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nhl-chirps · 8 months

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Guess who's back bitches :)

#zee speaks

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nhl-chirps · 1 year

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the hughes brothers + growing up

Jandy Nelson, I’ll Give You the Sun

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nhl-chirps · 1 year

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chris kreider and mika zibanejad + not quite lovers

—richard siken

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nhl-chirps · 1 year

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Kate Baer, New Year

thanks to @ghostgeno for the inspo

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nhl-chirps · 1 year

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Brad and Bergy as Judas and Jesus 👀👀

Oh, so we're doing this?

Okay. Buckle up. I have Thoughts. I have Feelings. I Don’t Have a Brain to Mouth Filter.

So first of all, Brad Marchand did all the heavy lifting for me on this one. Him talking about Patrice Bergeron being ABOVE??? JESUS??? HELLO??? Their relationship. Their personalities. The “Saint Patrice” nickname. The dedication. The potential for ANGST

The way Marchand looks at him.

ALL THE TIME.

I didn’t make this up he did this to himself.

(note: I’ve seen other people talk about this as well. Linking this post by @hard4softthings because I like the way they phrased their response, but there’s other people who’ve been talking about this recently I just don’t remember any specific posts.)

Now. Here comes the Narrative:

We’re all on Tumblr so we’ve probably all come across this line from Stephen Adly Guirgis´ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (2005) that reads like a punch to the fucking gut:

Which is an INCREDIBLE line, but the play itself is actually .. um.. a very different vibe:

Tell me Judas doesn’t read a whole lot like Brad Marchand. I dare you.

The line that precedes this is also pretty Brad/Bergy.

Is it ever anybody else? No. It’s Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand and it’s BEEN the two of them together at the centre of all this for years. It’s Jesus and Judas, Bergeron and Marchand, their names go together.

One of my personal favourite Judases is played by Carl Anderson in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). He really embodies the Tragic Villain I believe Judas to be. In several of his lines/lyrics he talks about the myth/person dichotomy. He loves Jesus of Nazareth, but does not know how to feel about Jesus Christ the Son of God.

Link

Link (SERIOUS TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE)

Which becomes especially relevant if you think about Bergeron being Saint Patrice, and Marchand being The Rat.

Borrowing from Frank Bidart’s “Guilty of Dust”:

Except we’re taking the Mythology approach to this: your name is your fate.

Now the real tragedy of Judas Iscariot is that his name is Judas Iscariot. We are all familiar with the bible story and as a result, the actor playing the part of Judas simply HAS TO betray Jesus. It’s what his entire identity is centred around. If he didn’t, the audience wouldn’t be able to recognise the character as Judas.

(Obligatory Richard Siken:

Snow and Dirty Rain)

That’s just tragic inevitability for you bay-bey.

In Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas’ name is repeated twice right after he betrays Jesus:

“Well done, Judas. Good old Judas” = Good job person who claims to be Judas, you have betrayed Jesus and proved yourself to be Judas. You are now “Good old Judas”, which is to say, the Judas we recognise from the Bible.

A lot of theatre productions play with this idea of inevitability & living up to ones name in interesting ways.

(See: Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra & their repeated failure to live up to their own myths / Troilus & Cressida “This is and is not Cressid” (5.2.175) when Cressida lives up to her name by being unfaithful, which Troilus thinks is unlike the Cressida he knows personally / Iago’s “I am not what I am,” (Othello, 1.1.65) - I am Othello’s loyal friend except that I’m not, I am Iago & will betray Othello, except that I am not yet because I haven’t betrayed him yet & earned the name Iago)

In Terrence McNally´s play Corpus Christ there is a moment where Judas becomes Judas:

The actor stops shuddering, has now been Named Judas and will go on to fulfil the ROLE of Judas.

In the case of Marchand and Bergeron I am most interested in the ways in which their nicknames become their fate:

Brad the rat - This one’s relatively straight forward. Marchand accepts this role and really works hard to seep living up to it. He has received the Rat label and My God he will act like the rat you think he is.

Saint Patrice - a nickname Bergeron has said he does not particularly like or agree with, but which DOES affect his behaviour and our perception of him. If Bergeron was to take on the role of the rat, that would be weird and uncomfortable to us. We expect Patrice Bergeron to act “like himself”.

Which ties it back to Jesus Christ Superstar: “If you strip away the myth from the man / You will see where we all soon will be”. Carl Anderson’s (brilliant) Judas struggles with the fact that he loves Jesus the man, but not Jesus the myth. In the case of NHL stardom you can look at this in terms of the difference between their on-ice personalities vs. their off ice friendship. Brad loves Patrice The Man, Patrice His Friend, he is less concerned with Patrice The Myth.

I also cast Brad as Dionysus in my little hockey mythologies. There are a few obvious (and slightly silly) reasons for this: Dionysus being the god of the grape harvest (read: wine, drunken revelry), festivity, insanity, (religious ecstasy .. interpret that however you will.. ), but it is partly because Dionysus is the god of theatre.

(I will circle back around to Brad/Judas I promise)

Dionysus = Theatre = The Rat Persona As Performance

(Note: person/persona/personality, from πρόσωπον or perhaps persōna = mask)

Now this idea of the Persona (rat personality) as that which helps the audience recognise your role in the play (the name of the character you play and the expectations that come with said name) and mask as something used to obscure your actual face is really interesting!!

It comes back to this question of free will vs. predestination. How much of what Judas does is the Human Person, how much of it is his Name-Fate. How much of The Rat is Brad. How much is just him living up to his reputation/nickname.

Oscar Wilde has a fun little quote about this that’ll complicate it further:

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

(The internet informs me this is from The Happy Prince & Other Tales but I will admit I only know it from the end of a Criminal Minds episode)

Michael Kinnucan in my favourite essay ever written about anything ever The Gods Show Up writes:

Brad is the rat, the rat is brad. It’s a person. It’s an act. It’s a mask. We know it’s a mask, but how much of it is a mask. No idea. COMPELLING THOUGH.

This same essay then brings us back to the tragedy of Judas: