In Context: The Glory of the World

Charles Mee's The Glory of the World, directed by Les Waters, comes to BAM January 16—February 6. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #GloryoftheWorld.

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The Glory of the World. Photo: Bill Brymer

When it premiered last spring at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Charles Mee's The Glory of the World—coming to the BAM Harvey Theater from January 16 through February 6—quickly became one of the most debated productions in the decades-long history of the Humana Festival of New American plays. The play had been commissioned to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who spent most of his career writing and meditating in the secluded confines of the Abbey at Gethsemani just south of Louisville. At the heart of heated discussions: How accurately had Merton’s legacy been portrayed?

Merton, author of some 70 volumes of poetry and essays (and the best-selling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain) is revered around the world—just a few months ago, in a speech to the US Congress, Pope Francis singled Merton out as a “great American.” But he’s especially beloved in Kentucky, where the Thomas Merton Center is housed at Bellarmine University (and where a recent campaign has emerged to name a new Ohio River bridge after him).

A Love Letter to BAM

This January, playwright, collagist, and Richard B. Fisher Next Wave Award recipient Charles Mee returns to BAM for a fourth time with The Glory of the World. Here—in an excerpt from 2011's BAM: The Complete Works—Mee shares dynamic memories of America's oldest performing arts center:

Mee's The Glory of the World comes to BAM Jan 16—Feb 6. Photo: Bill Brymer

By Charles Mee

We live in a world these days where it’s taken for granted that BAM is one of the greatest cultural institutions on the planet. And yet, not long ago—certainly within my own lifetime—it was a big old dark neglected pile of stones right off Flatbush Avenue where no one I knew ever thought to go.

The first time I ever walked into the theater at BAM it was completely inadvertent. A friend had invited me to see a theater piece called The Photographer/Far from the Truth, inspired by the work of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose obsession with animal and human locomotion led to developing a photographic means to project a series of images that had been captured by a set of still cameras: galloping horses, running bison, nude women descending staircases. I knew Muybridge’s work, and I thought it was great, but, of course, I knew no one could make a good theater piece out of it. Still, I went anyway, because I had nothing else to do, and I thought it might be kind of exciting to venture out into the unknown wilderness—and stop for some cheesecake at Junior’s.

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Stuffed chickens, backyard bathtubs, roller skates, pilled blankets: these are just a few of the homespun discards featured in Robert Rauschenberg’s work. As a young artist in New York in the 1950s, Rauschenberg would roam the streets around his studio, picking up everything from yesterday’s funny papers to worn out car tires and use them in his assemblages. In line with many of his Black Mountain contemporaries, Rauschenberg sought to close the gap between art and life by incorporating into his artwork the textures of American detritus.