen.

They aren’t just rehearsing for the performance; they are creating the piece in a developmental workshop.

The musical depicts the life of Mary Magdalene and Jesus based on the Gnostic Gospels found in Egypt in 1945, Olsen said.

[...]
That said, there is very little about the content of the musical:
The play will be controversial, Olm predicted.

“I would just want audiences to come with an open mind and an open heart and be ready to think differently about things that you’ve thought for a long time,” Olsen said.

According to the lead actors, it’s a love story, a love through God’s love and through wisdom.

“It’s about unconditional love,” Susan Burk said, who plays the wise midwife who mentors Mary as a young woman and encourages her to follow her destiny.

It’s also a story about the patriarchal society and how unjust it was to women and how unjust it was to history.

“She almost lives in me now,” Olm said “She has suffered for 2,000 years unjustly, being unjustly portrayed.”
We also learn that – besides Mary – Jesus, the apostle Levi (i.e., Matthew?), Pilate, the high priest Annas, the soldier who crucifies Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and some demons are among the cast of 14. I see nothing much of the actual content of the Gnostic Gospels in the description and it may be that it has been homogenized away into a p.c. God-is-love-and-hates-patriarchy message. It would be fun to see a performance that took the demiurgic anti-cosmism and docetism of the Gnostic texts seriously, but that may be too much to ask.

Related item on The Last Temptation of Christ (which does play with such themes) here.