Two plays

I was asked to usher for a play in downtown Philadelphia. I would get to see the play for free, and all I had to do was show up an hour before curtain time and hand out programs as people made their way down into the church basement where the performance would be held—they would have already paid upstairs.

The venue was the size of your average church basement, where congregations typically gather after worship for coffee, doughnuts, and conversation. There were roughly 100 chairs set up facing the stage, which was invitingly set with stage props ready to spring to life, but no one was in the room yet besides me.

A pretty young woman walked through after a while, entering the room from one door and crossing diagonally to disappear through a far exit. I looked at her, standing conspicuously alone with programs cradled in my arms, and she walked past me without seeming to see me.

Soon a man entered from another door and crossed the room quite close to me, but again it was as if I were invisible to him, though that was not possible, and I sought his gaze with my eyes. This happened several times before the first customer for my playbills ever arrived and took a seat. Sometimes it would be a single soul, sometimes two walking abreast, but each time I was like one of Dickens’ Christmas ghosts, observing but evidently not observed, as if abiding in a strange dimension or behind a two-way mirror.

There are intangible rules in every culture, I am sure, that dictate the appropriateness or inappropriateness of social intercourse in various settings. Who can understand them? Why is it, for example, that strangers on the street are friendlier in snowstorms? Why is it that the presence of another human being in one’s social space, within certain delimited parameters, almost makes it unthinkable to walk past a fellow divine image-bearer without acknowledging his existence in some way? But none of this was happening here.

People eventually filed in and took my programs and their seats, as did I. To my surprise, there on the stage was the pretty young woman who had crossed my path an hour earlier in socially awkward silence. There also animating the scenery of a WWII-vintage German prison cell were the men who had brushed past me in street clothes an hour before, all of them suddenly warm-blooded and exuding every range of human emotion from wit to compassion and tenderness.

The play was first-rate and the acting was professional. But for all that, the experience was diminished for me. I just kept thinking about Jesus, a superstar in Jerusalem in His day, who when finding Himself sharing a space with a lowly woman from Samaria with a water jug on her head, struck up a conversation with her about water.