Why Some Christmas Dramas are
DOOMED
FOR DISASTER (and how to prevent it!) by Rene Gutteridge
If you've been in any kind of church ministry for very long, you know the two most exhausting and stressful times of year are Easter and Christmas. As a Drama Director, there tends to be a lot of pressure to: a) come up with something creative and dazzling and out-of-this-world; and b) pull it off with perfection. After all, this might be the one service that CEO (Christmas and Easter Only) Christian might attend, and you don't want them to leave with a bad impression.
Sure. No problem. Piece of cake.
Yeah, right!
One Christmas I decided we were going to do an
indoor live nativity. In my head, it was dreamy. In reality, however, there were a few problems, one in particular involving the lights. I'd bought a bunch of spotlights you might use in landscaping or to illuminate your sidewalk, things like that. I taped them all to the platform on stage, twelve of them I think. I sat my beautifully adorned Mary and Joseph, with their flowing gowns, in front of them so it looked as if they were being illuminated by some divine, glowing light. It was absolutely stunning.
Until Mary's gown started to smoke.
Yes, the lights were getting a little too hot, and so I had a simple solution. We just hid a fire extinguisher between Joseph's legs, and if things started catching on fire, I instructed Joseph to lose his character and start spraying things down.
Well, unfortunately for me, Joseph and Mary, who were supposed to be up there the whole service looking serene and Joseph-and-Mary-like, looked, well, worried. Strained. And hot.
Then there was the year that we had a very formal Christmas Eve service, and had done extravagant advent dramas leading up to the final Christ candle. It came to the point in the service when the Christ candle was to be lit after a very lengthy and moving monologue by one of my actors, and...and....and...yes, try again...come on, baby, light! Light! Darkness.
I had people praying. I had the associate pastor digging out wax from around the wick with a pen. I was hoping someone might offer to bring up a blow torch and just set something on fire so we could finish the advent.But after twenty minutes, everyone realized the Christ candle would not light. I left the service so depressed. After hours of seclusion, I did learn one important thing: PREPARE.
Double and triple what you normally do to prepare for a regular church drama. Check the candles to make sure they all light. Check the lighters/matches/blow torches to make sure they work. Think of any little thing that can go wrong and make sure you've addressed it.There is no one thing you can do to ensure that nothing will go wrong. But you can prepare enough so that if something does go wrong, you have either a back-up plan or another way around it.
Every other week of the year, of course you put a lot into being prepared. But on holidays, just take that extra time to double-check everything. Go ahead and have that extra rehearsal. Join hands and pray one more time over the production. Double and triple check that one prop that is essential to the entire play. Have all your actors on three glasses of orange juice a day, just to fight off that potential nasty winter bug. (No, just kidding. Okay, sort of kidding.)
There is such a thing as being too prepared, I will admit. But if you will take the extra time to fine-tune the details, I guarantee you will have a much smoother and less gut-wrenching perfor-mance at the time of year when the norm is chaos and the expectation is high.
And if it ends up being the biggest disaster in all of church drama history, well, um, see my other article "Get Over It."
And then remember how much God loves you.
