In the summer of 2022, I visited the charming Alpine town of Oberammergau, Germany. I wandered its leafy streets lined with mural-painted houses, their balconies overflowing with flower boxes.
After indulging in ice cream and shopping for the town’s famed woodcarvings, I settled in my seat for a five-and-a-half-hour performance of Jesus’ final week on earth. Since 1634, Oberammergau has put on a Passion play involving almost all its residents, first staged in thanksgiving for the end of a bubonic plague outbreak. Normally the performances take place in the first year of a new decade (2000, 2010, etc.), but the new plague of COVID-19 delayed 2020’s play by two years.
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