Katrina and the Waves

When director Betty Bernhard visited our class last, we began to ask her questions about the reality of our circumstances. We're a class of non-actors, though some of us have high school or college experience. We have only three weeks to rehearse, which sounds like a lot until you realize that's only one night a week. It became very clear that it would be a challenge just to pull off one show well, much less two.

The other thing that happened was that Betty threw out an offhand comment on wondering what it would be like to set the play within the modern context of Hurricane Katrina. There was some excited buzz as we talked about this during class and during breaks.

We had a chance in the latter part of class to run through the lines together for the first time. I was surprised by how difficult the rhymining lines were and how hard they seemed to follow what with God directing Noah to take along some binding slitch and all those specfic instructions about cubit measurements and how many clean and unclean animals to take along. If it's hard for us to follow after reading it a couple of times, I wonder how an audience will do.

We got an email from Melinda, our director, this week telling us that the production team has decided that we will do only one version of the play. It seems challenge enough simply to do one version well in the time we have. Since I was to play God in both productions, I wasn't affected as much, but I sympathized for the other actors who would have two parts to learn. For me, though, it means I need to rethink how I portray God. My plan was to show two very different natures of God. An more traditional "Old Testament" God for one and a more Process Theology God for the other. Now I need to find a way to blend both natures into one, but then, that's how I have to relate to my own concept of God. I have to reconcile that God of the Hebrew Bible with my post-modern sense of being led, nudged, sometimes cajoled by the sometimes-gentle, sometimes cajoling and invading nature of that which we call God into my life.



More troubling for me was the part of Melinda's email that said the production team had decided to set the play in New Orleans before during and after Hurricane Katrina. While I think there could be some profound ways to tell the Noah story as God's judgment on the abandonment of entire neighborhoods and people by governments who decided not to provide proper levees -- for that "sin" -- I don't think that's the way we would go. Also, it seems difficult to me to take a play that relies on humor to convey its message and layer that on top of the devastation of Katrina. And, I still have vivid memories of being in Louisiana on a work trip just three weeks after Katrina and listening to people who earnestly believed that the Hurricane was God's wrath coming down on the lifestyle of the city of New Orleans. They were quick to name not only the debauchery of Mardi Gras but also their sense that this was God's commentary on homosexuality. It was chilling to work side by side with these folks in the name of the same God and be called to that work for such different reasons. It would be very difficult for me to deliver some of God's lines if they were set in the context of judgement of New Orleans. Early on, God says: "I see my people in deed and thought are set foully in sin." And talks about "man, who through fleshly liking is my foe." The other thing that troubles me a little is that this was just decided. We didn't discuss as a class how to set the show. Now, in normal productions, the cast and crew would just be carrying out the producer and director's vision, but our charge in this class is to study medieval drama and then consider how to put one on.

These concerns, it turns out, were shared by others because we spent a good bit of the openig of this week's class in a full-on debate about the merits or not of setting the show in a Katrina context. Melinda's email made some good theological points, particularly that setting the play in the midst of the Katrina devastation "fits our motivational thrust: Why is Noah/Noah's Wife and family saved and not The Gossip and others? ... (and) it fits Beth Leehy's point of the Medievals wrestling with the plague and us wrestling with a Hurricane - uncontrollable major devestating events of which we have no control ... " We didn't resolve much in the discussion, which got a bit heated, but we do seem at least in consensus to move forward in a contemporary context.

We began blocking the play tonight. I had forgotten that this is how I used to learn lines in my high school and drama days. Theres's something about walking and talking that helps build a play into muscle memory. Though, three rehearsals won't be the same as three weeks of rehearsals.

Melinda's email had also asked the cast to consider the final sacrifice scene and come prepared to talk about what sacrifice his or her character would make to God.
We didn't get to this discussion tonight, and she hadn't asked me, but I kept finding myself wanting to speak for God and say what God wanted. I think God wants the people on the boat -- the people on the ark that is Earth -- to make whatever changes they need to make in their hearts and in their lives so that we truly know peace. That's what God wants.

Directing is to ministry...

"An artist is someone who draws attention to what is praiseworthy in the universe."
-- William Ball, stage director

Betty Bernhard, acting and directing professor at Pomona College, shared that quote with us tonight during a lively guest lecture on directing.

Her talk was practical and philosophical, and, truly without belaboring the point, she kept drawing parallels between directing and ministry and, at one point, between the director and God.

Much of her advice for directors would also be good advice for ministers. Rather than belabor that point myself, I'm going to capture some of her advice for directors and invite myself and anyone else who reads this simply to insert the word "minister" for "director" and consider the similarities.

For example, the director should tell the stage manager never to run from Point A to Point B during the dress rehearsal because it alarms the actors. The director, too, must maintain a presence of calm no matter what disaster may be unfolding.

"You have to be very calm even if it's killing you."

Actors need praise. They thrive on it. They live for it. As a director, Bernhard said, "you must discipline yourself to give praise."

The director serves as the host of the play much the way a minister extends hospitality to a congregation, she said.

And, with some excellent vocational discernment advice, she said: "Don't do a play that you don't really love."

The same principle applies to the people in the production: "Don't talk anyone into doing anything on your show that they don't really want to."

The director needs to make sure that the play and the players speak with and to the audience, not through it.

Directors have moral, ethical, spiritual and financial responsibilities for the show.

Directors have to be very enthusiastic.
Don't be a director if you don't have great stamina.

I asked her who chooses to be a director, who feels drawn to directing: "People who are good at seeing the big picture. People who are good with deadlines."

Bernhard cautioned us against a scarcity mentality telling us not to feel limited by what we do and don't have. "Follow God's example and create a universe out of what's lying around."

