I've been working on my Quaker plays again, and doing a much-needed update of general publicity. I write and do my own PR, and that's why things get a few years behind, with my Quaker books and other books. But now I'm home a lot more, and besides the four teenagers I have hanging around, bored out of their skulls, I have less excuse for not getting anything done. That, and the fact that, with life being as risky as it is, there's no reason not to do everything one always had in mind to do.
That is why I'm working on my second book, tentatively called Quaker Plays for Grown-ups. I will explain about it in a minute. But first I want to explain something very simple.
The profits for these plays goes straight to Quaker pursuits. But even that's simple - since I only make about ten or twenty bucks a year off of them, and Cloud Quakers costs $16/mo., that's our entire economy. In short, I don't have much financial complication. You buy these books, I support Cloud Quakers, it's all pretty simple. Of course, you don't have to buy them. Most of them are on the web in one place or another, linked from here, my personal Quaker site. You don't have to even use them, since I happen to know from experience that putting on a play is an enormous amount of work. But if you are interested in learning about Quakerism, there is no better way to do it that read how real people dealt with real conflicts, historical in most cases, that involved their values being put in practice.
Now about the new plays. The first ones were definitely for kids - they started out dealing with the old Quaker stories, White Feather and all, when we had really young kids in our meeting and wanted some kind of first-day program. Eventually we got more kids and they got older, and sure enough, some were really into acting. Some were not, of course, and had a lot of trouble getting up there in front of everyone saying a few lines. And some simply couldn't memorize lines, and we had to prompt them from the first row. But the plays were incredibly popular, and once we took one (Lucretia Mott) up to St. Louis and the folks up there loved it. It was like you could really see history come alive, and it was really good for the people who knew history and the people who knew that history specifically.
So the new plays will be like that, only the lines will be unapologetically longer, and harder to remember. This new book will assume that you want to learn about history, and about Quakers, and whether you like performing them or not, you like reading and knowing about history. If you want to perform them, fine, they have stage directions; they have action sometimes, and things happen, sometimes. But one or two are of the variety that a single person can simply perform, by herself/himself, in front of a crowd, like a monologue. You memorize, you get up there, you belt it out.
That's because, in the end, there are a lot of complex issues to deal with. I have a couple from WWII right off the bat - both Rufus Jones, who went to Germany on a mission to help the Jews - and one about the boat that sailed to the USA and was turned away at our borders. There is one about homophobia in Africa - where the majority of today's Quakers are. There's Tide of Employment, about Hoover, so timely today because of the depression and the antagonism caused by the rich being greedy while everyone else starves. If you wonder whether you can read Quaker history off of plays, try this - it's free. Plays are not for everyone, but you can find out if they are for you.
There are more. One I am working on now, Massacre Canyon, deals with Quaker involvement in the last days of the free Pawnee tribe, before they were massacred by the Sioux. I'm going to do Nixon, and I might do Mary Fisher, an interesting woman who helped start Canadian Friends. I may do Quakers on zoom, just to throw in something modern. But I need more. If you have any ideas, let me know.
If you're interested in the first round, scroll down or try here. I am slowly buying one for each of the actors from the good old days, which would have been roughly 1997-2010, a spell of really fine performances, some of which were filmed, but most of which live on in memory as religious education for the children of southern Illinois meeting.
