For anyone who’s ever attended Sunday school, the book of Jonah is likely a familiar tale. I can still picture the cartoonish drawings: a kneeling, squeaky-clean Jonah prays peacefully inside a smiling, baby-blue whale. If you’re unfamiliar with these tempered iterations, excellent. If they are familiar to you, forget all of that right now…
The story of Yonah ben Amittai—the resistant prophet—isn’t cute. It’s thrilling, heart-breaking, frightening, beautiful, dangerous, triumphant, and quite fantastical. Tempests & leviathans, Hebrews & pagans, condemnation & repentance, toxic plants & underwater behemoths… So many outlandish elements, all Mercy…
Reimagined in a style that marries Greek Tragedy with folktale, Ionéu is a 90-minute retelling of Jonah’s remarkable story that dives deeply into many of its theological, cultural, and historical treasures, ultimately seeking to prompt this ageless question: What happens to a human heart when it becomes unable to give or receive Mercy?
