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November 12, 2001
FORMER SOAP OPERA STAR PERFORMS ONE-MAN GOSPEL PLAY
By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent
ASSIST News Service
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA (ANS) -- Every Christian has wondered what it would have been like -- to have been there, in Galilee, and met Jesus.
"AFRAID ! The Gospel of Mark," is one man's effort to help people have that encounter, by telling the story in the present tense, here and now.
Actor
Frank Runyeon, better known for his starring roles in more than a thousand TV
episodes, including opposite Meg Ryan in "As The World Turns," and also in "L.A.
Law," "General Hospital," "Falcon Crest," and "Santa Barbara," has been taking
his one-man, three-act presentation on the road.Runyeon is a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in Religion. Preparing for the writing of AFRAID !, Runyeon studied at Fuller Seminary and Yale Divinity School before receiving his Masters, with honors, from General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1994.
His performance of AFRAID! is set in the catacombs of Rome by candlelight. Its text is the Biblical Gospel of Mark, translated into contemporary American speech.
Runyeon tells the story in the present tense, here and now, with entertaining audience interaction. As characters and settings and lights constantly shift, the Gospel engages the audience's imaginations, surprises them with flashes of humor, and drives relentlessly forward with all the dramatic suspense you would expect from great theater. It is a play which is appropriate for the whole family, including grade school children.
Runyeon has recently been in Minnesota performing his play. This is not Runyeon's first appearance in Minnesota, but he said he prefers to visit the state in the early fall, "before the snow starts to fly."
He said he wrote the play, one of four such plays he has written for the stage, because he had been doing so many TV performances over the past 14 years. "Over time you are just looking for a script that is more nourishing for yourself and for your audience and that just speaks more deeply to the human condition than TV scripts. And for my own health, I was looking for spiritual help, I was looking to do something that was spiritually nourishing.
"I started studying the Gospel of Mark because I had seen (celebrated English actor) Alec McCowen do it in the 70s on Broadway and I found that what he had done was very good, but I noticed that the audience fell asleep -- and almost everybody does if you do King James from beginning to end. He does a lovely job of it, but I thought maybe there's a way to do this more theatrically that would really speak to an American contemporary audience," said Runyeon.
"You're still doing the Gospel of Mark, but then it really grabs people in a way that really holds them on the edge of their seats, moment by moment. So I staged it now more theatrically, there's still text, word-for-word from the Gospel of Mark, which was part of my Master's thesis in seminary -- a word-for-word translation from the Greek into what you would call a stage vocabulary. It would be like one of (the apostle) Paul's letters where he says 'I urge you,' then you can say 'Please!'," said Runyeon.
"It's just a matter of finding words to describe when (the Bible says) the sky is 'torn asunder' I use 'ripped!' " he said.
Runyeon has done four such plays, and is working on a fifth. His other plays include the Sermon on the Mount, the Letter of James, and the Three-and-a-Half Stories of Christmas.
Runyeon said he had always been a church-going person but as he has become older life has asked more serious questions and he decided to search out the great texts of faith.
"My faith really grew stronger and stronger the more I did it, and I just loved it," he said. "It was a deepening of my faith."
Having majored in Religion at Princeton, the Biblical texts have always been a major source of interest to him, said Runyeon. He learned Greek, and the more he studied it, the more interested he became.
"It makes people more secure to know that I've done my homework," he said.
"I've always been a bit of a student and I've been more of a scholar than an actor, but nobody knew that until I did this," said Runyeon.
For more information, call Runyeon Productions at (805) 498-5154
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