I don’t follow the theater world very much at all, but I recently discovered quite by accident that a local theatre group was doing a production of the French Catholic poet/diplomat Paul Claudel’s play The Satin Slipper. I’ve been curious about this epic for many years: It’s said to be nearly impossible to stage, running some 12 hours and set on three continents (and then some). Director Peter Dobbins, of the Storm Theatre and Blackfriars Repertory Theatre, has put together a three-hour version, and I decided to trek up to the Columbia University neighborhood this evening to give it a try. It was enormously rewarding, and I recommend it to anyone in the NYC area interested in religious drama — performances will continue until February 6. (Tickets here.) Set in Golden Age Spain of the late 16th century, the play is a romantic/marital drama, and a historical reflection on the colonization of the New World, but – most important of all – a story of the finding of purpose that comes only on the other side of the death of self. I was warned ahead of time that the first half of the play was difficult, and this was quite true; but the emotional payoff in the second half was immense, a convincing acting-out of the truth expressed in Psalm 51: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”

The venue is small — the basement of Notre Dame Catholic Church — and the production is not opulent. But the cast are excellent, and the bare-bones staging helps them create a genuinely engrossing reality. This is an excellent dramatic achievement, about the joy that lives within and beyond tears.