THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604060109
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY JANIE BRYANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 248 lines
BY JANUARY, WHISKERS started peppering the chins of men showing up for services at Calvary Baptist Church. By spring, the sanctuary was filled with bearded men.
It was time again.
Time to trade in Reeboks for lace-up leather sandals. Time to slip into striped robes or priestly garments. Time to pick up Roman shields or shepherds' staffs.
Time to tell the Easter story, the church's gift to the community - a pull-out-all-the-stops production that brings 20th century technology to the medieval idea of a Passion play.
Sixteen scenes, 17 musical pieces, a cast of 60, a choir of 40, an orchestra, one donkey, two sheep, 170 pounds of dry ice and enough computerized lights for an airport runway.
By its final performance on Palm Sunday, ``The Easter Story'' had packed more than 2,000 people into the Calvary Baptist sanctuary over four nights.
The church used a shuttle to pick up people who had to park blocks away.
Video cameras rolled, cameras flashed and children stretched up on their knees trying to get a better look at the live donkey bringing Jesus down the church aisle.
Thunder rumbled and lightning whipped across a windy crucifixion scene. A stone rolled from the open tomb, emitting a heavenward ray of light. A resurrected Jesus appeared before his mourners illuminated in an aura of gold.
A medieval passion play could draw a crowd with a few actors standing on a wagon. But Calvary Baptist members know that when it comes to getting the church's message across in today's world, they're competing with big-budget story-telling.
Although the Rev. Philip Parker is quick to stress that ``The Easter Story'' is a worship experience, not just a show, he also knows the production will draw people who might not normally show up for a church function.
``More and more churches are doing this because it's an effective way to proclaim the gospel,'' he said.
So each year, Calvary adds to its theatrical skills and its reputation for a quality production.
``The first time we did this play many years ago, we didn't have nearly the expertise and the equipment we have now,'' said Parker, who directs the musical drama.
``We said, `This just isn't going to work. We're not ready. It's going to be a total failure.' But there was nothing we could do about it. We had no more time.
``The first night we presented the play, everyone could sense that God was there and almost in a literal sense pushing us out on the stage, as to when and what to do.''
The audience seemed to sense that, too, Parker said.
``We had people saying as they left, `For the first time, I know why Jesus came. I know why he's so important.' ''
That is why each year when members of the church meet to decide whether to do it all over again - the hours of costume sewing, the long nights of stage construction and hanging lights and turning ordinary church members into seasoned thespians - the answer is always the same.
Besides the 100 people who sing or act in the play, there are many who spend long nights before the production working behind the scenes.
Eric Anderson heads up the construction end of things, including a stage built a foot over the pulpit area and the metal framework for curtains and a scrim. That is the loosely woven, semitransparent curtain behind which the play's action takes place.
The left choir loft is covered and becomes the prop room; the right choir loft becomes the orchestra area. A new choir loft is constructed on the upper-right side of the church.
On opening night, Alan Whitlow steps into the choir loft with the other vocalists and even offers his own solo performance, a hauntingly beautiful piece that illustrates Peter's sorrow after denying Jesus.
But that's the easy part.
Before that, Whitlow spends three weeks of late nights heading up the lighting and sound end of the production.
That means climbing to dizzying heights to hang smoke machines and spotlights. It means six hours on a ladder, sewing in tiny Christmas tree lights for a starry sky, then spray-painting some of them to dull them and provide the sky with depth of field.
``It started off as something small, and over the years it's built,'' Whitlow said. ``The first year we did it, we had like six lights.''
They were flood lights someone had bought from a hardware store, and they didn't light up the stage very well.
So Whitlow, now 40, called on the experience and friends he made during his younger days as a drummer in local bands.
``I don't know if it was a mistake or not,'' he quipped, ``but I said, `I know somebody we can get some lights from.' ''
Whitlow jokingly calls that kind of casual comment-turned-eternal-commitment ``the Calvary Express.''
A theatrical lighting system has since been donated, and the church now owns about $4,000 worth of lights, Whitlow said. In addition, Bob Hall, the Virginia Beach owner of Dr. Bob's Theatricity, loans the church about $15,000 worth lights for the production.
``I have probably about 25 spotlights on stage now,'' Whitlow said, ``plus two computerized spotlights, two chemical fog machines, one dry-ice fog machine, three strobe lights - and a partridge in a pear tree.''
Denyse Nobles, who heads up the wardrobe department, knows about the Calvary Express.
It sent her to a turkey farm in Harrisonburg to pick up three large garbage bags full turkey feathers.
They were free.
She could have bought clean, fluffy, white feathers at four for $2.99 retail. But she did the math.
She had a $200 budget for this year's wardrobe replenishments, which included everything from the angel wings to new costumes for a priest, a Pharisee and two Roman soldiers.
Free sounded better, though it didn't smell better.
It smelled pretty much like a turkey farm all the way home.
Nobles dumped the feathers in her hot tub and washed them. She put them into net bags and stuck them into her clothes dryer. She laid them out on sheets in her living room.
Then her house pretty much smelled like the turkey farm.
The odor went away eventually. And after covering elongated grape vine wreaths with white fleece, she glued hundreds of the feathers on to supply a host of angels who appear in the clouds with Jesus in heaven.
``You get pretty creative when working on a budget,'' Nobles said as she worked on a Roman breast plate the week before opening night.
Take the beautiful, long, gold trumpets the angels play in the final scene. It's actually the orchestra playing, and the trumpets the angels are holding are just primary-colored plastic toy horns volunteers found at a dollar store and spray-painted gold.
