Chancel Dramas

I have been directing plays and musicals for over forty years now, and yet I still enjoy producing chancel dramas as well. These are short plays written for worship services and staged usually in the chancel of churches, that is, on the elevated platform at the front of the church’s sanctuary. Chancel plays may be modest in size but they pack a strong emotional punch, especially for congregations hungry for the Christian message in this remarkably dynamic form.

The big challenge is finding good scripts. There’s precious little financial incentive to attract professional playwrights to the genre, and amateur playwrights often struggle with the traditional challenges of plot and character development, resulting in religious skits rather than full blooded dramatic productions.

Good chancel scripts in fact are so hard to come by that I finally went in search of unpublished plays in the genre. I ran ads in journals like The New York Review of Books. I made phone calls and wrote letters. I contacted amateur and professional playwrights alike. Not surprisingly I received a lot of rejection notes not to mention weak scripts. But the gems also turned up to the point where I eventually had fifteen publishable plays that Samuel French now offers under the titles: Bedlam in Bethlehem and Other Seasonal Plays, The Scarecrow and Other Non-Seasonal Plays, and The Mouse’s Discovery: Chancel Plays for Young and Old.

Here’s a taste of three of these sterling chancel dramas.

THE SCARECROW
from The Scarecrow and Other Non-Seasonal Plays

Allan Stratton (Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii, Bingo! and Papers) wrote The Scarecrow when he was only 16 years old. All the characters in this rollicking play — Young Man and his/her followers ( Hen, Cow, Bunny, Cat, Horse) and Elegant Gentleman and her/his followers ( Piggy, Dog, Fox, Lamb, Goose) — are on stage for virtually the entire 25-minute playing time. There’s plenty of action and all have ample opportunity to develop their individual characters.

The barnyard creatures end up going to war against each other, and the resulting holocaust causes a mysterious scarecrow to die. The play reminds us of what we so often do to Christ and each other when we read our religious prejudices into the Bible instead of taking from it a message that challenges and delivers us from our self-serving ways. Here’s an excerpt from the play:

Elegant Gentleman: (Lining up a golf shot only to have Young Man start whistling) I don’t like whistling…. It irritates me… Will you stop it?

Young Man: Pardon? Is that you Elegant Gentleman?

Elegant: Yes. It is.

Young Man: Good morning. (Goes back whistling)

Elegant: Will you stop that! You are giving me indigestion.

Young Man: But such a charming ditty.

Elegant: Funny Fingers has expressly forbad whistling. Why, just the other day he called me up on the phone and said, “Hello E. G. Would you mind reminding everyone that I expressly forbid whistling. Tell them: ‘Thou shalt not whistle. It gives me indigestion.’ ” So you see, Funny Fingers has forbidden whistling.

Young Man: Potato Sack hasn’t.

Elegant: You will one day see the error of your ways. Funny Fingers will damn you. (He prepares to hit the other golf ball)

Young Man: (Sarcastically) WOW! Just what does the Great Funny Fingers allow?

Elegant: Oh, a great number of things. (Swinging the club) Elegance for one. (Following the ball with his eyes) Whenever we have tea together Funny Fingers always says, “I say, E. G., you are looking elegant today. Glad to see it.” He also allows golf, for example. F. F. is mad about golf.

Young Man: Well, considering as how you are a messiah, you don’t seem to be doing excessively well.

Elegant: Not doing well? Tut, tut. On the contrary. While on the surface it might appear that I am getting nowhere, I am actually doing exceptionally well. You see, Funny Fingers doesn’t allow holes-in-one or birdies either, for that matter. “Thou shalt not get holes in one or birdies either for that matter” to use his exact words. Funny Fingers never gets holes-in-one, and by the happiest of coincidences, neither do I. Do you play golf?

Young Man: No, The Great God Potato Sack doesn’t allow it …….

