The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  In 1927, only the second year of Wallock’s Easter tableaux, the Lawton Constitution dubbed the presentation an “Oklahoma ‘Oberammergau,’” after perhaps the world’s most famous passion play. For much of its history, Oberammergau had been merely an obscure village in a small valley in the Bavarian Alps. But in 1632 the plague arrived in southern Germany, brought there, Vernon Heaton surmises in The Oberammergau Passion Play, by the Thirty Years’ War. Great swaths of Germany had been ravaged by the contending armies. Waves of refugees washed over the countryside, fleeing marauding bands of mercenaries, abandoning the injured, the sick, and the dead as they went. In the forsaken villages, looted and pillaged, the dead lay rotting in their beds or in the streets. Rivers and wells filled with the filth of the slaughter and became contaminated. Garbage decayed in the alleys. Vermin flourished in the fly-infested heaps of dung. The plague was born, Heaton argues, “from this pestiferous charnel house.”

  When news of the arrival of the plague in Bavaria reached Oberammergau in late September 1632, the town fathers, otherwise known as the Council of Six and Twelve, closed off the city gates to anyone entering or leaving. This included Kaspar Schisler, a day laborer who had been working that summer beyond the walls of the village, at nearby Eschenlohe, and who found himself banned upon his return. He retreated to the mountains, surviving as best he could for a time, but one night he managed to evade the watchmen and sneak back inside, reuniting with his family. Three days later he died of the plague. Disease then swept through the entire village, killing more than eighty souls, half of the village’s population at the time, as Heaton estimates.

  Eventually, in a strange sort of wager with the Almighty, every living member, sick and well, met in the parish church and, again under the Council of Six and Twelve, made a solemn vow to God that they and their descendants would enact a passion play every tenth year, forever, in return for his intercession in eradicating the plague from their midst. Though the plague continued to decimate the countryside around them, not another citizen of Oberammergau died of the plague from that hour on.

  Or so the legend goes. And the production continues to this day. In a vow ceremony every tenth September before the spring play, the villagers repeat this story to themselves and then formally renew their pledge to each other and to God. Origin stories too can be omphali, connecting what is made with what engendered it.

  But this story derives from an old handwritten chronicle which was not set down until 1733, a century after the events it records, and there are problems with it. As the Shakespeare scholar and theater historian James Shapiro observes in Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play, the death rate in Oberammergau rose steadily from October 1632 (when there was one recorded death) to March 1633 (twenty deaths), before declining steadily back to normal by July (one death again). However, as Shapiro acknowledges, if the parish priest, who enters the deaths into the ledgers himself, dies and is not immediately replaced, as was the case in Oberammergau, these records can be frustratingly incomplete. Still, the records show no abrupt end to the dying. Further, Kaspar Schisler’s name doesn’t appear in Oberammergau’s death register from the time, though it does in a commemorative album bound together with it.

  Regardless, the story the villagers have told themselves over the centuries is that the deaths stopped immediately after the vow. The townspeople’s original devotional exercise has evolved into a massive production of more than two thousand volunteers and hundreds of thousands of spectators. Only residents of Oberammergau, and only those of impeccable character, have been eligible for parts. Here too authenticity is prized. In the past, Shapiro points out, young women delayed marriage for years on the off chance that they might be given the role of Mary or Magdalene. In 1990, with strictures loosening somewhat, a wife and mother of two played the Virgin Mary, but one angry theatergoer complained to the directors that “a woman who had sex at night had no business playing the mother of God by day.” In addition to virginal authenticity, no wigs or false beards are permitted. Many of the men must begin growing their hair and their beards one year before the play. No makeup is used. Many of the participants spend their lifetimes on the village stage, starting as child actors and progressing over the decades to leading roles.

