By Jeff Guy
I went into Easter this year feeling a little sad. It was similar to how I felt last Christmas. My grandparents are gone, Mom and step-mom are gone and my kids aren’t really kids anymore. It ain’t like it used to be when my kids (and their cousins) were little and hunting for Easter eggs in the grandparents’ backyard.
I’m happy to report, however, that I got a piece of that old feeling back this Easter. It all started with a play.
The Guild Hall Players, a theater group that performs plays at St. James Episcopal Church off of east Douglas Street in Wichita, was holding auditions for His Passover, an original play dealing with Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper, written by Phil Speary.
What can I say about Dr. Speary? He’s a force of nature, not only in Wichita, but in the regional theater world. He’s written, directed and acted in plays and musicals for more than 50 years, as well as having small roles in a few movies. I can’t name all the famous people he’s met, but I can tell you he had lunch with Charlton Heston once in the ‘70s.
Over the years, the Guild Hall Players have put on such plays and musicals as Bus Stop, Big River and Macbeth. So not every play the group performs is religious, but if you watch closely, you’ll see there’s always a spiritual dimension somewhere in the work. I like that concept.
I did some acting and backstage work in theater in high school, college and in community theater, but I hadn’t done much in the past 30 years. When I left the demanding position of editor at the Worthington News, I figured I had time to do theater again. Also, I’m not getting any younger.
I took a few improv classes in Wichita from my friend, Jessie Gray. Then I auditioned with Wichita Community Theater for a part in The Diary of Anne Frank. Around 50 people auditioned for this play, which had 11 or 12 characters. I was happy just to get a call back audition, but I didn’t get a part.
“You probably won’t get a part right now, being a new guy, but keep trying,” Jessie told me.
Next, I auditioned with Guild Hall for the comedy, Ah Wilderness! By Eugene O’Neill. Thirty years ago, I had a bit part in the play as the bad influencing Yale college student, Wint, for Andover Community Theater. I was hoping this time around I’d get a part as one of the older characters. While I had a blast auditioning, again I didn’t land a part.
I was undaunted, though. After all, I was gaining good experience and I figured if I kept hanging in there, something good would happen. My friend, Dona Lancaster, a professional actress in Wichita, encouraged me to keep after it. “Directors will remember you,” she said.
Last February, I tried out for His Passover, reading the parts of Jesus and disciples like Peter and James. I wasn’t nervous about auditioning, itself, but I was a bit nervous about auditioning for Phil. He was my professor for speech class at Grossmont Community College in Beulah, Kan. some 30 years ago and I wasn’t the most studious student. I didn’t distinguish myself as a public speaker at all, making a C in the class. I would show up late for class and Dr. Phil would say, “Let’s strive for punctuality here. This is very junior high.” And I was a bit of a smart aleck.
So when Phil wanted to talk to me individually after auditions, I thought, here it comes. He’s going to lecture me about being on time for rehearsals or he’ll say, ‘If I let you in this play, you better not be a wise guy.’”
Instead, he asked me, “How much experience do you have acting?”
“Not a lot,” I said, thinking I’d auditioned poorly.
“You didn’t look like you were acting and that’s a good thing.”
He then asked me about my “religious background.”
“I was raised Baptist,” I said. “I stopped going to church in my teens and 20s, but went back in my 30s because by then I had kids and I wanted them to learn some morals.”
Phil called me the next evening and told me he was giving me the role of James Zebedee. The play would be performed April 7-10, a week before Good Friday and Easter.
Getting into character
The Gospel record recounts that Jesus, shortly after being baptized by John the Baptizer, came upon brothers Aaron and Peter, fishing on the Sea of Galilee. Next, he saw James and his younger brother, John, with their father, Zebedee, in the boat as they mended their nets.
They had been casting their nets in the water and coming up empty all night. Jesus told Peter to go further into the water and cast his net again. Peter and Andrew caught so many fish, the net tore, they enlisted the help of James and John and the boat was close to sinking.
“Come follow me and I will make you become fishers of men,” Jesus told the two sets of brothers and they immediately left everything to follow him.
I couldn’t see myself leaving my whole livelihood behind to follow a leader, but my character would. Of course, I’ve never witnessed a miraculous catching of fish either.
