Drama Kid Powers Activate! The Return to Bethlehem

I spent some time this week working on getting the space ready for the Return to Bethlehem experience.  Two months ago, a friend of mine asked if I would help, and I said yes, even though I wasn't exactly sure what would be involved.  I thought it might be something like a living Nativity scene, maybe with a few extra scenes.

I was wrong.  It's a whole living Nativity village.  One of the supervisors walked me through the space, telling me about how the visitors would stop at each station to hear actors tell about the space.  For example, there's a weaver's house, and the Temple, and a place where a person dyes cloth.  Eventually the tour ends up at the inn and the stable outside of the inn.

I do wonder a bit about the content.  I hope it's not anti-Jewish, and with the subject being Christ's birth, maybe it's not.  But the man who was working with me did say that the stop at the Temple has the priest talking and children asking about the star and the priest talking about the backwards shepherds.  Hmm.  And there's a spot on the tour where a Pharisee is holding forth.  I know that the potential for antisemitism is there.

But it's a script that has been paid for, written by a national group.  It might have a more conservative skew than I would like, but at least with the Nativity story, it's not likely to go as wrong as the Crucifixion end can go, with substitutionary atonement theory and antisemitic messages right and left.

I thought it was a church that puts this on, and I marveled that Groce United Methodist Church in Asheville was big enough (in terms of people, money, and space) to do this.  Come to find out, it's a different group that puts it all together, and different churches can host.  Of course, very few people have a big enough space.  There needs to be a fellowship hall that's the size of a gym.  Here's a picture of people getting the space ready for us to finish--you can see the theatre flats that we're using:

Each space had a picture of what the space looked like in a past year, along with tubs of supplies.  We assembled as best we could.  Here's a picture of what the Temple looked like before:

And here's the after: 

It took over an hour to assemble the Temple.  I did start counting all the spaces and thinking about the fact that the show opens Thursday night.  Happily, not every space will take that long.  I was part of the two person team that did the dye shop, and it only took about half an hour to get this space ready:

I'm enjoying the work.  It takes me back to my undergrad days, when I had a student worker job in the theatre department, creating sets.  It brings me the joy that fashioning worship spaces for my Florida church gave me.  And I'm needed--yesterday we didn't have many volunteers to do the work.