Drama And Audio Theatre In The Medieval Church
It was during the Medieval Period that the first church dramas began to appear. As Richard Courtney, famous drama teacher and theatre scholar, pointed out that the Mass itself of course has the seeds of drama – chanted dialogue and a theme of action, but not the essential quality of impersonation.
Impersonation began with the trope sung during the night before Easter. A trope was an extra chant written to accompany church music on special occasions. In the Mass, the trope had been sung by the choir. When repositioned, it became a separate little scene performed at Matins on Easter morning; much like a tiny opera, three people impersonated the Marys and one the angel before an improvised sepulchre.
Eventually, the small-scale tropes evolved into more complex dramatizations of Easter and Christmas stories. The Bible stories were enacted in the church by priests. As these plays achieved a wide popularity, the dramas began to be written in the vernacular and performed outside the church proper, although still on the church grounds.
Through this linguistic and spacial separation, the church dramas became more secularized. Eventually, the audio dramas were produced and performed by laypersons, guild members who would enact cycles of miracle plays based upon biblical stores and the lives of the saints. These plays included many secular and temporal elements of farce and mime that appealed to the medieval audiences.
Given this story, it is no wonder that the Catholic (and other sects) Church continues to be a most natural environment for drama and theatre. During the 1950s and the 1960s, at the beginnings of the Off-Broadway avant-grade movement in New York City, several churches provided homes for gifted theatre artists.
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