It's tricky, turning Biblical short-hand character sketches into three-dimensional characters. Some of the people I wrote about, like Hadad and Edomite, only appeared in a line or two. Others, like Solomon, had a lot written about them, and yet the portrait of Solomon was full of contradictions (Wise king/Tyrant? Monotheist/Polytheist?). Showing up for the production, I was a little nervous that people would think I had treated Solomon unfairly, or that I wasn't reverent enough in my presentation. What I never expected was the objection that came up the most: I had presented Solomon as having hundreds of wives and concubines. Telling people I had taken the numbers straight from scripture helped not at all.
For this reason, I'm posting a fairly large sample section of each play, so that you can really get a sense of how the story and people are presented before deciding to produce the play. The Biblical plays also come with Bible-Study Guides for discussion, and the scripts themselves are footnoted with the Biblical passages referenced.
Unless otherwise specified, these are “Mystery Dinner Theater” plays – each has thirty or forty minutes of action involving several characters, followed by a newspaper article containing the details of a murder, clues for the actors to sell in character, and a brief resolution scene. Each kit comes with three sets of clues and solutions, so that the play can be presented multiple times without the solution leaking out. These were written for fund-raisers in which the audience experiences a play, eats dinner, buys clues from the characters, and the first table to turn in the solution to the mystery wins (rewards for a winning table sometimes include gift certificates from local businesses – this is for the fund-raising organization to arrange).
I look forward to writing more of these plays. If your group would like a play about a specific Biblical person or time period, I would be happy to write one on a commission basis. I would strongly encourage the choice of a person whose cause of death is not presented in the Bible (Writing a mystery about who killed Abel would be difficult, first because everybody knows who did it, and second because writing multiple solutions would mean contradicting scripture). You can contact me at tjs@snodgrassplays.com to get the ball rolling.
