This weekend the Academy students perform their Winter Comedy in the Odyssey Theatre (parish auditorium), Afterlife. This is a shameless plug, but in the spirit of this weekend’s reading to “bring your gift to the altar” (Matthew 5:24) Here it goes: I want to personally invite you to come see the play! The performances are Friday, February 10, 2017 at 7:00 p.m. or Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 2:00 p.m.
“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. (1 Corinthians 13:11),” the Apostle Paul makes his point bluntly. Having been accused and complimented (it depends on the source) I’ve been suspected of never really growing up. So, in a year that finds me getting married, I’ve been ready to grow personally, emotionally and professionally—life does that to you—but, creatively, I’ve been very happy to stay and play in the sandbox perhaps a little too long. It is time to “put aside childish things” so I’m writing for adults again, and next year’s season will find our Academy children focusing on some American classics, but before we depart, I thought it would be fun to revisit this weekend’s play, the first play I ever wrote when I was in 8th grade 20 years ago.
The summer before 8th grade I tried to read Dante’s Divine Comedy and finished Woody Allen’s Without Feathers. The two books had a profound impact into my imagination. My Catholic imagination was born when I wrote a short story called “Death Comes for Jimmy” and drew cartoons called “Death and Company.” Combined they became Afterlife, the story of saints, mythological creatures and sinners getting into adventures. With my mother’s urging and my pastor’s approval, we staged the play with some friends, four chairs, and a cardboard cut out in the shape of a skeleton in the gymnasium of St. Joseph’s Church in Bogota, NJ.
In college I brought an incarnation to Seton Hall and then twice more here, once with OLMC’s youth ministry program and again with the Academy middle school students. A fun fact: Our very own Justin Fernandez played the hapless angel Enoch! So Afterlife has had, well, quite the afterlife.
Reviewing the original text all these years later I discovered a couple of things. First, how crudely constructed it is, everyone sounds the same, all the jokes are the same level, they are based on cultural appropriating and caricatures of what I though adult life consisted of, it has no plot resolution—action seems to just stop and the ending is so clunky we had to reconstruct it for this production. But, reading it again all these years removed, I see how deeply concerned I was with sainthood, how in order to relate to our Catholic heroes I had to make them sound like us, they had to be real— as real as my 8th grade buddies around the cafeteria table. I was very concerned with heaven (and hell). It serves as a good reminder to my older self now. Before putting “aside childish things,” we should remind ourselves to hold onto to childlike wonder. Our Academy students, roughly the age I was when I wrote the piece, reminded me of that.
It is clunky, sentimental and overly silly. I think it’s my most honest play. The show is free, I hope to see you there!
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot