We strode into the service with one short rehearsal behind us.  The congregation watched with a bit of skepticism as five people fumbled with microphones and chairs at the front of the sanctuary.  We sat in our ragged semi-circle, and the narrator began to read.  We all read and a story took center stage. Some of us mugged and mimed, and some simply read with feeling, The children moved to the front of the room or stood on their parent’s laps to see this minor gaggle of readers as they told the story of La Befana, the Italian Christmas witch.

 

Reader’s Theatre is a very low-tech, low budget technology for story-telling. It requires a nicely developed script, a few props, willing readers, and an investment in rehearsal time.  It’s that simple, almost too simple to work.  But, it does work.  We all love to hear a story.  Our very brains are designed to follow a plot, to anticipate twists and turns, to dash ahead to our own imagined ending and back again to hear what is really happening.  

 

After the service, one member commented that his son had a book about the holidays, and in a pictorial representation he’d noticed a witch on a broom.  He said he’s always imagined the Italians had some special Halloween celebration, and now he’d connected that picture with the legend of Befana, the woman who refused to follow a shepherd to Bethlehem to see the baby Jesus. 

 

We are all driven to made connections, even between a child’s picture book and a story told at church.  We can’t help but gather all the bits of information at our disposal and make something out of them.  That is how stories of every kind came to be in the first place.  A good story satisfies something deep within.  In the story of  La Befana, the message of hope the story conveyed was a bonus, a pleasant connection with our first foray in the simple world of Reader’s Theatre.