Passion Play 1960 — American Angels in Oberammergau

Evening star, Wahington D.C., April 10, 1960

American Angels at Oberammergau

By Norbert Muhlen

The world's longest-running play has something new —two U. S. schoolgirls !

Pair of angels:
Elisabeth (left) and Blythe go to Oberammergau school

Oberammergau, Germany

The longest-running play in history is about to be given another performance here in this village of wood carvers in the Bavarian Alps. It’s the Oberammergau Passion Play, which was first produced in 1634 and, with few exceptions, has been repeated once every decade for 326 years in accordance with a vow made under the threat of the Black Plague.

The dreaded pestilence which was sweeping through Europe had struck Oberammergau with terrifying effect : half the townspeople were dead or dying. In desperation, the survivors made a solemn pledge: If the plague abated, Oberammergau’s people would relive the Passion of the Savior. Further, they and their descendants would undertake the giant drama every 10 years forever. Miraculously, the plague ceased. Oberammergau at once began fulfilling its vow and has done so ever since.

Based on texts written by medieval Benedictine monks and a local tailor who doubled as a playwright, the play retraces Christ’s way through this world.

From its first performance the drama was a tremendous success. And despite tempting invitations to repeat it moreoften than once every 10 years, the villagers have stuck to their original vow. Until recent years, the cast has always been entirely composed of villagers from Oberammergau although after the war the rules were relaxed to admit a few refugees. 

But this year that three-century-old tradition is being upset by two little American girls: Elisabeth Dietz, six, of Dayton, 0., and Blythe Lasley, seven, of College Park, Md., both daughters of Gl’s in Germany. They are going to play angels in the Angel Choir, otherwise made up of school children from Oberammergau.

"My daddy, who’s in the Air Force, told me to be a good  girl so I could play an angel real good,” Elisabeth recently told me in the first exclusive interview of her acting career. A winsome-faced little blonde, she is in the first grade of the Oberammergau Public School. Her mother, a native of Munich, married Elisabeth’s father after the last war. Blythe is a lively, uninhibited youngster with long brown hair. She’s in the second grade. Blythe is a Protestant; Elisabeth, like nearly all the rest of the cast, is Catholic. Before they started rehearsing for the play, Blythe and Elisabeth knew each other only slightly. Now they are fast friends and trying hard to behave like angels.

Every Oberammergauer aspires to the honor of playing a leading role in the Passion, and many prepare for this all their lives, beginning as angels in the children’s choir and "working their way up.” Anton Preisinger, a 47-year-old local innkeeper who will enact Christ, was in the angel choir when he was 10. A descendant of four generations of Passion players, Herr Preisinger confided to me that as a boy he, too, had looked forward to some day playing an important role but that he had never dared hope to portray Christ. For his role he has let his hair grow to shoulder length and has grown a beard. He has sad, thoughtful eyes and fine features. He looks as if he might have just stepped out of an Old Master painting. 

Of the 50,000 townspeople of Oberammergau, 1,500 are in the cast. Oberammergau’s barbers have much time on their hands these days —it seems as though nearly everybody in the town is letting his beard and hair grow.

Public dancing has been forbidden for entire year out of respect for the solemnity of the show. Pretty 21-year-old Irmgard Dengg, an office girl chosen to play the Virgin Mary, doesn’t miss the dancing. "I would have no time for it now anyway,” she told me.

Audience: A million will see it !

With the opening of the 1960 Play now just a month away, townspeople are girding for an onslaught of one million visitors from all over the world. That’s the number expected to fill Oberammergau’s gasthauses, its bierstuben, and its amphitheater between May 19, when the play opens, and September 25, day of the last of 81 performances. Seats have been specially reserved for 10,000 American Gl’s.

What the visitors will see is a spectacle that takes eight hours to put on with a brief intermission for lunch. It has 38 scenes, covers the Scriptures from the Fall of Adam to the Ascension of Christ. embraces an orchestra and several companies of singers, has more people than a Cecil DeMille film, and has been miraculously whipped together by a 70-year-old woodcarver named Georg Lang, since 1910.

American visitors, including several former Presidents. have been in the audience for the past century. Some Oberammergauers still talk about a gentleman from New York named John D. Rockefeller, who acquired lasting fame in their midst by his unprecedented open-handedness. After peeing the play and staying over for two nights, he sent his landlady a present of $12.50.

Not to be outdone, Henry Ford, after he watched the Passion and admired it, shipped a model-T car to the player of Christ.

I asked Herr Lang, the "leader” of the play, what makes the performance of his people so moving. "In the Passion Play they achieve with their own bodies and souls what they do every day of their lives with pieces of wood,” he told me, making reference to the delicately carved Christmas creches, crucifixes, and other objects of religious art which arc produced with such fidelity in Oberammergau. "Besides,” he added, "they believe in the truth of the words they speak.”