For those of you who
read this blog regularly, I apologize. I have taken on a huge task that is
consuming my life. I am now writing 7-9 hours a day and when I finish that
work, I am weary of writing. But I am not going to stop till I at least leave
Canby, there will just be fewer entries, possibly only two or three a week and
I have no idea when they will appear. The middle of the week is the most
likely. I realize I am past due.
I couldn’t leave drama completely when
I came to Canby. I began again with the Christmas program at my church during
my second year. I put it together more as a pageant than a play. I pulled out
all the old skits from my first Christmas program with the Portrait Players
then added pieces for all the little kids, had adult music groups sing to help
make transitions. By using short skits I could involve a great many people and
not have many rehearsals. The approach worked, people liked it and it wasn’t to
hard on my schedule.
The next year I mounted a production
of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I knew I wanted to do a play based on the
book as soon as my first program was completed. I began contacting every
company I could think of to try and find a copy of the play. The book is perfect
for a stage production. No play distributer that I knew had the play. In
February I had hit a brick wall so wrote the book publisher to get permission
to adapt a play from the book. I didn’t hear back and didn’t hear. In September
I decided to go ahead and adapt the book and hope and pray for the best. I
hoped permission would come before we got too far in the play.
My kids loved the book. We had
read it as a family that Christmas and Rhonda was a major influence on me
adapting the play. She wanted to play Gladys, the littlest Herdman and the one
who played the angel in the pageant. She had asked a number of times to be in a
play I had directed and she was the right age and size and I didn’t know if I
would ever have another opportunity if I missed this one.
I didn’t have much trouble casting
the play. I had several kids with the ambition to act. Some were very good. I
had to talk a few others into coming on board. I wrote my adaptation and we
began rehearsal at the first of November. I had never worked with kids and
keeping their attention was a challenge. There is a scene where one of the
Herdman boys gets in a fight with another boy. We blocked the fight scene out
and had rehearsed it several times, then came the explosion. Chad (the fighting
Herdman) was accidentally actually hit in one rehearsal and he stormed out the
church angry and mad more than hurt. He said he was never coming back. He hated
this old play.
He reaction was a problem. He was
the oldest Herdman boy and key to the show. I couldn’t replace him. I had no
one. Even if I did have someone to replace him it was too close to the opening
to change actors.
I talked with him, his mother
talked with him. We tried to explain that what happened was an accident. No one
meant to hurt him. In reality, he wasn’t hurt/ He was barely touched. It was
just the idea that he got hit and he never really liked the boy who hit him.
Fortunately he showed up at the next rehearsal and we went on.
The Monday before our Friday three
day opening, I finally got a letter from the publisher about my request to
adapt the book for a play. I was denied. We were too close to the show and kids
expectations were too high not to do the show. I filed the letter appropriately
saying to myself that they had ten months to get back to me. I did the play
anyway without telling anyone I did not have the rights.
Wouldn’t you know it? The next
year there was a stage production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and the script was now for sale. I was very
pleased that their script and mine were very similar. I filed that under
experience gained. The kids had fun, did a great job and Rhonda got to play
Gladys. That was the end of her career. Acting was hard work. Too much waiting and too much of the same thing over and over.
In 1990 I pulled a few guys together to produce The Cell, another one I has done in Regina. As I would sit in church week after week and look at the height of the baptismal tank, I kept seeing the stage as a dungeon. All we needed was a door at the top and stairs. We got a fair amount of publicity from this. The Canby Herald covered the story as did the Oregonian. All the actors knew what the set would look like as we had talked about it quite often. We had rehearsed the play many rime but the stairs were placed only for final week leading up to the performances. At out first on set and full costume rehearsal, my leader character was to have a fight on the stairs with a guard. When he gets up in place to do the scene he announces that he is afraid of heights. When one was aqt the top it did look a longs ways down, especially with no railing.
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