Always Yes to Theater

My friend Heather is so funny. She can’t even finish her question of whether or not I want to help with the Middle School play before I’m reaching for her script. One of these days she'll stop asking and start assuming.

It's mid-November, so another Middle School theater production has come and gone, complete with a stellar cast and much laughter between hours and hours of work. I told the kids how they were probably the first cast I’ve ever worked with who didn’t fall like vultures upon the food table every night, usually a given when we have props that contain food. Especially cupcakes! They were such professionals.

The story was an unfamiliar one. The Ransom of Miss Elverna Dower is about two students who don’t want to give a speech in English class, so they kidnap their teacher. However, it turns out she’s a persnickety person whom the principal would rather not have back, so he doesn’t pay the ransom or even tell anyone about her situation. Meanwhile the two kids keep getting more and more work from her so that in the end they simply release her. But neither the kids nor the principal get in trouble because Miss Dower never rats them out. The humor was right at Middle school level, complete with jabs at the expense of school principals and teachers. Our kids were thrilled to perform this in front of a school audience.

As every year, at some point, Heather and I tried to direct the conversation toward the deeper things. If a story is “good,” it must contain gospel truth somewhere, so I asked them to think about it for this play. What came out in the end made us all chuckle because we decided that Elverna Dower - the teacher that no one wanted to interact with - was most like Jesus. She was the one who absorbed the sins of both kids and the principal, their failures and poor decisions throughout the play, and she allowed others to think it was her own carelessness that had locked her in the book room all day. She forgave and moved forward with teaching the kids English and the principal leadership.

I’ll never grow tired of being in the wings of a stage, of getting to fist-bump students when they come off after a hard monologue, of making sure that one 6th grade actress remembers to grab all her props. But it’s those conversations where we get to see Jesus that drive me to say “yes” every year when Heather starts the question, “Do you want to help me with …” “Always yes!”

with one of the leads after opening night