Leap - Orpheus Theatre Company

Leap is an original stage play written and performed by Jeremiah Miller from the works of Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th century philosopher. Performed in the small, austere space of a church chapel, it is a tour de force, surprisingly long but never dragging.

The production's conceit seems to be bringing Kierkegaard into the modern day, although it mostly remains a meticulous period piece. At one point, Miller's Kierkegaard is interrupted by the digital voice of Alexa being asked who he is; a later section (I assume drawn directly from Kierkegaard's writings, though I haven't individually verified this) has Kierkegaard all but predicting the cell phone and declaring it would cause mass lunacy; a biker's leather jacket is trotted out for one of Kierkegaard's characters; Miller gets a laugh by miming the taking of duck-face selfies with opera glasses instead of a cell phone. But mostly, Kierkegaard is interesting enough on his own terms, in his own time.

Anyone even lightly familiar with the contours of Kierkegaard's life will hope to see Kierkegaard's unique romantic struggles depicted, and that they are -- the woman he falls in love with, only to him to break off their engagement while remaining obsessed with her the rest of his life -- and the vision of playwright-actor Miller and director Katharine Rossi even dares to suggest a kind of equivalency between Kierkegaard giving up love and marriage for more-or-less ideological reasons and Abraham being told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, the subject of Kierkegaard's most popular writing in Fear and Trembling.

Kierkegaard, I read on Wikipedia, left behind 7,000 pages of journals; and with any other historical figure, one might suspect a one-person stage-show would be drawn mostly from these biographical details rather than philosophy. But not only are Kierkegaard's musings not dry, but the historical Kierkegaard has left Miller the key to understanding his philosophy as a work of drama: Kierkegaard very often did not write as himself, but as a series of pseudonymous characters -- none of whom may be assumed to represent Kierkegaard's position exactly on anything. With a series of masks and costumes, Miller-as-Kierkegaard takes on these semi-fictional personas.

The show is primarily affecting on an intellectual level, but Miller goes for raw emotion as well, reckoning not just with lost love, lost parents, and unfriendly tabloids; but with the raw connection between the individual and God. Kierkegaard is a writer and would seem egotistical had history not seemed to vindicate the ego. But at one point he contemplates whether it would be better for him to be a "country parson," which may have been the most affecting scene -- for the question is not what to know, but what to do.

LEAP is produced by the Orpheus Theatre Company at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lancaster. Two performances remain -- Saturday, December 17th at 7:30PM and Sunday, December 18th at 2:30PM -- for which tickets can be purchased HERE.