Several months ago, Porter signed us up for a pre-anniversary present of tickets to the Orlando performance of The Screwtape Letters. I tucked them carefully away in my Tickler file, and last week they popped up. I'm very grateful for the Tickler and for Google Calendar—when you book things so far in advance it's all too easy to forget, especially in a season of other big events. It was a delightful post-Christmas outing.
The location, the Plaza Live theater, was initially disappointing, as it looks—and smells—like the converted movie theater it is. But that was easy to forget once the show started.
Not so easy to ignore was the excessive volume of the music and sound effects. I did not want to resort to my earplugs, because the speaking part was of a reasonable volume, but after several assaults I gave up, and was still able to hear the monologue. Yes, it's a monologue, though not a one-man show. But the other character, Screwtape's secretary, Toadpipe, is a mime. And played by a woman, so maybe it is a one-man show after all.
How do you adapt a book, consisting entirely of a series of letters, to the stage? With difficulty, but they did a commendable job. The stage setting is in Hell, where Screwtape is dictating his letters. Toadpipe's acrobatics and the sound effects provide enough action to keep the show moving. For what it is, the show is very well done, and should have large audience appeal. It received a very positive review from the Orlando Sentinel. Even I enjoyed it, no doubt because the script was so faithful to the original. I know the book well enough to recognize that large sections were performed verbatim. Much was, of necessity, left out—I had wondered how they would handle the part where Screwtape turns into a cockroach; they didn't—and there were one or two places where I thought there might have been just a little modernization. But it's hard to beat C.S. Lewis for writing, so I'm glad they didn't try. Best of all, the show stays true to the character of the book.
No show could replace the book itself. But for an introduction to the book, it's a good performance. If only they had turned the volume down!
A Boy's War by David Michell (OMF International, 1988)
In 2010, revelations of unspeakable abuse of missionary children at not one but two West African boarding schools only confirmed my intense belief that missions organizations sinned greatly against the very families that gave everything to serve with them, by expecting—often requiring—parents to send their children away to boarding school at a very young age. After all, isn't one of the (multiple) lessons of the Old Testament story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, the counter-cultural message that God does not ask parents to sacrifice their children, but himself provides the sacrifice? How did the organizations dare preach Jesus Christ while demanding sacrifices to Moloch? I'm not talking about high school-aged children who chose to go to boarding school for the sake of a better education and preparation for college, but little ones, as young as six, whose education would have been better accomplished at home with their parents. I daresay the parents' missionary work would have benefitted as well, as the native peoples would have more easily accepted them as fellow human beings as they watched them interacting as families.
Granted, there are many excellent boarding schools. My quarrel is not with families who choose this as the best educational option for their children, but with the missions that mandated the practice. Why did the organizations rip children away from their parents in the name of God, and why did their parents put up with it? It was a long time before I came up with a theory: it may be because so many missions organizations have their roots in England, and other countries where sending small children off to boarding school was standard practice, a historical and cultural given. (More)
