Katie Marchant -- Mediation #8 -- The Mysteries

I really did like The Mysteries, once I got over the fact that I had to sacrifice an entire Saturday to sit in a dark room to watch some 6 hour movie.
I found the choices that they made about staging and the effect of having the audience literally in the middle of the action very interesting. Because I was raised in a Christian church and learned all the typical bible stories from preschool on to high school I found it very intriguing to see the stories I know so well played out before me in a dialect that was hard to understand and with jokes that sometimes were lost on my American ears. I have done Christian themed musicals like Godspell and Joseph and as a child had the leads in church pageants with titles like A Star is Born where I literally played a star. The difference in these plays and The Mysteries to me is how these stories are presented. There are no musical theatre-esque production numbers, the actors are dressed in either period costumes or modern day clothes, they take the time to interact with the audience and because the material for this work is well known the audience feels comfortable interacting with the actors. I really liked the things they used as set pieces like the cherry picker lift for God and the tractor claw as the mouth to hell. I also really loved the rotating world that was revealed to the audience near the end of the production. Because the scale of the production up to that point wasn’t so grandiose this reveal was quite unexpected and impressive.