Nobles was sort of an honorary angel this year, although she prefers her work in the background.
Her appearance as an angel marked her first time on stage with her husband, Larry, who has played Jesus in the production for several years now.
Nobles said she got involved because she could sew. Her husband started out as a disciple, but his long hair and beard quickly got him drafted as Jesus after another member had to drop out of the production.
``And the kids,'' she joked, ``did it because we made them.''
The Nobles' children started out playing people in the crowd scenes.
One year, Mark Nobles, now 14, played a crippled boy Jesus healed in the temple.
``Now he's moved up to a stretcher carrier,'' his mother said. ``I think Christine was an angel one year.''
Two years ago, when Christine was 14, she was in a scene that allowed her a view of her father portraying Jesus and carrying the cross down the church aisle while a Roman soldier cracked a whip at him.
``She was so upset, she dropped out of the play,'' Denyse Nobles said.
That kind of heart-wrenching reality is exactly what Parker wants people to see.
It's the reason some of the scenes begin in the aisles of the church.
Parker wants people in the audience to feel carried back to the first century, to become a part of the crowd in Jerusalem witnessing what took place.
The only spoken part of the drama, other than the choral pieces that support each scene, belong to narrator Van Welton.
It takes about an hour of makeup work to turn the 28-year-old youth minister into a 90-year-old St. John, living in exile on the Island of Patmos.
Remembering the events in the last week of Jesus' life as he writes to his churches, the apostle sets up each scene before the lights go up on the stage.
The actors perform behind the scrim, which gives each scene a surreal quality and the texture of a Renaissance painting come to life.
``It's almost like you're looking into the past,'' Whitlow said.
Each time the choral piece supporting the scene ends, the players wind down to the stillness of a painting again, and the light fades to black.
Besides the dramatic effect of the scrim, the screening is also functional. When the lights go off, the screen keeps the audience from seeing the people and props change for the next scene.
When the stage lights are off, the church is dark except for the almost candlelight effect of the small, battery-operated, clip-on lights the musicians and choir members use.
Some of the church members have done some acting in high school or college, but for the most part they're amateurs with a mission.
``Of course, I'd like to think in working on this play they've become pretty good,'' Parker said. ``What I've tried to do with folks is help them forget who they are and become the people they are portraying.
``When that happens, they're able to get into character and really become quite good, in my opinion.''
After the last dress rehearsal, Parker tells the cast to meet upstairs in the wardrobe room. He has last-minute instructions.
Deeper furrows on the makeup, he tells Welton. More emotion from the women at the crucifixion scene.
Parker's not satisfied with the final scene of Jesus in heaven either. He tells Larry Nobles not to walk all the way down the black slope he stands on in the scene. Stay elevated, he tells him.
Then there's the matter of acting behind a scrim. It makes movements look faster, something like an old movie, Parker explains to them. Move in three-quarter time, he reminds them.
An angel shifts her hip to one bare foot as the minister goes on and the clock closes in on 10 p.m.
``Live the part. Live the person,'' Parker says. ``Stop living in the 20th century.''
Many of them do. Denyse Nobles sees them come back to wardrobe after a scene, tears in their eyes.
She hears the man playing Judas talk about how he has trouble sleeping at night, thinking about that betrayal.
Helen Reagan loves being in the play, but she cries every year and hates her part in the crowd scene, where she has to wave her fist in the air with the others as the choir sings the words, ``Crucify him!''
``It's just not in my heart,'' she says. ``It's hard.''
Living the Holy Week through the drama has become an annual revival for church members, Parker said.
And the minister thinks it's appropriate that the drama focus on that one week, rather than trying to do Jesus' whole life, as some churches do.
``Almost one third of the gospel of Mark is given to the last week. . . . It's Jesus putting into action everything he taught,'' Parker said.
``It focuses our attention on what he did for mankind.''
Parker doesn't take it for granted that people know the story.
``I think a lot of people know just enough about Jesus, really, not to know anything at all. For that reason when they see this, they see a significant slice of who he was and how he responded to people.
``For a lot of people, this is an eye-opening experience.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Cover, Color photo]
Celebration of Easter
``The Easter Story'' is Calvary Baptist Church's gift to the
community. And it's quite a production.
[Color Photos]
STAFF PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK MITCHELL
Top: Actors at the foot of the stage portray the angry mob,
demanding Barabbas be freed and Jesus crucified. Above: Van Welton,
youth minister at Calvary Baptist, narrates the drama as 90-year-old
John, the apostle, looking back on the last week of Jesus' life. At
right: The sanctuary, built in 1914, undergoes an extensive
transformation for the annual production.
LEFT: Larry Nobles portrays Jesus in the Last Supper scene. The
actors perform behind a scrim, a loose curtain that gives each scene
a surreal quality and the texture of a Renaissance painting come to
life. ``It's almost like you're looking into the past,'' says Alan
Whitlow, who oversees lighting and special effects.
ABOVE: stands in Calvary Baptist's empty baptismal pool to do
electrical work. At left: Wardrobe mistress Denyse Nobles helps
with her wings. Working on a tight budget, Nobles got all the turkey
feathers she needed free from a turkey farm. But she paid a price:
Her house and car smelled like a turkey farm for some time.
Calvary Baptist's minister, the Rev. Philip Parker, discusses
production details with Larry Nobles, who plays Jesus. ``What I've
tried to do with folks is help them forget who they are and become
the people they are portraying,'' Parker says. ``For a lot of
people, this is an eye-opening experience.''
by CNB