  As Matthys and I were walking the grounds of the Holy City, we ran into Anita Brockwell, a wholesomely pretty middle-aged woman with a blond bob, who in her daily life raises pygmy goats and miniature donkeys and sells ceramic figurines, and is both director of wardrobe and the Virgin Mary for the pageant. She attaches a good-natured little laugh to the end of nearly every sentence, and she offered to show me the Angel House—which, on pageant night, doubles as the place of the temptation of Christ—where the angels’ wings and gowns are sewn and stored. “This is the hierarchy of angels,” she said by way of introducing the five or six mothers and daughters, all outfitted with gloves and earmuffs, who were inventorying the wings inside this unheated structure. “I call it typecasting, myself,” joked one of the women. “Hells Angels,” added another. Some of the old sets of wings are elaborately embellished with interleaved layers of white feathers. The newer ones have fence-wire frames covered with parachute fabric that has been cut into shreds. “To be an angel it’s hard,” said one woman of Comanche descent. The wings are heavy. The wind at the top of the hillside where the women must appear is stiff. “To be an angel, you have to be tough.”

  Matthys and I wandered over to Pilate’s court and climbed onto a parapet between two towers. “Now this is where Jesus is brought before Pilate,” he told me as we looked out over the rugged hills beyond, and to the grassy prairie and the buffalo. “The crowd is down below and some are saying ‘Crucify him!’ and one or two are saying ‘Save him!’” We walked along the parapet as Matthys described how Pilate washes his hands and throws the cloth down to the crowd and says, “His blood shall be on you,” freeing Barabbas instead of Jesus.

  The implication is deicide: the Jews killed Jesus. A number of historians, however, including Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer in Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present, call into question the historicity of particular details of the Gospels’ story of the passion of Christ. For one thing, they claim, in the Roman-ruled province of Judea, the notion of a frenzied Jewish mob holding sway over a prefect from Rome is improbable. For another, the act of Pilate’s washing his hands of the blood of an innocent man is “a Jewish gesture and symbolic act,” stemming from the Book of Deuteronomy, not a Roman one. And how would Pilate have rationalized the release of any prisoner to Emperor Tiberius? The story of the passion, they argue, is not history. It is kerygma—preaching.

  As such, passion plays regularly sparked violence against Jews because of the accusation of murder inherent in this scene and others. Jewish characters often were costumed in outlandish hats with horns. They appeared bloodthirsty, allied with the devil, that other denier of God. In The History of Anti-Semitism, Léon Poliakov gives an example of one particularly gruesome scene from a late fifteenth-century passion play by Jehan Michel, bishop of Angers, where the Jews in Pilate’s palace torture Christ:

  BRUYANT: Let us play at pulling out his beard

  That is too long anyway.

  DENTART: He will be the bravest

  Who gets the biggest handful.

  GRIFFON: I have torn at him so hard

  That the flesh has come away too.

  DILLART: I would take my turn at tearing

  So as to have my share as well.

  DRAGON: See what a clump this is

  That I pull away as if it were lard.

  “In a total identification,” Poliakov writes of this scene and others like it, “the crowds lived Christ’s agony intensely, transferring all their rage to his tormentors, with a real massacre often following the depicted one.” The carnage was acute enough to require the attention of the city governments. In 1338, for example, Freiburg forbade the performance of anti-Jewish scenes. In 1
469, Frankfurt ordered special measures for the protection of the Jewish quarter during their passion play. And in 1539, Rome banned its passion play altogether in an effort to prevent the sacking of the Jewish ghetto there.

  Hitler famously attended the passion play at Oberammergau in 1934, during the jubilee season marking the three-hundred-year anniversary of the original vow. After the performance, he was given a gift from the villagers, a set of mounted photographs of the play that was inscribed To our Führer, the protector of the cultural treasures of Germany, from the Passion village of Oberammergau. Years after viewing the performance, at a dinner on July 5, 1942, Hitler is recorded by Shapiro as having said, “It is vital that the Passion Play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the time of the Romans.” In a perverse and self-serving interpretation of scripture, he added: “There one sees Pontius Pilate, a Roman racially and intellectually so superior that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.” As Shapiro also notes, a significant number of the Oberammergau cast members had joined the Nazi Party. Jesus was a Nazi, as were eight of the twelve disciples. So was the Virgin Mary. Somewhat ironically, according to the Nazi Party enrollment records only Judas was categorized as a “strong anti-Nazi.”

