Canadian Mennonite
Volume 9, No. 10
May 16, 2005
Passion Play Jesus
Winkler, Man.
At first glance, Don Martens might seem an unlikely candidate for a major role in any sort of theatrical production. The mild-mannered Winkler resident is married with two children, has a career in human resources and attends Winkler Mennonite Brethren Church.
But each summer, Martens portrays Jesus Christ in The Carpenter, Manitoba’s outdoor Passion Play. Volunteer actors and crew stage the spectacle annually against the open-air backdrop of Manitoba’s Pembina Valley near La Riviere.
“I think we all have an expectation, or a picture, of what Christ would have looked like or would have sounded like…how he would have walked or how he would have smiled,” Martens muses. “And I think through paintings or productions people have come to a preconceived notion as to what Christ might have looked like. We could all be very wrong,” he admits with a laugh. “But I think producers…are looking for a particular voice, a particular look. And I guess they probably felt that I fit that to some degree.”
“I didn’t have to tell a lot of people initially that I was involved in The Carpenter,” Martens says with a chuckle. “I have spent most of my life clean-shaven, so suddenly people were encountering me with a beard and with longer hair. It forced me to tell people what that all meant.”
Martens admits the role is a difficult one, although not in the way most would imagine. “The first time I committed to playing the role of Christ, I wrestled with that a lot, because I am by no means a perfect person, and Christ was perfect, in the sense that he was without sin in his life here on earth. I have said to many that playing Christ onstage for me is relatively easy. For me, it’s playing the part of Christ off the stage that is very very difficult…in my workplace and in my home.”
Martens also recalls his experience the first time he ever laid his body on the cross. “I found myself thinking, ‘Who am I to be in this holy place?’ I viewed the image of the cross to be a very holy image. And after a few practices, wrestling with that, I think it was God’s quiet little voice in my heart that finally opened my eyes. I realized that this cross is not a holy place at all. This was my place, and because Christ sacrificed his life, then I don’t have to be on there. So it has become a holy place because of what Christ did for us. When we see it empty, we don’t see our bodies on there—we just remember the person that sacrificed for us.”
When he first accepted the call to play the role of Christ, Martens’ expectations were that it would be a very serious, sombre kind of a role. “It has been that to some extent, but I also have really enjoyed portraying the lighter side of Christ,” he says. “[Jesus] was a magnetic personality, and that doesn’t come from just being serious and sober. It comes from someone who enjoyed life and enjoyed people. He taught in parables and stories, and I think often those stories were very amusing and very intriguing to people. So I think to that extent my expectations changed, and I started to see more the real Christ in scriptures.”
“My personal faith impacts the way I see the role of Christ,” Martens explains. “I believe very strongly in the story, but more so I do believe in the person of Jesus Christ. I was raised in a home with the beliefs I carry today, but I have gained a greater appreciation for what Christ did for me. And this has caused me to think about Christ as a real person—as someone who lived on this earth. As Christians, we often have some real distance with that thought.”
Martens has gone home after a performance with a few scrapes and bruises on occasion. “I’m not nailed onto the cross as Christ was, but it does take some physical strength to maintain that position, and to try to make it look believable and make it look real. So I often go home with very tired arms and legs.
“I remember one time…when the production was over, I said, ‘You know, if I could choose a time in life when I could die, now would be the time.’ It’s not as though I desired to lose or end my life, but I think if one wants to end life on a positive note, with the feeling of having accomplished something, that would be the time.”
For more information about The Carpenter, visit the website at: www.passionplay.ca.
Pop-Mennonite surrealism
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Winona Lake, Ind.
With his Pop-Mennonite series of paintings and drawings, Indiana artist Don Swartzentruber shatters any notion of an idyllic concept the general public might have concerning the Old Order Mennonite and Amish people. He portrays the shortcomings of his own ethnic community, confronting and even caricaturing their systemic problems and troubling aspects, so that sins, temptations and depravities are not only characteristic of the secular world outside.
Over the past decades, tokens of American mass culture have infiltrated the largely isolated world of these rural religious groups. These alienating elements of the popular cultural climate are represented by the artist in the form of “pop” icons taken from cartoons or comic strips. These figures appear in the artist’s drawings and paintings at odd angles, in jarring positions and in overlapping configurations alongside his images of “old-fashioned” community life and moralizing family traditions—with often startling effects.
A rather revealing—and disturbing—portrayal is called Mennonite Jesus: A Publishers Perspective. Swartzentruber depicts Jesus as a dark-bearded and ordinary-looking white male. His large head is encircled by a headband of twisted rope instead of a crown of thorns, while he seems lost in gloomy meditation, chewing on a large stalk of grain. Jesus rests his child-like body on “a Stonehenge of hay bales,” with each bale featuring a grotesquely grinning or shouting mouth. Could this be the artist’s irreverent way of suggesting that “the stones will cry out” when humans fail to recognize the divine image?
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In his drawing What’s Up Menno, for example, a figure of Bugs Bunny has been inserted into an otherwise conservative portrayal of Menno Simons. In this surprising way, the cheerful rabbit is contrasted with the cheerless founder of the Mennonites.
Bugs stands triumphant on the beard of Menno, pushing his hand irreverently against the preacher’s forehead. Both the old-fashioned preacher and the contemporary rabbit have their large incisors exposed—Menno in order to sink his teeth into a small book, symbolic of his intense piety to devour the scriptures (with allusions to Revelation 10:9), and Bugs to exhibit his voracious appetite to chew his carrot.
In this jarring juxtaposition of the sacred and the secular, Menno’s tongue offers only doctrine, while Bugs Bunny, as the jester, suggests—rather dubiously—a remedy to “life’s monotony and melancholy.”
Despite a general Anabaptist prohibition of portraiture as an art form, Swartzentruber—in his 2002 Self Portrait: The Grotesque Facing the Sublime—portrays himself with a large balding head and a sober, self-confident facial expression. He is dressed in the traditional plain coat that he had inherited from his grandfather, a common item of clothing that gives him the appearance of a respected community elder.
By placing himself in a central position in this work, the artist deliberately ignores an ancient tradition, deriving perhaps a sense of gratification by breaking the ban. There seems to be no sense of guilt or remorse on the artist’s part, unless the absence of caring and sensitive human hands—replaced by a pitchfork and axe—can be seen as self-condemnation, as if the very making of images of art can be counted among the other destructive human activities that have already depleted the earth’s resources.
On various occasions Don Swartzentruber has both verbally and visually expressed his troubled relationship to his own church and community, as we learn from the commentaries that accompany the work on his website gallery (www.swartzentruber.com, then follow the links to Pop-Mennonite.)
One wonders if such a dark confessional art, exacerbated by elements of pop culture and surrealist nightmares, yields a more honest perspective of Old Order life. Or are such images a pessimistic—even embittered—reflection of a very private bias, so that the artist is not only “seeing through a glass darkly,” but through a broken mirror?