James and John asked Jesus to call down fire from the heavens over a couple of towns that rejected them, which he refused to do. For that reason, he called the brothers “sons of thunder.”
Of the people who followed Jesus, 12 were his disciples, or apostles. Of those, three comprised his inner circle – Peter, James and John. They were the most hot-headed disciples, but apparently Jesus saw leadership qualities in them.
They were with Jesus on a mountain to pray during the transfiguration – when Christ turned a gleaming white, appeared to be talking to Elijah and Moses and a voice from Heaven said, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.”
They witnessed when Jesus resurrected a dead girl.
Jesus said to Peter, “Upon this rock, I build my church.” He gave Peter the “keys to the kingdom.” James and John were jockeying for position because they had their mother ask Jesus if they could sit on his right and left when he established his kingdom – in hindsight not such a good move. The scriptures say when the other disciples heard about this, they were mad.
These details reveal that there were jealousies and tension within the group at times. That’s what Phil wanted to depict in his play. The disciples were great, holy men. But they were also human; they had flaws.
As a group, we talked about the background of all the characters, the Sermon on the Mount and the miracles the disciples witnessed.
“Now, you don’t have to believe any of this,” Phil told us. “But your character believes it.”
Phil’s goal in casting the parts was diversity – to have multiple backgrounds and genders represented. For example, Deb Goin, whom I hadn’t seen since Ah Wilderness! 30 years ago, played the part of Andrew. Katheryn McCoskey played the part of Thomas. There was a wide age range from people in their early 20s to people in their 60s.
We had all heard the stories about Jesus – turning water into wine, foot washing, expelling demons, etc. – since we were kids. It becomes just like a story, but we had to make it real and immediate in our minds. We had to appear shocked when Jesus washed our feet, when he told Peter he would deny he knew him three times before the cock crowed, when Jesus said one of us would betray him.
We had to be aware of the tumultuous political situation of the time. When Jesus talked about his kingdom, his disciples thought of it as an earthly kingdom that would free them from Roman occupation. Jesus hinted at what would happen to him and the disciples heard it, but they didn’t hear it. They had some denial.
Also, we had to learn a bit about Jewish culture. The play was set in pre-Christian times. Jesus taught in synagogues and his followers identified themselves as Jewish. They were a tribal people, proud of their heritage as God’s Chosen People.
A thousand years earlier, the 12 tribes of Israel were living in slavery and bondage under the Pharaoh in Egypt. God sent the 10 plagues upon the Egyptian people until he relented and let God’s people go. The final plague was the death of the first born son of the Egyptians. The Jewish people smeared blood from a sacrificial lamb on their doors so the Angel of Death would know to pass over them. God parted the waters of the Red Sea so his people could get across. Their captors drowned in the water.
A lot of this sounds hard to take for modern ears. But whatever people may think of the 10 plagues – frogs, blood, vermin, pestilence, boils, hale and fire, locusts, darkness and the slaying of the first born – they’re integral parts of the Jewish tradition of Passover. Killing the first born son may sound barbaric to us, but for ancient Jews, especially, the Egyptians got what they deserved. In their minds, Pharaoh was a shit.
Easter, friends, family
I made some wonderful friends among the cast. Trevor Vincent Farney, the actor who played Peter, was terrific. We would talk before and after rehearsals about how our characters related to each other. (Historically, Andrew and Peter were probably cousins to James and John and there was likely some rivalry.) Trevor played the loutish Stanley Kowalski in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which impressed me.
Katheryn, an English instructor at Grossmont, gave me a book by J.I. Packer called Knowing God, and I told her I’d give her my copy of the book, The Jesus I Never Knew by Phillip Yancey when I finished reading it.
Matthew Purdom, the actor who played my little, er, younger brother, is one of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet. He’s actually bigger and taller than me. For the play, we pretended I was around the same age as Jesus (early 30s) and he was a teenager. In real life, he graduated from high school in 2014 and is young enough to be my son.
Dalton Nelson immersed himself in the politically zealous character, Simon Zealots. His facial expressions and things he’d say while improvising conversation at the Passover table were hilarious. It was all I could do during tech rehearsal to keep a straight face and maintain the dignity of the scene. Like Matthew, Dalton has an excellent voice and sings in Heart of America’s Men’s Chorus in Wichita. He’s also a paraprofessional in an elementary school and works with latchkey kids, which I admire.