  “In each was to swell a singleness of purpose to dominate his life—but the purposes were direct opposites,” the newspaper had said of Anthony Mark Wallock and Adolf Hitler. From the beginning Wallock did insist that the Holy City Easter service be open to all races and all creeds—especially remarkable given that this was Oklahoma in the era of Jim Crow. When the cast of the Oberammergau passion play was busy joining the Nazi Party and handing souvenir plaques to Hitler, Wallock was dedicating the theme of the 1936 service to the “Brotherhood of Men and Peace.” His final tableau that year, the April 5 issue of the Daily Oklahoman reported, would be shrines of worship for the various races: a pagoda for the Chinese, a Japanese Shinto shrine, tepees for the American Indian. “Negroes and the brown race” would also have their place in the scene, though their shrines of worship were not specified. Behind these representative figures: lights which would represent the rising sun. At a signal, the groups representing the five races would move into formation, marching in a single column toward the light, followed by the rest of the cast, “while the glare of the artificial sun flashe[d] into the eyes of spectators.”

  Still, one wonders what to do with a passage from the exact same article proudly crediting Ron Stephens, district WPA director from Chickasha and a former army engineer, with “seeking out Ku Klux Klan members, who resurrected four hundred abandoned robes to be used by members of the cast in the Easter Service.” While Brockwell reminded me that Indians have roles in the pageant—I had met the Comanche angel—and that the Lord’s Prayer is performed in sign language at the opening of the play, she also felt it necessary to protest some accusation of prejudice against African-Americans of which, until then, I had not been aware. “We’re not prejudiced,” she told me. “We’ve had a colored baby Jesus. But you can’t put them in a costume because they disappear in the dark. Philip Muse,” she went on, mentioning one of the few participating black actors, “was put in as an angel. You could see this white suit with angel wings floating down the pathway, but no head. He’s a disciple now.”

  Whether or not there is prejudice at work in the Holy City Easter pageant, the fact remains that while this place and this play once expressed a deeply sensed and widely shared worldview, each year it draws fewer and fewer participants and observers. All through World War II, attendance for the pageant still neared a hundred thousand. The Easter after the war ended, in 1946, the audience actually neared two hundred thousand, according to the Daily Oklahoman and the Lawton Constitution.

  The Lawton Story, a movie version of the pageant, was even produced by Kroger Babb, the godfather of exploitation film, a genre which was, according to Felicia Feaster and Bret Wood in Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film, “a bizarre mixture of . . . saccharine morality tales interrupted by moments of raw, ugly truth.” Babb’s 1944 film, Mom and Dad, for example, follows the story of a young woman charmed into sex by a dashing pilot. After the pilot dies in a plane crash, she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. The Story of a Birth, a movie within the movie of Mom and Dad, then presents detailed drawings of the female reproductive system followed by a graphic documentary of a woman giving birth, first vaginally, then by cesarean section. Given Babb’s background with Mom and Dad, perhaps it’s not so strange that he would produce The Lawton Story, which contains its own embedded nativity scene. The film premiered on Friday, April 1, 1949, in Lawton. President Harry Truman and his wife, Bess, were invited, though they did not attend. The Lawton Story, later recut and retitled The Prince of Peace after a dismal critical reception, is about a six-year-old girl, played by the relentlessly cheerful Ginger Prince, who persuades her great-uncle, a heartless banker, to see the performance of the Holy City passion play, after which, of course, he changes his greedy and iniquitous ways. Inside this frame story is lengthy footage from a daytime reenactment of the actual Holy City pageant.

