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| Walter Cronkite is Dead |
Why is the church putting on the play “Walter Cronkite is Dead”? Well, last Friday, Reverend Heather came to see the show. Her planned talk on Sunday was “It’s time for an exorcism.” And in the course of seeing the show, she heard the character Patty do a three-minute monologue on the movie, “The Exorcist,” which she asked me to reprise on Sunday as an introduction to her talk. It’s a very funny monologue and the congregation enjoyed it so much that some of them asked if we could put on the whole show. We applied for and got the rights to it for one night on July 11. My acting partner, Marilyn Wolfe, graciously agreed to come and perform it with me.
I decided to audition for “Walter Cronkite is Dead” at the Broadway Vista Theater because: 1) I’m always looking for a new theater opportunity; 2) I was looking for a new challenge and memorizing more than half of an two-person, 90-minute show seemed like a new level of opportunity; 3) the subject matter is very Science of Mind; 4) it was a paying gig and very few theaters offer actors more than a gas stipend; and 5) God sent me a sign—we already had a trip planned to visit our parents in the Midwest in May and they were having a two-week break in rehearsals over the exact dates I planned to be gone!
There were 34 women who auditioned for the part, which the director culled down to five for each character at callbacks. I was delighted that I was chosen to play Patty—the Southern Conservative. Marilyn Wolfe was selected to play Margaret, the uptight East Coast Liberal.
The play is a long conversation that occurs between these two women when they get stuck sitting next to each other at an airport during a big storm. The discussion between them is volatile. It’s a great opportunity to look at how our personal world-view influences even our smallest social interactions. The biases we carry about how we should live our lives seep into every area of discussion. And as the conversation moves from the best places to travel, to children, to personal hopes and fears, to politics, the audience gets a chance to examine their own beliefs, see which character they identify with, and see the commonalities between them. After all, we ARE all one.
I’m excited to have another opportunity to share “Walter Cronkite is Dead” with our spiritual community. Marilyn and I performed the show for the last month at the Broadway theater in Vista. We worked hard to flesh out all of the nuances of this show and hope that translates to a wonderful audience experience for you as you get to know and, hopefully, understand and appreciate both Patty’s and Margaret’s points of view. I hope you’ll join us this Friday, July 11, at 7 p.m. at the Center for Spiritual Living Capistrano Valley.
~Kimberly Wooldridge