Magdalene: Jesus is Gone, Now What?
This afternoon’s ramble to the wilds of Chester took us to the Town Hall, where in the Chester Theater Company’s impressive 37th year, we saw the opening production of Mark St. Germain’s Magdalene. It was nice seeing a matinee on a Thursday, and the house was pretty full up with retirees and locals who support the theater year after year.
The Magdalene set was proper Biblical, with an arched stone wall and two crude seats…we were going back to exactly 18 days after Jesus left the Earth. We wouldn’t hear the name Jesus again throughout the play, as St. Peter (Adam LeFevre) was banging on Mary Magdalene’s door. He wants in, having been turned away repeatedly after the episode. He has a lot of ground to make up, and Mary isn’t happy with him since the tragic event. She rips him–“Borrow some testicles!!” she exclaims, as he begs her forgiveness for casting him out. Peter reports that Matthew is also not doing well. What’s left of the Apostles is hung up on whether Mary is ‘pregnant from the lord, and asking, ‘why didn’t he ever come to me’ instead of seeking solace with Mary. Bitterness, but not resolution.
The actors give the feel of modern dialogue, yet they discuss events that happened more than 2025 years ago—back to year one. Peter is just one of the apostles who weren’t at all happy with how things turned out…and he, like them, is worried about this new religion that they are supposed to nurture and support…without him. The playwright, Mark St. Germain, sees a great inequality in the Catholic church against women; he says they are ‘second-class church advocates’, and his character Mary Magdalene (Danielle Skraastad), the Apostle to the Apostles speaks up for herself. St Germain cites the way Mary ‘vanished from biblical sight’ after the resurrection.
Mary is greatly resented by Peter and his fellow Apostles because they see she is so close to Jesus. They are jealous of this woman who was once accused of being a prostitute.
The play is a heated dialogue that rarely cools down, until finally she invites the exhausted Peter to sleep in the hayloft. Then she approaches the golden chalice, and the heavens light up in appreciation. But for me to get into and to care about the interactions of these two characters, I would need to care about the Bible, and God, and what happened to Jesus. I care not at all about these things, like most modern Americans, and so the dialogue, no matter how witty or modern, still left me kind of bored. I’m not sure what made the CTC producers, who usually have a good sense of what’s interesting and current, pick this play; it seemed off the mark.
But if you are interested in the dynamics that might have gone on between ancient characters who have never been given a voice before, this play might be for you.
Magdalene, Chester Theater Company, continues Friday, Saturday and Sunday through June 29. Chester Town Hall, Chester, Mass. Directed by Keira Naughton, written by Mark St. Germain. Tickets.
June 28, 2025 @ 11:27 am
The relevance of this play, can be felt even by those of us who, like you, don’t care much at all about the Bible, but are appalled by everyday news of what has been done and is currently being done by the organized religion created after Jesus’s death. Perhaps, if the culture in those ancient times had listened to the woman who was closest to the man, we wouldn’t have the kind of organized religion that led to witch hunts and megachurch businesses that have sprung up in “his” name. The playwright’s position that the Catholic Church has been a major source of inequality toward women (think Magdalene Laundries as well as the sexual abuse of children) is totally accurate. And now the poser in the White House uses religion as a pretext to remove the separation of church and state, which would only make all things worse for women, children, and the planet…everyone except the 1%. How anyone who claims to be Christian can support this agenda for billionaires is a mystery. I feel the play, Magdalene was a small snippet of an imagined history that could’ve changed the world for the better. The take away from this play could be the importance of listening to women’s perspective.