Jesus Christ Superstar: Getting Into Character (part 3)

JCS: Getting into Character (part 3) -- Sights and Sounds

The thought experiment proposed in the first post has our time machine plopping us down into the middle of the first-century world of Jesus and the people around him.  This would be an entirely astonishing experience because of its strangeness to us.  Your senses would be assaulted by sights, sounds, and smells that your moderns experiences could barely translate.  A short-form blog post is not going to do much to cut through the murkiness of it all, but we can do a bit to bring you closer to comprehending this odd world.  And maybe it will help you play your part with more confidence, more sympathy.

Sights and sounds are a broad simplification of the experiences.  A more nuanced way would be to look at this old world through some lenses we could easily latch onto: Land, Language, Literacy, Learning, Law, and Lore. 

To be honest, this alliteration is contrived because I enjoy the sound of the words.  A better writer, while not eschewing the first four lenses (another “L” word, if you are paying attention), would have called “Law” what it really is: politics or government or even power.  And as for “Lore”, I am really thinking of the religious life of these first-century people.  Nevertheless, cheesy alliteration aside, these perspectives on the “sights and sounds” are a useful starting point.

Let’s visit the LAND first.

 

Land

After our time machine drops us into the first century, what our senses experience depends on where in the land we get dropped you.  Visiting Nazareth or Capernaum in the Galilee region would be completely different to visiting Bethany or Bethlehem down in Judea.  This is not unlike the difference you would experience between visiting West Texas and Manhattan.  Moreover, there is a surprisingly diverse climate in the land.  Some places, for instance, experience a rainy season over the Winter; others may not see a drop of rain for years.  You know where you are based on clues (BTW, my new show idea, “Where in the World is Judas Iscariot?”, was universally rejected by PBS executives… Live and learn).

Israel at the time of Jesus was predominantly an agricultural society.  There were not good ports, so being a maritime power was not feasible.  But the land could grow stuff, and everyone was connected to it in some way (just consider how many of Jesus’ parables involved agriculture).  But its location in the Europe to Asia to Africa “land bridge” also made it at a sort of “crossroad to the world”.  (This is a good news-bad news story.  Good news: lots of lucrative commerce and trade which makes for prosperity.  Bad news: all that prosperity attracts the attention of invading, conquering armies, from the Hittites to the Assyrians to the Babylonians to the Persians to the Greeks, not to mention the constant neighboring rivalries with Philistia, Edom, Moab, etc.  Israel ended up being an economic ping-pong ball, bouncing between empires.  This fact – and Israel’s expectation that their glory and freedom would someday be restored – figured prominently in the mindset of Jesus’ crowds.  More about that in a future article.)

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a suburb of Jerusalem, spend part of his childhood as a fugitive in Egypt, and was raised in the town of Nazareth in the Galilee.  He got around.  Given that our story begins in Jerusalem, though, our time machine ought to drop us there.

Jerusalem in the first century is home to anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 people (these are estimates because nobody was doing a headcount; ancient historians like Josephus assert much higher numbers, in fact, but scholars today recognize these numbers as exaggerations).  Whatever the number of people, the population comprises both Jews and non-Jews, although the city is
overwhelmingly Jewish.

The city is a product of ambitious building and expansion projects begun under Herod the Great (yeah, that’s my dad; sorry about the whole “murder the children” thing…and all the other horrible stuff he did) at the beginning of the First Century.  My “dad” restored the city to its former glory (well, maybe transformed to a new glory) by building an amphitheater, a theatre, various palaces and viaducts, and some monuments, all to impress Rome.  From a pretty useful research website:

No visitor seeing Jerusalem for the first time could fail to be impressed by its visual splendor. The long, difficult ascent from Jericho to the Holy City ended as the traveler rounded the Mount of Olives, and suddenly caught sight of a vista like few others in the world. Across the Kidron Valley, set among the surrounding hills, was Jerusalem, "the perfection of beauty," in the words of Lamentations, "the joy of all the world."

The view from the Mount of Olives was dominated by the gleaming, gold-embellished Temple which was located in the most holy spot in the Jewish world and really God's world. This was the Lord's earthly dwelling place, He mediated His throne here and raised up a people to perform rituals and ceremonies here that would foreshadow the coming of His Messiah kinsman redeemer who would be the lamb of God, slain for the sins of the whole world.

The Temple stood high above the old City of David, at the center of a gigantic white stone platform.

To the south of the temple was THE LOWER CITY, a group of limestone houses, yellow-brown colored from years of sun and wind. Narrow, unpaved streets and houses that sloped downward toward the Tyropean Valley, which ran through the center of Jerusalem.

Rising upward to the west was THE UPPER CITY, or Zion, where the white marble villas and palaces of the very rich stood out like patches of snow. Two large arched passageways spanned the valley, crossing from the Upper City to the temple.