TAKE ME
from Bedlam in Bethlehem and Other Seasonal Plays
Jim Taylor’s fifteen minute monologue finds a contemporary Mary re-living her life with her son moments before his death. This Jewish mama clearly loves her boy but struggles (as do so many Christians!) with his radical, outspoken ways. Basically she wishes he had settled down and acted more like a nice kosher-respecting lad. Here’s some of the “dialogue” as she reflects on her son’s teenage years:

Mary:
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Who with?”
“My friends.”
“Oh. That’s good…. I thought you might be going out with your enemies.”
“Aw, mum, get off my back, will ya?”
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“What difference does it make? Don’t you trust me anymore?”
“Of course I trust you, dear. I just don’t trust those friends!”

When the Roman soldiers finally come for her son, Mary has an abrupt change of heart:

“It’s him. It is him. I was hoping it would be a mistake…. You can’t do this. It isn’t fair. Don’t you see? He couldn’t have stopped doing what he believed in any more than I could have stopped being his mother. He couldn’t have lived with himself if he had compromised his principles. Is that wrong? Is it wrong to care about others? And he did care. He really did. And it made a difference. They needed him. They needed him a lot more than those rich successful beasts! Those exploiters! They just wanted to use him for their own purposes. They wanted him to be a puppet on their string. They’re the ones who are doing this to him, because… because he made them ashamed of themselves. Oh no…! No, no! Not nails. Not, not nails. No, no, no….! (Sound of nails being hammered is heard as Mary buries her head in her hands and sinks to the floor)……..”

Jim Taylor wrote this play out of the indescribable anguish of losing his own son to cystic fibrosis. The playwright in effect is saying, “Oh God, why didn’t you take me instead? Take me now O Lord. Take me.”

THE FACE OF JESUS
from The Mouse’s Discovery: Chancel Plays for Young and Old

This is a powerful chancel drama for the Lenten season, although last summer I used it during an outdoor worship service for cottagers on a lake in northern Ontario, and the only complaint came from a buzz-saw 100 yards away. The playwright, Patricia Wells, died recently of cancer. This play, which trains the spotlight on two familiar figures sharing the same cell while awaiting execution, is one of the last things that Pat Wells wrote:

Barabbas: Hey! Why do you keep looking at me like that?

Jesus: Like what?

Barabbas: You despise me, don’t you?

Jesus: Not at all.

Barabbas: You’ve got that holier-than-thou look in your eyes. I can tell. Just because I’m a murderer and you didn’t kill nobody. You think you’re better than me, don’t you?

Jesus: Not at all.

Barabbas: Okay…. You feel sorry for me then.

Jesus: Well, yes I do.

Barabbas: Well, I don’t need your pity! Don’t waste your precious pity on me, Jesus bar Joseph. Who are you to pity anybody anyhow? We’re both gonna hang you know! And when they take us down we’ll both be dead as doornails.

Jesus: That’s why I feel sorry for you.

Barabbas: Yeah, well, like I say, I don’t need your pity. You can feel sorry for yourself.

Jesus: It’s not exactly pity.

Barabbas: What is it then?

Jesus: Try compassion.

Barabbas: Compassion. What’s that?

Jesus: Well, love. You know what love is, don’t you?

Barabbas: Yeah. Well my definition of love probably ain’t the same as yours buddy.

Jesus: Did you love your mother?

Barabbas: ’Course I did. (pause) But I wasn’t the only one.

Jesus: Tell me about her.

Barabbas: My old lady?

Jesus: Yes.

Barabbas: Put it this way. I don’t know who my father was except he was some guy called Abbas. I only had one father. But I sure had lots of uncles. If you get my drift.

Jesus: I get your drift.

Barabbas: What about your old lady?

Jesus: My mother?

Barabbas: Yeah, what’s she like?

Jesus: She’s a sweet brave lady who long ago wrapped me in swaddling clothes and laid me in a manger. She’s the woman who sits behind a computer all day making data entries. She’s the woman who works in a home for people with AIDS and holds their hands when they die. She’s the woman in India who sweeps the streets all day with a broom…

Barabbas: (interrupting) Hah. What about the lady who sits on a bar stool with a drink in her hand and says, “Hi ya handsome? New in town?” Is she your mother?

Jesus: Yes.

Barabbas: Then maybe we’re brothers.

Jesus: Maybe we are…..

Gloucester Cathedral by maybrick2001.