She’s angry when we first meet her. She’s sweeping a floor – apparently in first-century Rome. But the floor could be anywhere, in any age; the woman any woman.
She’s one of the characters in All That I Am, a play presenting five female nobodies of the Christian church. At best these are women who always have come second. Unmentioned, unsung, in some cases we don’t even know their names, though the men with whom they were associated are as familiar as the apostles.
One was just that, the wife of Peter the apostle. It is this desperate fishwife, sweeping in search of her lost coin, who inspires the play’s opening.
The woman behind the “nobodies” is Roberta Nobleman -- English actress, American citizen, wife, mother, grandmother and for much of the past three decades a performer of one-woman shows about religious personages.
“There’s a whole part of church history that’s unwritten,” Nobleman tells an audience who has come to enjoy lunch and the show at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Haworth, N.J., where Nobleman worships.
Before they leave, they will have met Peter’s wife, the mistress of St. Augustine, the wife of a 12th-century priest during the 150 years that celibacy laws were enforced for Roman Catholic clergy, the mother of the 12 children of Anglican priest and poet John Donne and the fiancée of Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who the Nazis jailed and executed.
Nobleman tells their stories with humor and irony as well as rage, using masks, mime and music. The actress dons each of the character’s masks with her back to the audience. Once the mask is in place, she pivots and creates the pose that best depicts each woman.
Looking beneath the ‘masks’
“What you see under the mask of the medieval priest’s wife is someone who’s been told by the pope she has to separate from her husband, that their children are considered bastards,” said Nobleman after the show, pointing out the lines of resentment in the face.
The mask mistress Anne Donne wears reveals the raw skin and drawn eyes of a woman who’s had little sleep for many years, who’s had to get up during the night to nurse the baby or care for a sick child and then rise early to kindle the fire and prepare breakfast for her family.
Three teen Girl Guides who were in the audience ask Nobleman if they can try on the mask worn by Augustine’s mistress. Their choice does not surprise her. The mask with its sad eyes and African characterization has a mouth that’s “been kissed too often and not always in the right way,” Nobleman said.
“Our girls are encouraged to wear the mistress mask,” said the actress, who raised two daughters and has two toddler granddaughters. She points to Sex and the City and easy access to birth control as encouraging some girls to be sexually active.
The mask she wears to depict Maria Von Wedemeyer, espoused to Bonhoeffer, is a white face suggesting the neutrality of someone who “has wiped herself out, become neutral or faceless for someone else,” Nobleman said.
But make no mistake about it, she added, these women resisted the masks that society demands women wear. Underneath, despite inequality, oppression and seeming unworthiness, are five women who are strong and well-integrated in their own sexuality, she said.
Nobleman was inspired to craft the play after hearing a Mother’s Day sermon in which the priest told how his mother always took the wing of the chicken, sparing the bigger and better pieces for her husband and children.
“I do the play for the countless cleaning ladies in churches all over the world,” Nobleman said. “The play is about serving one another, but about getting the balance right between service and gratitude to those who serve.”
“In God’s eyes Peter’s wife is of equal value to Peter. Attention must be paid to such persons” -- and it hasn’t been, she lamented.
More questions than answers
Roman Catholic Sister Irene Mahoney, an Ursuline nun in New Rochelle, N.Y., wrote the play in 1987. She and Nobleman had collaborated before. Mahoney said she had no thesis to propound or even an attitude to defend when she set out to create the play.
Writing it positioned Mahoney – “not with the sure defense of answers,” she said, but “with the risk and the hope of questions.
“When Peter’s wife cries at the end, ‘What of me? …What of all of us?’ it is my own heart that cries.”
Audiences respond in different ways to the play, which Nobleman has performed over 15 years at convents, in large auditoria and in the intimate space of a parish living room.
In Australia, a clergyman told Nobleman that it had prompted him to make the bed the next morning for the first time in his married life.
Watching a performance at the Catholic convent of the St. Joseph of Peace sisters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., a retired nun grew agitated as the play progressed. The next morning, she found the courage to ask her superior the question that St. Peter’s wife raises: “What about me?”
The nun related how she’d been raised in Ireland at a time when her brothers’ needs came first. She had no time to learn about art, her great love.
Her superior sent her for painting lessons in nearby Tenafly. Within two years, she
was riding the bus into New York and studying art with professionals. She became an artist because she was able to ask, “What about me? What about us women?” Nobleman said. In all the women depicted in the play – as well as in the nun – “there’s a female humility that stands tall and discovers the kingdom of God is within.”
Nobleman said she thinks drama is as important for our age as it was in Greek and Roman times. “What we need today is a change of heart. Theater can do this. But we use it as entertainment. We want it on the fringes, not in the holy of holies.”
She would like to see drama take on a bigger role in the liturgy, as art and music have. Nobleman doubts that this will happen because “theater is so bodily; it’s action and it uncontrollable.” Still she mused: “Jesus taught through story telling, and the Christian story is a great theatrical pageant.”
There is more anger in her performance than there was 15 years ago, Nobleman said. Much is fueled by stories she’s come to know personally over the past decade as she has worked with asylum seekers who are being held – some as long as four years – in detention centers in Elizabeth, N.J., and other parts of the nation.
The detainees often tell of being raped, beaten and, or, threatened in their homeland and of their fear of returning. Like the women she portrays in All that I Am, the fate of most of these women also lies with men – husbands, fathers, INS officials, immigration lawyers, tribesmen and corrupt authorities in their native land.
Actor as servant
If someone were to awaken Nobleman at 3 a.m. and ask, “Who are you?” she would tell them: “I am an actor; I act in churches, not in theaters.” But performing is hardly the glamorous life that many think. “Acting is playing the servant role; you just do the best you can to serve your audience,” she said.
Not everyone Nobleman portrays on stage is a nobody. Her repertory is filled with performances of Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa of Avila, the initiators of religious orders, Susanna Wesley – mother of Methodist founder John Wesley – and most recently St. Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Jesuits.
“On every stage where I perform, there’s an altar,” Nobleman said. “I am a priest in a sense offering a sacrifice for the people.” The way theater takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary is not unlike what happens in sacred liturgy, she added. Both “good liturgy and good theater point to the truth.”
Nobleman recalled a performance of All that I Am in a Catholic church in Detroit, at which a woman stood up and shouted: “It’s all a lie. Don’t listen to that woman, she’s from the devil.”
Nobleman grew terrified, but suddenly she heard the voice of the principal of the theater school she attended in London in 1959. It clanged in her ear:
“You are an actor. You are in the theater. Remember your lines.”
As she stepped forward to say them, a man in the audience told the irate woman:
“Sit down.
It’s true. Listen.”
