Lifelong actor Stephen Rowe has come to Wesleyan to perform his original piece, “Stand-Up Mark: A Street-Wise Version of Mark’s Gospel” in the Memorial Chapel Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m.
The son of a Lutheran preacher, Rowe has worked extensively with playwright Edward Albee, traveling around the world in the “Albee Directs Albee” project and appearing on Broadway in Albee’s Tony-award winning “The Goat.” Rowe is also a founding member of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. and was a resident teacher and actor at Harvard for seven seasons.
Rowe was kind enough to sit with me last Saturday to discuss “Stand-Up Mark.”
JB: What inspired you to turn the gospel of Mark into a theatrical performance?
SR: I know a lot of actors have done Mark’s Gospel for several reasons. It’s the earliest of the four gospels, it’s the shortest and it is the most action-packed. It’s the least evangelical; it has the least amount of Jesus explaining theological things.
I believe it was in the 70s, the great British actor Sir Alec McCowen brought the Gospel according to Mark to Broadway and it was a big hit. It may well have been done before that, but…that was the first time I’d ever thought that anybody could do something like this and really bring it off.
JB: How does your performance differ from McCowen’s?
SR: His version of it used the King James version of the text, which is almost Shakespearean. I’m interested in a narrative that might be told by George Carlin or Lenny Bruce. I’m not going to do a Lenny Bruce imitation. That would be fool-hardy, right? But…my slant on the material is to have the narrator be somebody who’s testing the material all the time so that there is a possibility of the narrator entering into, for want of a better word, a conversion in the run of the story. Unlike Sir Alec, who was with Jesus and all of his events from the beginning, a sort of advocate, my narrator is not necessarily that.
JB: What do you mean by the title “Stand-Up Mark?”
SR: The text is a combination of the New English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version, so it’s literate. This is not an attempt to dumb down the text in any way. When it says it’s a street-wise version it means that the guy talks a little like this (New York accent). It’s more the character and the attitude than it is the text itself. The text itself is…95 percent verbatim.
JB: How did you prepare the text for performance?
SR: I worked on this text with Helmut Koester who’s a Professor Emeritus at Harvard Divinity School. Some vocabulary in the text has always bothered me. There’s a lot of talk of Jesus dealing with people who have unclean spirits. As Professor Koester pointed out…an unclean spirit is an unkosher spirit, meaning that, according to the Jewish purity laws, even if you have some sort of mental disorder, or depression, or anything that is so common for all of us, it would have been seen as something unclean. I really worked hard with people who know what this text says in the original Hebrew and the original Greek. We worked a little bit to take some of those terms and give them different names. The Holy Spirit shows up as Bernard Shaw’s idea of the life force. I’m trying to [have] people hear the story in as fresh a light as possible.
JB: What makes the Gospel according to Mark special?
SR: There’s no nativity in it. There’s a very peculiar ending. The original ending of the book is completely unresolved. It’s replete with images of fear and that interests me. That what Jesus is doing…is cutting across this unbelievably prevailing sense of fear in an occupied territory. And very, very little mention at all of his awareness of his own divinity. He keeps telling people to shut up about it. I find that extraordinarily interesting. It seems like the focus is always coming back to the people who are around him. “What do you think about this, what do you think about that?” “I don’t know, I don’t know.” And he’s constantly saying to them, “Don’t be afraid.” And I think that’s the core way of looking at it. I’m interested in the political aspects of it, too. I’m not interested in who’s responsible for killing Jesus. It’s clearly the Romans, not the Jews. Politically, it’s the story of how we can’t tolerate visionaries.
JB: What made you come to Wesleyan with this performance?
SR: I was invited. Lou Manzo was kind and generous enough. I did this piece last year about this time in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as part of a program called Actors-in-Residence. There was a report in some National Catholic Review, and Lou read about it and invited me to come. I love this place. It’s a great school. I keep having to remind myself that this is a religious community that’s sponsoring this. I really hope to have this thing speak to an audience who can come and see a good yarn in the theater. Not to downplay or discount the religious significance of this.
JB: In light of your spiritual upbringing, why did you decide to become an actor?
SR: I’ve always known that this was going to be it. I’m very fortunate to have been given a pretty progressive spiritual upbringing and I thank my dad for that. There have been times in my life where I’ve considered being a preacher, but not that seriously. The two professions are clearly intersected. About ten years ago I wondered if there was a way to produce something that had integrity as theater art but also had a connection to the sacred. I really think that this sacred text is so rich and so poetic and so full of metaphor and so not conducive to literalism. By taking a radical point of view with the material we can see…that the material does support a lot of different angles.
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