The Santa Cruz Monterey Bay Branch of the Anthroposophical Society of America is pleased to present the perennial Christmas favorite, the Oberufer Shepherds Play – a loving restoration of a medieval mystery play which dramatizes the Birth of Christ from the point of view of the Shepherds.
There will be one performance only, Saturday, December 17 at the Louden Nelson Community Center. The performance begins at 7PM. An admission of $12 for adults and $8 for children and seniors will be requested.
About the play (and this production):
The history of the Oberufer Shepherds Play goes something like this: in medieval times a play was performed on Oberufer, an island in the Austrian Danube. Characters were played by members of the community who kept the same roles from year to year.
Karl Julius Schröer published this play along with others in 1858 in Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungarn (German Christmas Plays from Hungary).
Sometime later his student Rudolf Steiner edited this play and set the language in the regional dialect, retaining much folk humor and liveliness.
Around 1940 A. C. Harwood translated the plays into English, a challenge, given the obscure Austrian dialect. The nearest American equivalent would be like translating Brer Rabbit into German. How do you do this? Harwood chose a kind of Shakespearean/Biblical language, which is of course nothing like a true folk dialect. But it was a good solution to a difficult problem, and has become much beloved over the years.
Steiner worked with an anthroposophical musician named Leopold van der Pals for the music we use here. There are also other scores, but we like the van der Pals music and it’s the one that’s familiar in America.
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