Moments of beauty and moments of terror in 'Passion'

Susan Pourfar and Joaquin Torres in Yale Repertory Theatre's ''Passion Play.'' (Joan marcus)

NEW HAVEN - Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play" is nothing if not ambitious. A three-play cycle that clocks in (with two intermissions) at 3 1/2 hours, it takes on religion, politics, the theater, and the intersection of all these elements and more in settings that range from Elizabethan England to 1934 Germany to Spearfish, S.D., in 1968 and again in the Reagan years.

Did I mention the giant fish puppets?

So it's hard to reduce "Passion Play" to a few choice adjectives, and it's even harder to grasp, ultimately, what it's all up to. It has moments of great beauty, moments of great terror, moments of love and fear and, yes, passion, in both the religious and the sexual senses. But those moments don't fully connect into a coherent whole. For all its vastness of scope and greatness of intent, the cycle is a collection of sometimes intriguing and sometimes incomplete scenes, rather than an intriguing and complete play.

Ruhl herself seems to sense this; she's been expanding, revising, and revisiting the play for more than a decade, ever since Paula Vogel - then her teacher at Brown University, now newly head of the playwriting program at Yale - urged her to follow through on her idea about a man who plays Christ in his village's passion play (the traditional enactment of the last days of Jesus' life) but would prefer the role of Pontius Pilate. "Passion Play" now encompasses three passion plays, in three different eras, with the same actors reappearing as the figures of the biblical story and the townspeople who portray them.

In different incarnations, the play has been staged at Chicago's Goodman Theatre and Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage before arriving in its current form at the Yale Repertory Theatre, where it opened Thursday night. As he did in Chicago, Mark Wing-Davey directs the New Haven production. He clearly has an affinity for Ruhl's work, with its distinctive conjunctions of ordinary settings and hypertheatrical, sometimes surreal developments.

Allen Moyer's set (designed with assistance from Warren Karp on the huge proscenium stage of Yale's University Theater, better suited to the play's epic scale than is the Yale Rep's own stage) begins as a plain suite of wooden plank walls, but as the action expands, so too does the setting. By the end, it has encompassed magical airborne sailing ships, giant wooden crosses, and spectacular projections by Ruppert Bohle of sunlit skies, vast highways, railway yards, the Alps, the Black Hills. . .

And don't forget the fish.

Actually, the fish are about as close as we'll get to a governing motif. Rich in Christian symbolism, they're also a real and smelly part of some key characters' lives - especially in the first segment, when the English fish gutter who plays Pontius Pilate wins the village's Virgin Mary away from her true love, Jesus. That triangle recurs, with variations, in the third play as well, which focuses on a modern American adaptation of the traditional passion play in, you guessed it, Spearfish, S.D. By the time the present-day Pontius figure shoots a giant fish in Vietnam (he'll come back to South Dakota in time for the Reagan-era production), it almost seems like a normal bit of everyday life.

Well, except that Queen Elizabeth jumps from her own era to show up next to him and the fish. We've seen her before, in the first segment, shutting down the Catholic passion play and threatening to round up any stray priests, but her appearance here is less clearly comprehensible. So, for that matter, is Adolf Hitler's; after interrupting the second segment to praise its virulently anti-Semitic Passion at Oberammergau, he pops up again in South Dakota.

Ronald Reagan is there too, of course, and even if Ruhl hadn't specified that all three be played by the same actor, it would be pretty hard to miss the parallels she draws among three leaders who use their theatrical powers and religious (or quasi-religious) fervor to seduce the public. Kathleen Chalfant infuses each with a glittery-eyed, terrifying intensity, but their appearances still feel like an odd mix of half-baked political statement and theatrical whimsy.

When she focuses on the smaller and more individual characters of her three passion plays, Ruhl writes with greater specificity and clarity. The Pontius character is particularly layered and engaging, especially in Felix Solis's deeply grounded, smoldering performance. Joaquin Torres brings a nice mix of unearthly glow and earthly heat to the various sinners who portray Christ, and longtime Ruhl associate Polly Noonan makes as much as anyone could out of the childish, sometimes grating and sometimes heartbreaking characters variously named "Village Idiot" and "Violet."

There's more - much, much more. "Passion Play" is lavish with incident, character, and imagery. It's so lavish, in fact, that it feels ungrateful to ask that it also add up to something bigger. But Ruhl, here and elsewhere, has shown herself capable of working theatrical miracles. Is it too much to wish for one more?

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.