New York. Around Broadway, or its backstreets – generally, the central area. A volunteer theatre troupe is staging a version of Nikos Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucified. They are raising money to stage the play slowly but surely.
A charity raising money for local homeless shelters moves into the empty lot next door. Now both organisations vie for the same customer base. In the original book this acted partly as an analogue for the Greek Civil War, but here, in this metafictional version, the replacement of that theme with the overtone of capitalist competition acts as a commentary on the relationship between the arbitrary movement of capital and war.
The young man in the theatre troupe chosen to play Manolios is a good man, simple and potentially holy despite his venal surroundings – he is a country boy who came to New York to send money back home. When given the role of Manolios, who in the novel was chosen to play Christ in the village’s passion play, he is similarly impressed and awed, and a little proud, at the gravity of the task. The other character correspondences are easily made. The church atop the mountain becomes an acting school. The Prophet Elijah is transformed into Shakespeare. Etc etc.
Cue…the modified, modernised, meta-made plot of Christ Recrucified, all over again. In the end the New York Manolios is, of course, shot in the street.
Not just a new crucifixion but a meta-crucifixion, this time transplanted to the dirty streets of Noo Yawk. (Not quite the true New York, I think, but the magical, wild, violent and hyper-referential New York of Peter Gabriel’s Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.)
verso folio 