March 8, 2009 – Columbus, Ohio

The blog which I am now beginning, at the gracious invitation of my friend Joseph Pearce, will be a recounting of my adventures on the road with my actors, who along with me are evangelizing through drama as part of my company, the Theater of the Word Incorporated.  We experience firsthand what the St. Austin Review is all about – the attempt to reform our culture from a Catholic perspective.  And as we hit the road performing shows such as “The Journey of St. Paul” (which recounts the life of the great apostle in this the Pauline year), bringing God’s word in dramatic form to audiences across the United States, we have a variety of adventures.

Last month alone – February, the shortest month – we traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, Corpus Christi, Texas, all over South Dakota, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and San Francisco, California, spending only three days at home in St. Louis, Missouri.  In that time we filmed season two of Joseph’s series The Quest for Shakespeare, we performed eight shows in three days and got sunburned in Texas, and while still sunburned found ourselves snowbound in southern Minnesota, participated in the most dreadfully celebrated Mass I’ve ever been to in my life, had a priest in California verbally abuse me when I attempted to defend the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and much much more.

Blogging about these adventures at the very least is worthwhile if only to record the rather astonishing and incredible things that happen to us as we preach the Word through the dramatic arts.

Tonight we performed in Columbus, Ohio, for example, to an eager dinner theater crowd at a parish activity center.  The associate priest for this parish is a tremendous man, having led his parishioners through the Didache series on The Scriptures.  “And now they’re hungry for more,” he tells us.  We, too, have discovered that people want more than just trashy comedies or experimental nonsense on stage.  If you feed people good food, they do indeed feel nourished.  This bodes very well for the New Evangelization – for it is not all resistance out there.  People are hungry and appreciative of being well fed.  And though it took us a while to discover this as a touring theater company, we are beginning to see that this is why we are called to go out there – people are indeed hungry for what we offer.

But we get our share of resistance as it is.  Mine comes mostly from my actors who tour with me.  They are post-adolescent slugs who occasionally experience miraculous conversions, stirred as they are by the Holy Spirit by the work on stage – but who quickly backslide into a life of sloth and narcissism.  Actors are, generally speaking, rather disturbed people – I’ve been one all my life – and usually bear the worst of the burdens of the post-modern age, prone as they are to emotional volatility, promiscuity and addiction.  My actors always do well on stage; I insist on that.  But getting them to clean up after themselves, for example, is an ongoing source of frustration.

And so our adventures continue.  I will post more as the tours carry on.