Good Shepherd of the Outback Heading for the Stage

Tomorrow is try-outs for the Rhema Christian School Spring Play, which I will be directing. I oringinally signed on thinking we were doing The Hobbit, but it turned out that the bulk of the actors, who would be 5th to 8th grade girls, were less than enthusiastic about the idea of putting on beards and acting like dwarves. Next we settled on an adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin, which turned out to have little to do with the title character and mostly be a fantasy in the tradition of Shakespeare's comedies, with no less than EIGHT couples ready to wed at the end. Showing the couples to be in love would have involved some hand-holding or walking arm-in-arm, and that ran afoul of the schools policy on PDA. SO, after much thinking, reading, and negotiating (all while the clock was ticking towards performance dates of April 27 and 28), we finally settled on something we had in hand, that could be adapted easily without violating copyright laws... and we will be doing a full-scale production of The Good Shepherd of the Outback.

I see no real problem telling the story in one night, as opposed to stringing it over five days in serial fashion, and it will be good to give the story a fuller treatment production values that eight weeks of rehearsal and technical development will afford. If the message has come across as well as it has lacking that time and care, I can only imagine it will have more impact if it is presented more professionally.

My only concern is with the fact that every student who tries out is guaranteed a part. And I'm not concerned there in having to work with young actors lacking in talent; my teen drama groups often included actors of limited talent and range, and I've managed to cast them and work with them well. What concerns me is the sheer number of parts that may need to be created to accommodate this. We can double the number of sheep, certainly (we've always alluded to a larger flock than was represented onstage), and there are a few other parts that can be added with no problem. But if we get 30 kids or so showing up tomorrow, it's going to necessitate a major rewrite and create a lot of headaches for blocking!

Flashbacks to Babylon

Our third week in the Lion's Den was a bit chaotic... My wife, who seemed to be getting over the flu on Monday had a major relapse on Tuesday, and I had to step up to the plate and handle the homeschooling for the day. Consequently, I didn't get my planned day off to prepare for that night, and around 3:00 decided to go with a "music video" approach to telling the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. I had sort of hoped to do something musically (probably the title song from *Cool in the Furnace*), but what was at hand was a song on a Beginner's Bible CD Pam loaned me. It was fun, involving sound effects of a fire chief and dispatcher's radio communication, had a female vocalist and a bit of a rap. It required purchasing four additional puppets to play those roles (the fireman actually was designed to be a fireman, but the dispatcher was a queen I redressed in a discarded policeman's uniform, the rapper was a knight that I converted to an angel (left the shiny suit on and just replaced the helmet with a starry halo and added wings) and the lead singer was a cowgirl (no reason she should be, but no reason she shouldn't, so I left her as she was, for lack of a better idea). We ad-libbed a short intro with Daniel and the Lions, in which Daniel explained he was away on a diplomatic mission when this happened, and so he had to read the story from official transcripts (he rolled out a scroll which was the cue for the music). Interestingly enough, the Bible doesn't tell us WHERE Daniel was when his three friends were thrown into the furnace, but the rabbis came up with some VERY interesting possibilities in the Talmud (one of my favorites was that he was in the Valley of Dry Bones with Ezekiel, helping to raise the dead).

I of course couldn't see how any of this went down (the fire department and space for the singers were in front of the kitchen window we use for the Den, out of my view), but I'm told the kids were into it, and the puppets danced appropriately. The only major problem was my puppeteer for the angel Azmaveth, Daniel's guardian, went AWOL, and the fearless prophet of God had to run away in order to end the scene.

Also out of my view was the doorway we filled with red, orange and yellow streamers to serve as the fiery furnace. Four child volunteers and one of my adult leaders acted out the story as the puppets narrated in song. This followed a pattern established the week before, involving live actors (including some of the kids) in the flashback scenes. That week we had combined the leftover part of the first script (involving Daniel's refusal to eat the king's food) from chapter 1 with the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in chapter 2 for an extended flashback to his early days at court. Surprisingly I did not do much with the character of Nebuchadnezzar, but the young actress who took the role really played it up, turning him into a childish egocentric (giving me a good idea for how to develop the character for next week!). The standout in that week's script was Ashpenaz (who actually was a composite of the chief eunuch in chapter 1--I didn't bother explaining that--and Arioch the chief guard in chapter 2). I wrote him as annoying and annoyed, fearful and sarcastic, all at once. He couldn't understand why his young charges refused the finest food in the empire for the sake of a God who, if he cared anything for them, would not have allowed them to be conquered in the first place. He tried mocking them, reasoning with them, and eventually begging them, fearful that if they didn't do as they were told HE would lose his head. When they ended up being the most impressive new students, rewarded with high positions in the king's court, he had to admit maybe they knew what they were doing, and there "might be something to this God of yours after all!" As I tried to imagine this character, what came to me was a voice from one of the "Fractured Fairytales" in an old *Rocky and Bullwinkle* episode, the one in which Prince Charming is a crooked schemer who, instead of kissing Sleeping Beauty and waking her up, decides she's more interesting asleep, and turns her into a tourist attraction, building "Sleeping Beauty Land", charging admission, and making a fortune off of merchandise tie-ins. I don't know who the voice talent was, but he was very familiar and I'm sure had a lot of the work back in the day.

The challenge for the coming week is to write the script for King Nebuchadnezzar's "Beastly Time" (when he is humbled and eats grass like an ox), and to get the lions' mouths moving.