A high, thick, gray stone wall encircled Jerusalem. It had been damaged, repaired and enlarged over the centuries, and in Jesus' day it was about 4 miles in circumference, bringing about 25,000 people into an area about a square mile. At intervals along the wall were massive gateways. Just inside each gate was a customs station, where publicans collected taxes on all goods entering or leaving the city.

A bustling city at all times, Jerusalem bustles even more in the Spring, when our JCS story begins, because pilgrims travel from all over to visit the Holy City for Passover.  The Text records that Jesus and His family visited Jerusalem every year for Passover, and one year the boy Jesus decided to hang around a few extra days to have conversations with the Jewish religious teachers in the Temple (Luke 2).  Our song “Hosana” takes place during what is called His triumphal entry at the beginning of the Passover festival.  There were mobs because the city was crowded with visitors, thronging to the Temple, moving about the narrow streets, trading in the markets.

 We will look at the importance of Passover and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in a future essay.

JCS: Getting into Character (part 2) -- The Ancient Eye for the Modern Guy

As a DC native, I watch DC-based TV shows with a jaundiced eye.  When the NCIS cops drive from Arlington to Norfolk in less than an hour, I know we are dealing with writers who’ve never bothered to visit the places in their story.  What, the writers couldn’t be bothered to check a map?  Ever heard of “Google”?  And even small errant details that only locals would notice can be disconcerting.  When a character is driving somewhere on “the 95”, I have a pretty good idea the writer is from California, where the article precedes the highway number, rather than from the East Coast, where it never does.

 

Some of the most irritating aspects of dramatic portrayals of real people and events from the past are the inevitable inaccuracies we meet on stage and screen.  Obviously, with our “based on real events” experiences from Hollywood, we accept that writers take some liberties with the actual story.  We know, for instance, that the historical PT Barnum did not resemble Hugh Jackman and probably could not manage Jackman’s vocal range.  Suspension of disbelief comes with the territory.  Moreover, the intentional anachronisms often make for better entertainment (so do the accidental ones, but for different reasons).  

 

Take our JCS as an example; Rice and Weber were not aiming for “by the book” realism.  It’s a rock opera, for crying out loud, which seeks to tell the story from the point of view of the man many consider to be the primary villain, Judas Iscariot.  As a stage piece, it is clearly not just taking some poetic license. Instead, Rice and Weber’s show is seizing that poetic license by its short hairs, dragging it kicking and screaming into the open, and pummeling it mercilessly-but-cleverly, aided and abetted by the interpreters who stage the show.  This becomes clear in both small and big ways in the story.  Suspension of disbelief, indeed. 

 

Rolling on up to the inaccuracies and anachronisms, while giving them the nod and a wink the authors intend, does not make them any less inaccurate or anachronistic.  And while the underlying story – the story behind the story, as it were -- still goes faithfully forward, some of the meaning might get lost in the jarring clang of of modernisms.  This series will try to muffle some of that noise, not to cancel it, but perhaps to round out your understanding of just who all these people are.

 

So, if you’re game, buckle up for the ride.  We are going to explore the strange and mysterious world in which our story is set.  Hopefully, some of these details make their way into your character’s formation.  But even if they don’t, they will (perhaps) open your eyes to some details you might have been missing in the familiar tale you have always been told.

 

Jesus Christ Superstar: Getting Into Character (Part 1)

 

So here’s a thought experiment.  Imagine you are transported back in time to first-century Palestine, when “Jesus Christ Superstar” is set.  Imagine the sights and the sounds of that world.  What would you see?  What would you hear?  What would you feel?  

Obviously, you are a stranger in a strange land.  I mean, it would be REALLY strange.  From our 21^st century perspective, it is virtually impossible to put ourselves in that world.  Everything is so radically different.  How then do you “get into character” when the world that character inhabits is so completely foreign to our own?

This little essay is meant to be a primer – a very brief primer – on the “life and times” of Jesus.  Hopefully, it will help you better inhabit your character and your motivation.  It is a surface-level presentation of that strange world – maybe enough information to be dangerous on stage.

If you want to know more about this topic area, I am really down with that.  I am card-carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth and his times are utterly amazing and worth getting to know with everything that you have.  (Yeah, maybe a little like Rain Man, but without his social awareness and effervescent personality!)  I am always ready to grab a coffee with anyone who wants to talk more about the topic.  And although I am a self-styled nerd, I am by no means an expert or the only person who “gets it”.  I happen to love the subject matter and geek out in talking about it.  Which is why I am writing it in a blog instead of getting in your face and over-enthusiastically telling you about it.

Feel free to scroll on by and ignore.  Or if you want to learn a couple of things about the strange land and strange people of the world we're portraying on the stage, this might be an okay way to spend a few minutes.  Or more.