On a more personal note, I continue to be surprised by how excited I am to be doing a play again after decades of not. It has been very telling to realize anew that theatre is, indeed, one of my loves.

I recently heard someone describe a bright young woman who changed her major from psychology to engineering, gave engineering a noble try and then decided to switch back to psychology. Those who knew her well said that when she talked about sociological situations, particularly in work settings where a psychology degree might help in a human relations job, she would light up in ways she rarely did when she talked about engineering. That's good discernment.

I light up these days in this class. And, I light up when I talk about it. But, I'm not changing my major, because I also light up when I talk about ministry, and I light up when I talk about worship, and I light up when I struggle with theological issues in scripture. And, I no longer light up nearly as much when I talk about journalism.

My hope is that as a minister, I, too, can be someone who draws attention to what is praiseworthy in the universe.

Morality Play

For more than a week in the early days of the semester, my husband would come upon me reading and I would look up from my book and smile broadly. This isn't the usual reaction he sees when I'm reading for school. But this semester, I got to -- had to, really -- read a brilliant work of fiction: Morality Play by Barry Unsworth.

The novel is a mystery of sorts about a traveling troupe of players in the Middle Ages. Our professors assigned it for its historical accuracy in detailing the nuances of everyday life in those times.

I was fascinated by how the players put on their plays with a small ensemble and a ragged array of costumes. They also had symbolic masks and sometimes carried symbolic props. What most drew my attention, though, was the complex set of hand signals the players used to communicate with one another as the play was in progress as well as the common set of mimes and gestures known not only to the players but to their audience as a kind of shorthand to establish character and motivation.

The play we will do, Noah's Flood, was done when the productions were put on by guilds and were more elaborate.

Prof. Lori Ann Ferrell was in class for the first time this week and led our discussion of Unsworth's novel, trying to get us to consider what it told us about medieval times and then trying to get us to consider how we would apply what we had learned to our own production.

At the beginning of class, our director, Melinda Teter, explained that she had cast the play two ways for two different productions. The first would be a standard portrayal of the play, the second would cross genders with men playing the role of women and women playing the role of men. All the roles change in the second production except God. God remains constant.

Nevertheless, I began to wonder if the second play might allow us to think creatively about the nature and essence of God. Is it possible to tell the first story as it is written -- with an angry God deciding to wipe out much of creation and start over -- and tell the second story with a God who is less directly involved? A God who doesn't intervene.

And what does God wear? There has been some talk that a group of dancers on campus might be persuaded to dance in with multi-colored streamers to represent the rainbow. And the flood, too, could have rising waters that dance across the stage. Maybe God is wrapped in the streamers that will become water and the streamers that become rainbow and hands the streamers to the dancers as a way of bringing the flood, as a way of placing the rainbow.


Credit for this photo goes to National Geograpic. To learn more about it go here

And how does an actor play God? So often, good acting involves freeing yourself to become one with your character, letting your character embody you, becoming, if only for a time, this other. Can you do that acting as God? And what about this wrathful Old Testament God, how does an actor with a different theology of God portray that God?

I'll have plenty of time in the next few weeks to consider all of these things because the person Melinda cast as God is me.

My seminary friends and a few in San Diego know that events in my life in the past year have challenged my thoughts on the nature and essence of God -- though I still hold tight to the Gospel message of Jesus and the loving guidance of the Spirit. These friends are taking great pleasure in the fact that, having lost God at times in the past year, I now have to find God within myself.

Auditions and the return of theatre

When the ancient Greek culture disappeared, so did theatre.

As we learned in the second week of class, it was centuries before formal theatre returned, even then it wasn't fully embraced again until Shakespeare's time. As Prof. Coogan said: "That's a long time with no theatre."

Which is not to say the world was without drama. Life is drama.

The early church was opposed to theatre, which helps explain why there was not a rapid rebirth. Yet the church kept drama alive. As our BBC documentary noted, the church, each day, kept theatre alive in "the mystery and drama of holy communion." The Mass itself was religious drama.

Over time, the church began to tell its most sacred stories in drama -- the story of the nativity, the story of Christ's passion, death and resurrection. Those dramas were told on the church steps, but soon the religious dramas left the church. They became the province of the people and theatre was reborn.

With that backdrop -- and with the admonition from Prof. Coogan that he could point to 19th century documents warning us Methodists to steer clear of the evil influences of theatre -- we launched into production planning and auditions for the medieval mystery play we will stage this semester from Noah's story.

My friend Melinda Teter is the director. Melinda entered seminary when I did, leaving a career in production with the LA Opera. It was a joy to see Melinda drawing on her gifts and expertise from her former vocation in service to her new path.

In our first year, I think many of us who came from other professions thought we needed to submerge those talents or distance ourselves from them. I delight now as I watch each of us acknowledge those past crafts and learn how to use them in seminary and in ministry.

It was fun, too, to watch Melinda direct each person who auditioned. Offering encouragement and praise while seeking to draw more energy and passion from each performance. (I also got the sense that she was also testing how well each person responds to direction.)

It had been years since I had auditioned for a play. I felt a wonderful sense of freedom in realizing that I truly didn't care what part I got or whether I got a part at all. In fact, I told Melinda I would happily just be a part of the menagerie.

We each read speeches from the voice of God and from the wife of Noah. And I had fun reading both. I had fun considering "God's motivation". And I had fun as Noah's wife scoffing at Noah and his little boat.

I realized anew the power of story, the power of words, and the power of drama to bring story and words to life.

I had forgotten what it feels like to walk onto a stage and, for a time, become someone else. I had forgotten both the freedom and the sense of responsibility to be true to character.

But I have never forgotten that "all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players."