Staging Jonah - The BAS Library

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22 For a long time, I wanted to write a play about the comic, contentious, absurd, salvific relationship between God and us—to present a comic Everyman locked in mortal (salvific) combat with Yahweh. But I got nowhere with the idea and let it lie, until one night I read through some of the Minor Prophets and came across the Book of Jonah. My preconceptions about the book were, in retrospect, utterly ordinary and rather embarrassing. I knew the story: The guy gets swallowed by a fish, and there was something about a miraculous plant as well. But this time, […]

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Footnotes

Even after the Ship’s Captain tells Jonah to “call on your god,” we never see that he does so.

In Genesis 18:23–33, Abraham bargains with God to save the righteous citizens of Sodom, which God has pledged to destroy. To intensify the grimness of this scene, we might imagine Jonah attempting the same thing in reverse: “If I find, say, 50 unrepentant sinners in Nineveh, then will you destroy it?”

The actor playing Jonah spit at the end of the line.