by Savannah Hart
There’s just nothing quite like live theatre. I don’t think anything can be a good enough stand-in for the experience.
The university from which I graduated last year hosts annual trips to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Canada. Being in the theatre crowd, I joined my friends on the trip my senior year, and witnessed a magical level of quality in storytelling. The talent of those actors was breathtaking. My friends and I vowed to make our own trips even after graduation, since it was only about an 8-hour drive away.
Last fall in 2019, a few of us made that happen. We saved up our own money, chose the two shows that were must-sees for us, and blew some well-spent cash on the tickets.
Stratford brings the Bard’s stories to life, but also many other renowned plays. The pair we chose thematically went hand in hand: Shakespeare’s Othello, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. And that pairing ended up wrecking me a bit.
For those of you who are familiar with The Crucible, you will easily understand the rest of my thoughts. For those of you who aren’t, you need to know that the play, similar to Othello, is about the truth—about an entire village in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1600’s miserably attempting to get to the truth, about the seemingly rampant presence of witchcraft among the villagers. I won’t describe the plot any further, for Miller weaves such a brilliant narrative with articulate complexity that the script is absolutely worth the read. But the uncertainty, the manipulation, the stubborn blindness, characters striving to denounce the lies of other characters—the struggle taking place on the stage stirred deep pockets of my mind.
Photography by Cylla von Tiedemann
I left the theatre with tears still in my eyes, exiting in silence with my friends through the sea of people. Like a good art piece should evoke, I had to process my thoughts on paper when I got back to my hotel room that night. Here’s what I wrote in my journal, next to some leafless trees I scribbled that mimicked the set design:
“Evidence. Proofs. Reverend Hale [a primary character] believed in the witchcraft and demonic presence in Salem because of the ‘far too many proofs.’ . . . Hale was already persuaded before he arrived. He believed as he thought, and he interpreted the evidence the way he’d decided and desired. Evidence can support that which it is coaxed to support. Where do we do this, God? . . . Here in Salem was a Scripture-originating community, blended with the norms of their time, their stacked books of added knowledge, their social constructs of authority . . . Can I ask for You to be proven without already desiring You to be so?”
My experience with that work of art was one in a chain of events constituting a long wrestling journey with epistemology, or how we know what we know. My move to college was a move from one Christian circle to another, however the Christian circle of college encompassed a lot more: a few thousand people coming from their own subcultures of Christianity to an environment that strongly pushed its own Christian subculture. I was introduced to several more interpretations of the truth than I had previously known were allowed to be considered credible. I was suffering from a deficiency in awareness of other denominations—of other microcosms of believing—of other cultures of knowing. I remember finishing my last theology class of college and thinking, “Wow…there’s a lot less consensus than I thought there was.”
This, of course, was disheartening, at times exasperating. Why do there seem to be so many ‘versions’ of the truth? And while many of my friends were responding to this frustration by giving up and fabricating their own preferred ideas, I was determined to hold to the truth that there is such a thing, and that perhaps our aim is to find ‘the truest version of the truth.’
Photography by Cylla von Tiedemann
Seeing The Crucible a few months after graduating reminded me not only of this journey, but of my own inability to be fully rid of preconceptions. Entangled in our contexts, unavoidably influenced by our communities, we are all (myself included) broken comprehenders. The story made me face the question, “Can I fully embrace the conclusions I have come to, if I know I can’t possibly come to them objectively? Can I fully be at peace with submitting to You, God, if I know my journey to You began with a bias?”
Without giving away the play’s ending, protagonist John Proctor finally and sacrificially surrenders for the one thing he knows to be true, even though the audience will be left with a Salem still in a horrendous state of upheaval. The absence of resolution does not mean the absence of resolve.
Arthur Miller didn’t give me answers. He gave me extremely good and crucial questions for living as a broken comprehender.
How is this belief or idea influenced by my context?
What do I treat as proof that I should rather treat as evidence?
Though I cannot eliminate presuppositions, can I name them?
Why do we believe what we believe.
I must finish, for now, where I currently am with the question that the Stratford stage and its players gave me to face:
Our journeys of belief and epistemology are far more experiential and relational—less intellectual—than we like to admit, because that is the nature of our creaturehood. Inescapably. It is the way we were designed. And God—the truth that is a Person, that is an Incarnate Gospel—continues to reveal Himself through experiential, relational, and intellectual evidence better than anything else I’ve experienced the world offering.
Savannah Hart is an emerging mixed-media sculptor living in Louisville, Kentucky. She collects and repurposes discarded material or objects and assembles them into sculptural diagrams of thought to explore the spiritual questions she ponders. The most continual question in her work is, "How does the finite interact with the Infinite?" She finds that altering reclaimed objects pre-packed with narrative lends itself best to this both objective and non-objective focus.
Savannah seeks out ways to use art as social activism and healing for the community in which she lives, working at the cross-section of art and ministry. She is currently an intern with Love Thy Neighborhood and Sojourn Arts.
You can view her work by following her on Instagram @savannahhartwork.
This post is part of an ongoing series where we ask artists and arts professionals to share a piece of artwork that has significantly impacted their formation as a Christian.