Gene Carr, who played the tax collector-turned disciple, Matthew, was fun to talk to backstage. “So you were in college in the ‘70s?” I asked him.
“And the ‘80s,” he said. “I was on the eight-year plan.”
“Oh, I know about those.”
The closest thing he’d done to theater work, while at Wichita State University, was standing on a stage during a show’s intermission and acting like Gene Gene the Dancing Machine from The Gong Show after having a few beers backstage.
“I belonged to a fraternity,” he said. “Everything that happened in that movie, Animal House, happened to us at one time or another. Maybe not all in the same year, but it happened.”
Gene’s wife, Louise Brinegar, prepared the food we ate, re-enacting the Passover. She helped with props and she played the part of Mary Cleofas, possibly a half-sister or step-sister to Jesus’ mother, Mary. Liz Wine, a ballet dancer, played Mary Magdalene and Terri Ingram played the part of the mother of Jesus.
Terri is from my hometown, Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000 in the ‘70s). She graduated from high school there in 1978, nine years before me. I saw her turn in an amazing performance in Guild Hall’s production of the Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, right around the time auditions for His Passover were taking place.
We both took drama in high school from the legendary Miss Mac. “She told me I wasn’t good enough to work in theater, even at a junior college. Then I got a full-ride to Grossmont, went to the University of South Dakota and did summer stock theater. My younger sisters told me she would brag to her theater kids that I was one of her former students.”
I have a soft place in my heart for Terri because aside from being a good person, she also looks like my mom did in her later years.
She and Dillon Green, the actor who played Jesus, turned in some heart wrenching scenes that were actually hard to watch.
Dillon and I formed a pretty tight friendship even though he’s around 23 years younger than me. Just out of seminary, he’s an Episcopal priest at St. James. We had a lot of theological conversations and I didn’t always agree with him. “That’s okay, you don’t have to agree with me,” he said.
He played an amazing Jesus, bringing to the part Christ’s charisma, poignancy and even his sense of humor. Dillon did some plays in high school and college, but indicated he’s too busy with his priestly duties to act in a lot of shows.
Those who could make it surprised Dillon by coming to hear him preach on Easter Sunday. I must have been the first of our group to arrive there because when I showed up at 10 a.m. I saw a bunch of churchgoers I didn’t know, but I also saw something else that filled me with nostalgia and hope.
All these well dressed kids, carrying Easter baskets and hunting for hidden – and not so hidden – Easter eggs. The bigger kids on the grass to the right of the driveway, the little kids to the left. Parents took pictures and video of their kids, and among them I saw a face I did recognize from social media and TV.
A slender man, not too tall, wearing a brown sweater, khakis, his hair cut short and all in place, smooth shaven. “Are you Mayor Whipple?” I asked, already knowing the answer. He shook my hand.
“Brandon Whipple,” the Wichita Mayor introduced himself.
“Jeff Guy,” I answered.
Next, I turned around and saw Dillon walking up in his black clergy clothes. He was later joined by Louise and a female priest Dillon had gone to seminary with – Ashley Mather Petty, who now lives in Washington state with her husband. She was pregnant, which I thought was so neat. We’re all getting older, but there’s new life coming into this world every day and it’s like a ray of hope.
Inside the sanctuary, I sat among my theater friends. It was a beautiful service. I’ve been in a lot of churches – Baptist, Methodist, Disciples of Christ, small country churches, a mega church, evangelical churches, mainline, charismatic, conservative and liberal. I have a fascination with all faiths and try to learn as much as I can about them.
I liked the liturgy of the Episcopal church. The musicians on clarinets and violins. The choir. The candles. The Eucharist Christ’s body broken for you Dillon, wearing his vestments, gave a wonderful sermon.
“A light put out once but not extinguished. To feel the warmth of Christ’s life from the candle, to see his life burning there.”
It was a good coming together of friends. Gene, the one-time frat boy, hugged me three times before I left that day. Dillon, who suggested we have an Oscar party at his house next year, implored me to keep in touch.
“Hit me up,” he said. “We’ll get a beer.”
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