  The Lawton Story may have been the high point. In the 1950s the Holy City Easter pageant began to see a slow but steady decline. Now, in a good year, the audience might number a couple of thousand. The cast has also shrunk—to two hundred or so, “including animals,” Anita Brockwell said. Brockwell, Burgher, Matthys—they have all mourned this falling-off, as well as the waning participation in the passion play. They blame television and other creature comforts, soccer games and T-ball practice and ballet, the laziness and greed of youth. As the older generation dies, the young people are not coming up to replace them. “It’s the trend of the whole world—the change in times,” Matthys told me. “I’d like to see that hillside covered again. But it’ll never be.”

  In 1882 the Wichita Indians were removed from their village on the north fork of the Red River to a reservation 25 miles east of Fort Sill. From there the Wichita Mountains were just barely in sight. In 1900 reservation lands that had been held in common during the intervening eighteen years were divided into allotments of 160 acres per person, with the remainder declared “surplus lands” and opened up to non-Indian settlement. The Wichita elders knew the end was approaching because their ancient stories foretold the time of Dakawaitsakakide, “When Everything Begins to Run Out.” They knew that the things which they had needed and which had been given to them in dreams would disappear. That children of the same families would intermarry and cease to have offspring, or that they would birth not human children but animals. Then the animals, even the flowing water, would begin to speak to men. The morning star and the moon would be human again, and the man who had been chasing the deer he’d shot, an act that had set the universe in motion, would finally overtake it and recover his arrow. “Furthering this belief [in the coming end],” writes George Dorsey, who recorded the stories of the Wichita in 1904, “is the frequency with which the people in their dreams converse with stars.”

  Medicine Bluff for the Plains Indians, the Holy City of the Wichitas for generations of Lawtonians, the Holy City of Jerusalem for Christians and Muslims and Jews—why do we need these omphali, visible and tangible manifestations of the longed-for and imagined? Is it because, as all the old mythologies say in one way or another, we’ve been split umbilically from the divine? The cord’s been cut, we’ve been cast out from our native land, and we yearn to reclaim that place where we can be connected again, however briefly, to what we no longer possess. We’re all exiles, longing for home.

  In Genesis, which begins the Bible, we have what scholars believe are some of the oldest references to the place that became the actual Jerusalem; Revelation, and thus the Bible, ends with John’s inspired and imaginative vision of the otherworldly New Jerusalem, to which those who believe will one day return. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth
: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea,” begins chapter 21. “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Then, from “a great and high mountain,” an angel shows John this New Jerusalem of precious stones—jasper, sapphire, emerald, topaz, amethyst. The streets are gold, the gates are pearl, the river of the water of life clear as crystal. Growing in the center, the tree of life, laden with fruit.

  Saint Augustine saw human existence as a kind of exile from the divine, and the journey of the soul as a pilgrimage to God. In On Christian Doctrine, he describes a world permeated with signs which we must learn to read so that we can use them to reach God, who is our home. “Thus in this mortal life, wandering from God,” he declares, “if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed, we should use this world and not enjoy it, so that the ‘invisible things’ of God ‘being understood by the things that are made’ may be seen, that is, so that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual.” That last bit—so that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual—is what Jerusalem, both the real one, with its Calvary Mount and Stone of Unction and empty tomb, and the Holy City of the Wichitas, with its earnest facsimiles, tries to give those who come, seeking their spiritual homeland: a passing connection, through the things that are made, with the divine.

  That April I convinced Terry to leave the girls with their grandparents and drive back up to Oklahoma so we could witness for ourselves the country’s longest continuously run outdoor passion play. We arrived in Lawton late in the afternoon on Saturday and checked into the Best Western near the Comanche Nation Casino and Smoke Shop along the highway, then drove out to the Holy City. The sky was overcast and a cold, damp wind had begun to blow. In the refuge, low-lying wildflowers were starting to show though the russet winter grasses. Above us, hawks circled as if on pendulum strings.