“How do we advance Good in our local community?”
One way I have answered this question in my life has been through the telling of good stories from the Stage. I believe if we teach good stories to our children—and if our children perform these good stories in front of an audience—then our children will have deeper and richer imaginations, and these stories we told together will nurture our culture. Aside from a forgettable role in my high school’s production of Pinocchio, I have never had a great passion for being involved in the performing arts. Rather, I was swept up into the world of props, lights, entrances, and exits through a love of good stories and a hope to put them into our community. 
My first entry into theater work as an adult was a play I produced in collaboration with The Trust’s executive director Dr. Robert Bigley and his family. I believed that the children in our community needed to interact with Shakespeare in a more up-close and personal way. The Bigleys and the Bustards joined together in this idea, and we called ourselves “The West End Shakespeare Company.” We brought together students of various ages to present Much Ado About Nothing. The night of the performance, people from all over Lancaster County filled the seats—kids sat on the floor and teenagers sat on windowsills. It was packed. Everyone followed the story and we cheered and laughed all night. We had so much fun that we staged Twelfth Night the following summer.
My hope to see the good stories of Shakespeare come alive for the people in our community, especially our children, had happened. I was later invited by The Lancaster Academy for the Performing Arts to lead their theater department and produce their shows. I was joined in this venture by Bonnie Bosso—“Miss Bonnie,” as our actors called her—our lead teacher and show director. We worked together, combining vision, skill and joy, to give our children and their families excellent experiences throughout the year.
But why emphasize telling good stories through plays and musicals? Because we are a storied people and stories form our imaginations and our identities. Stories also shape the soul of our communities and culture. We all tell stories and receive stories throughout our lives. As Christians, we are rooted in a Kingdom story—an epic tale, full of many other stories, including our own—written by God.
In the book It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God Charlie Peacock wrote: “. . . the Christian artist must imitate his Lord in story telling. . . . the storyteller of good imagination seeks to leave the world and its inhabitants tangibly better than they were before the storyteller arrived on earth.” Working with a script, wrestling with how to present it, collaborating with the cast, finding connection with characters, and sharing it with an audience are tangible ways of telling a story. With a good play or musical, the audience experiences the story, and then takes it with them out into their everyday lives.
Today’s culture—what we see, hear, read, and do—is a mixed bag of the beautiful and the good jumbled in with the mediocre and the profane. Many storytellers today leave the earth tangibly worse than when they arrived. Children can easily grow up on a diet of consumer marketing, shallow songs, and anemic stories. Many TV shows and movies, while very visually appealing, are laced with cancerous ideas that shape our children’s imaginations and ideas about life. When you add to this the over-sexualization of our culture and the overindulgent use of smart phones, we are left in the garden of life, working against a growing wasteland.
At the heart of it all, we are what we love. And what influences what we love? Not just knowing a vast amount of facts and theories. What feeds our hearts is a combination of knowing and being, which is shaped by whatever has molded our imagination. What feeds our imagination? Our relationships with people, stories, music, poetry, art, knowledge, and nature. As James K. A. Smith says in Desiring the Kingdom: “Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us.” I would say that the practice of storytelling (and for this conversation, the work of storytelling on the stage) shapes our loves.
