I certainly don’t expect everyone who watched my show enjoyed it or connected with it, but I thought I would share this blog post I found, written by a stranger.
Last night my wife LaRinda and I went to see an original play at BYU titled “Without Fear.” It was performed by the “Experimental Theater Company.” Brighton Hertford, a friend of ours, had a role in the play which had a total of 5 actors in it. It was performed in a backstage area with only three props. Two long wooden bench-type props, and a wooden box. The play was a study in memories. The playwright, Morag Plaice-Shepherd wrote the script without any sort of sequential timeline. It was a series of scenes from the life of a girl named Kirsty who lived in Scotland. One moment we would be watching a scene from Kirsty’s young adult life, the next a scene from her childhood. Brighton did an incredible job as childhood Kirsty. You would think this kind of jumble would make the play difficult to watch, but it was surprisingly easy for me to get “involved” with the scenes. Each scene, although an abrupt change of time and circumstance, seemed to flow easily into the other. The various characters often interacted simultaneously with characters from different periods of the timeline. It was facinating and thought provoking. Seeing a person’s entire life as a disjointed mish mash of out of order events lent a very different perspective to the audience. Every single one of the actors were very skilled and handled the difficult task with precision and finesse. I was impressed. The whole thing got me thinking.
I didn’t fully understand what the play was trying to get across at first. I think I figured it out about half an hour after leaving the theater. The key was in the title. Every scene of the play presented a piece of the puzzle from each of the characters’ lives. Kirsty seemed motivated by a desire to not have anybody leave her. (Her mother had left her and her brother Fraser to live with their father when she was little. Whether by death or just leaving is never really clear, though I suspect the former.) Fraser was portrayed as having chosen to reject faith of any kind as a result of the experience. Yet the whole play he was torn between his desire to take off on his own, and his need to stay for Kirsty. Kirsty’s friend Marjorie spent the entire play afraid of getting in trouble, fearing her father would beat her. Kirsty worked very hard to show Marjorie what she was missing, with limited success. Then there was Campbell. In Kirsty’s childhood, Cambpell loved her, but was afraid to show it, so he teased her instead. In young adulthood, he couldn’t keep himself from her and spent the play following her around begging her to marry him. He was the only character who seems to have left his fear behind and embraced what he wanted. However, Kirsty’s fear of getting too close to anyone only to have them leave, kept her from fully accepting Campbell’s affections even though she really wanted to. She would simultaneously pull him closer and push him away.
The play, to me, was a treatise of how we allow our fears to get in the way of our full enjoyment of the blessings life has to offer. We spend our lives desperately trying to avoid tragedy and trial, yet they inevitably occur in ALL of our lives. By contrast, faith gives us the ability to say “I don’t care what bad things may come, I know I’ll survive and get through them somehow, but for now, I’m going to enjoy what I can!” I want to have that attitude more. I believe if we choose to take advantage of the good things that surround us every day, and don’t allow fear of what may or may not happen hobble us, we all could live much richer and fuller lives.
I recommend Without Fear. It is playing two more times. Today (Saturday December 6, 2008) at 1:00 pm and 9:30 pm at the Margetts theater at BYU. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased at the event.
Congrats, Dave. It sounds like a hit. Especially if someone cared enough to say so much (good) about it.