Yet far from making irrelevant the time and place where God's story can be retold, it reawakens us to the meaning that is everywhere in our world and in our actions. Noah and his wife 3 may have spats that seem common and petty, but amidst the comedy we feel the urgency for them to put aside their anger and get on that boat. Their anger is an impediment to their salvation. In fact, the Wakefield cycle is quite interested in the relationship of anger and evil. Lucifer, Cain, Herod, and Augustus are all particularly angry characters.
Anger seems to be a key part of the plays' dramatic vocabulary for evil.
But the Wakefield cycle suggests connections that make us see traces of Cain's anger in Noah's wife and then in Noah. Similarly, the Wakefield cycle wants us to see in Noah and his wife the significance and potential destructiveness of our own anger. Though we are not seeing the Noah play in the current BYU production of the Wakefield cycle, it is this kind of connectedness between biblical characters, fifteenth-century British commoners, and us that the plays wish us to find over and over. The plays urgently admonish us to recognize that our sins produce the pain the plays graphically portray for us in Christ's crucifixion. Even before the plays ask us to see ourselves on stage at the last judgment, they have innvited us to see aspects of ourselves in Pilate and in Peter.