ABSTRACT
The play was the New York Carpenters' pageant of The Resurrection of Christ, performed in March 1977 in the Nuffield Theatre Studio of the University of Lancaster. The most striking example in the Resurrection of the use of the audience is almost invisible in the script, and it comes over very powerfully in performance to reinforce the theme of the play. The Resurrection is an extended Quem Quaeritis; it goes to some trouble to make this quite clear. Like the Quem Quaeritis, which takes its essential character from an earlier age, it concentrates on the theme of bearing witness to the event, true witness and false witness. A literature which was devised to help the late medieval reader imagine the emotions of being at the Crucifixion is being used to provide the techniques for representing those emotions in characters who are supposed to have just come from the Crucifixion.
