Word: priesting
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...PRIEST STANDS at one end of the hall, the revolutionary at the other--white cassock and Bible against khaki fatigues and M-1 rifle. The symbols are the obvious ones, but through them A Time of Fire attempts to come to grips with the personal side of revolution in Central America...
Written by Leverett House senior Bernadette Ward, the play is set in Nicaragua during 1979, when Sandinista rebels struggled to overthrow the dictatorial Somoza regime. Ward tries to dramatize the revolution's impact on a single village and its stock characters: the boyish revolutionaries, the Catholic priest, the young lovers, the disgruntled town elders. But the Guardia National remains off-stage; the abuses and injustice that spawned the revolution appear only as a background for the exploration of the tension between the revolutionaries and the traditions of the church and village...
...Ward aimed to use Rodrigo merely as a symbol, such superficial characterization might suffice. But instead, the play tries to fathom his anguished jealousy of the village priest's power over the villagers, an emotion the audience cannot appreciate fully without understanding why this power means so much to Rodrigo. His apparently pointless anger at times even risks belittling the revolutionary cause and the very real tragedies behind...
...beatific and even-handed charity of the Catholic Father Paz (David Johnson) persuades little better. The exclusive focus on the dutiful and kindly stereotype of the priest--a role Johnson plays with subdued control--shuts out any insights into the tension and passion of a man so close to the heart of the revolutionary upheaval. The unending saccharine sweetness manifests itself again in the angelic religious devotion of Rodrigo's brother Manuel (Phillip Windemuth), who delivers his lines with unwavering child-like idealism...
...dull brick Memorial Cathedral for World Peace, where the Pope prayed briefly, the host priest bore scars from the heat and radiation of the atomic attack. Many in the congregation of 1,800 still suffered " anemia, sterility or blood diseases brought by the bomb...