Religious Drama

When we talked about religious drama, we were not talking about board members storming out of a heated meeting and renouncing the church.

Rather, we were discussing theater and what makes a drama religious rather than secular.  We discussed Alfred Edyvean's "This Dramatic World: Using Contemporary Drama in the Church."  Edyvean offers an interesting and succinct history of the relationship between the church and theater, and then goes on to name a number of characteristics of religious drama and Christian drama.  John summarized Edyvean's primary points as saying that religious drama explores: Human relationship to the divine, human relationship to the self, and human relationship to society/culture.

In the end, almost any drama can be thought of as a religious drama when viewed through the proper lens. But offering a dramatic presentation in a religious setting certainly does shift the focus and leads the audience to consider the material in a different (and one hopes deeper) way.

We read aloud from T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral," Neil Simon's "God's Favorite" and Michael Christofer's "The Shadow Box"--three very different plays, but each thought-provoking and beautiful in its own way.  OK, so maybe the Neil Simon play wasn't so beautiful, but it was certainly a very funny re-telling of the Book of Job.

John also offered some helpful pointers about how to present drama in a church setting.

This afternoon we started working on our class presentations, which we'll be giving on Friday.  I'm telling a story I learned from Margot Adler and still have a fair amount of work to do to get it into shape.

I'm very much looking forward to our class field trip to the Chicago Art Insitute tomorrow evening.  Should be fun!