A Word About THE ACTOR

Right after we sort through the cultural implications of yesterday's election

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First…

About the Trump victory in yesterday’s US presidential election,

Frank Furedi

offers five takeaways, one of which is:

“The outcome of the election represents the first serious setback for identity politics. It shows that merely appealing to race, gender, victim identity is not sufficient to achieve victory in a crunch situation.”

Let’s zoom out from the immediate political situation and think for a moment about the sources of “identity politics.”

In the medieval Christian world picture, man had a definite “place” in the world. Above all, as a Christian, he was a child of God. As a man, he was the apex of God’s creation. He also, most likely, belonged to a kingdom and served a lord. He was also likely the father of a family. His identity and his duties were clearly defined by the roles he filled in human and divine society. From the duties of his roles he knew (generally) how to think and feel and act.

“Identity politics” is one manifestation of the seismic cultural shift that has occurred in the West over the past 500 years. In that half millennium, modern man has assumed autonomous control of his destiny—autonomous, that is, from Christian revelation and other religious authority, from political authority as traditionally understood, from nature as source of moral value, from the traditional understandings of family and economic life and the arts. Modern man chooses to abandon all sources of authority he does not explicitly chosen for himself. He has thus laid himself bare against the universe, and set himself the task of constructing, as it were from scratch, who he is. It is no wonder, then, that he pursues his quest for identity with great stress and anxiety, with shrill assertion and a defensive posture—and, more and more often, with violence. After all, when you’re a demigod, there’s no easy day at the office.

It is also no wonder that his homemade sense of identity emphasizes aspects of his humanity apparently most vulnerable to attack (race, gender, etc.). For when you are laid bare against the universe, you naturally seek security. And you construct your battlements around your most vulnerable flank.

No presidential election can reverse a situation that is not ultimately political in the first place, but philosophical and cultural. But can it be read as a sign that a residual Christianity has awakened from its complacency, and that many others, as well, are tired of the demands of the demigods?

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This weekend, November 8-10, 2024, my play, THE ACTOR, premieres at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, where I teach and chair the philosophy department. Later I will share the link for the live stream of the performance on SUNDAY EVENING, November 10, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. EST. If you’re in the area I hope you will be able to make it. In any event, here is my Author’s Note for the program…

“At that time I was completely absorbed by a passion for literature, especially dramatic literature, and for the theater.”

So reflects Pope St. John Paul II on his younger, teenage self, in the little autobiography he published in 1996 on the 50^th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, Gift and Mystery. As a great lover of the theater myself, how could I not be intrigued by the fact that this saintly pope—the man his official biographer, George Weigel, once called the greatest man of the 20^th century—grew up wanting to be an actor? And how did it happen that the young Karol Wojtyla’s ambition for the theater was transformed by a vocation to the priesthood? These were the questions I was eager to explore, and how fitting, it seemed, to explore them within the medium of a play.

Add to this germ of inspiration other elements: that the dramatic dreams of Karol Wojtyla and his friends were disrupted by the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939; that, after the Occupation, they courageously decided to take their theatrical activities “underground”; that with every performance—indeed, with every rehearsal—they were putting their lives on the line in an act of cultural resistance; that meanwhile Wojtyla, along with all Poles, was enduring great distress and degradation at the hands of his oppressors—and that in the midst of it all the future pope, having already lost his mother, suffered his father’s death as well. There was unusual drama in all this, and these historical events were enough to set up a good part of the structure of the play.

Yet over time, the dramatic word revealed to Wojtyla the Word that gives it life and meaning—and that he was being called to make this Word really present on the altar. As John Paul II writes in Gift and Mystery,

“The word, before it is ever spoken on stage, is already present in human history as a fundamental dimension of man’s spiritual existence. Ultimately, the mystery of language brings us back to the inscrutable mystery of God himself. As I came to appreciate the power of the word in my literary and linguistic studies, I inevitably drew closer to the mystery of the Word….”

There was no one, decisive moment in which Wojtyla’s vocation revealed itself; it was a gradual process. But my job as playwright was to show this revelation in a decisive third-act climax, one that remained faithful to the real historical circumstances while also imagining Wojtyla’s interior calling as an event that could be depicted on stage. In helping me with this formidable task I am grateful to those groups of Christendom Players who workshopped the play in March 2024 and at the Christendom Summer Consortium in June 2024.

As this is a play about college students—albeit college students whose college careers have been taken away from them—it is a special delight that its premiere production is being put on by students at the college of which I am so happy and proud to be a part. To the gifted, ebullient Christendom Players, and to their masterful director, Liz Foeckler, I am immensely grateful for this display of your talents.

I do hope you enjoy the show! To find out more about me and my literary work, find me on Substack at danielmcinerny.substack.com.