Today was the first performance of the Gospel of Luke at a minimum-security prison in Kuna, Idaho. Three residents stayed for the whole thing, and we had a nice discussion afterward.
It some ways, this was an audition. I am scheduled to return next week, and a lot will depend what these men tell the other residents. If they liked it, there should be more at the next performance. If not, there will probably not be anyone there.
At this early stage, every performance is an audition for the next performance. There is a long way to go before it becomes self-sustaining.
I’m learning that discussions afterward are as important as the performance itself. This is something I hadn’t anticipated. It’s an entirely different skill to address each person and enter into a conversation that includes the whole group. Every performance will be an opportunity to develop this skill.
On Wednesday, June 17, I performed the Gospel of Luke, verses 1:1 to 9:50, in the Faith Formation Room at St. Mark’s Catholic Church. Sixteen people attended, including a high school principal, and two theology teachers, and two priests.
St. Mark’s Catholic Church in Boise, ID.
I started with some butterflies, but settled into the performance after a couple of chapters. The audience was fully engaged, and I took a pause after chapter 6, to check in with them and make sure they would like the performance to continue. They encouraged me to continue, and it proceeded to the end.
I do wish that I had some promotional materials at hand, like a business card or something to hand out. When it was completed, I didn’t know what to expect. There were a few questions, but I should have organized the conclusion better, to make sure everyone had a chance to respond and ask questions. This is one of those things that only become apparent after an actual performance.
I am very happy with how it went, and it will take a few more live performances before it starts to become something polished.
In the audience was a longtime drama teacher who offered to discuss what can be done to improve the piece. We met at the Boise State University campus, and had a good discussion about how to rise to the next level.
There is a lot of work to be done on this project, in almost every area. But it seems to be off to an auspicious start, and I am grateful for the opportunity to perform for a real audience for the first time.
This week I will be giving the first performances of the Gospel of Luke at St. Mark’s Catholic Church. Hopefully there will be some school administrators there to assess whether this is something they’d like in their classrooms.
It’s high stakes, but it’s also necessary stakes. It’s like the ante in a poker game. You have to be willing to take some risk in order to be allowed to play the game.
I am trying to transform my life, to engaging full with the Gospel of Luke. I mean that it needs to become my main source of material support, so that I can commit to memorizing the rest of it, and performing throughout or society, from prisons to schools to churches to assisted living facilities to parks to events, and so on.
Sometimes I realize how far way this goal lies. And the biggest obstacles to its realization are my ingrained habits, both of activity and of perspective.
This is not a project that comes naturally to me, and I’ve never tried something like it before. It requires a great reframing of how to organize my life and how to feel about strangers witnessing the project.
It was begun and developed in private. Not only do I have to take it public, I have to spread it as far and wide as possible. The nature of the thing has to change. It’s like a necessary metamorphosis, or like a plant emerging from within the ground and having to suddenly interact directly with the entire sky.
I will report back how things have gone at St. Mark’s. This is a crucial time in the growth of the project.
When I recite the Gospel of Luke from memory, up to chapter nine verse fifty, it takes more than an hour. Sometimes actors have to memorize a lot of lines, and sometimes monks memorize large portions of scripture. But apart from these two instances, I don’t know who would be compelled to undergo such an exercise.
It’s not that I have a great memory. When I started, it was with the notion that my limits would become apparent, and that would restrict how much I could memorize.
Image by Gemini
But with consistency, regularly adding lines and reciting what I know daily, the amount grew beyond what had at first seemed possible. When the total reached more than an hour, then the limitation emerged of how much I could rehearse each day to maintain what I had learned.
It would have been nice to continue on to the end of the Gospel of Luke, but in order to keep that in memory, I would have to recite it for more than three hours a day. I’m sure that with good organization, I could set up a routine where a section is recited each day, with the sections cycling through a weekly pattern, so that all of the material is covered. That may become necessary in the future.
I would like to memorize all of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, because they are by the same author and are a single, continuous narrative. This will certainly require proper organization to keep things memorized.
I haven’t experimented with delays, to see how long it takes for something to disappear from my memory. That’s because I don’t want to lose what I’ve already worked to acquire. But that may become an issue as I try to expand the project.
If there is enough interest in the Gospel of Luke Project, and there are plenty of venues in which to perform it, then I will work on the rest of the Gospel. Until then, it seemed prudent to stop at an hour and a half of material, so test the waters, and see if there is enough interest to sustain it.
The Gospel of Luke will be performed next week at St. Mark’s Catholic Church next Wednesday at 12:30pm. This will be the first full performance, and it will be for clergy, deacons, and school officials, with the hope that they will see enough value in it to consider it for their school curriculum in the Fall.
St. Mark’s Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho.
Yesterday, I met a Volunteer Services Coordinator at a local prison, and we set up a tentative schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays, after I have completed the required volunteer training in a couple of weeks.
So thing are beginning to get underway. Now I will be focusing on assisted living facilities, to see if there is any interest in performances there.
All of this might allow me to fulfill all the requirements for my senior project in the Fall at Boise State University, part of which requires me to perform the Gospel of Luke in at least three different venues.
I should mention that this is not the entirety of the Gospel of Luke. I have memorized from the beginning through chapter nine, verse 50. This is a natural break in the narrative, and at over an hour long, this seems enough to start with.
If there is enough interest, and the project seems to be self-sustaining, I would like to add chapters of Luke’s Gospel until the entire thing is completed, and then start adding chapters from the Acts of the Apostles, but that is a much longer-term goal.
Now all the preparation and effort will be tested. Real people will see it, and deliver their verdict on whether it should be allowed to expand. I always expect difficulties along the way, including here at the first performance. It would be great if they decided to include it in their schools.
This is beginning in a local Catholic church, and I hope to expand to other churches and denominations. It will be interesting to see how it is received elsewhere. I don’t really know what inter-church relations are like, and this will expose me to some of these outside relationships.
This morning I met the Volunteer Services Coordinator at a prison in Idaho. He is enthusiastic about the project.
I still need to take a volunteer training class in a couple of weeks. After that, I will be coming in on a regular basis to recite the Gospel of Luke for the prison residents.
South Idaho Correctional Institution entrance.
I hope that this is a starting point. If things go well, and there is a good reception, it will be possible to expand to other prisons and facilities in the area.
My personal goal is to perform the Gospel of Luke on a regular basis, to improve my performance, and to expand into more venues, like schools and assisted living facilities.
I hope to have news soon about an upcoming performance at a local church.
On Saturday morning, I performed a part of the Gospel of Luke for a small group of men at my local church. This was the first public performance of The Gospel of Luke Project.
The local church where the first performance occurred.
It was a small group, and rather than take an hour and a half of their time, I asked them to pick a chapter from one to nine. Someone called out, “six!” and that seemed like a good choice because that chapter contains the sermon on the plain.
It was very nice to see how people reacted to this project, with a ten minute version. It was positive, and gave me confidence that the entire project can work, and work well.
Tomorrow morning, I will be visiting with administrators at the Idaho Department of Corrections about The Gospel of Luke Project, to discuss performing the Gospel of Luke at the prisons. The performance on Saturday convinces me that this can be a valuable exercise, and could even be well received!
It has also been valuable because I am encouraged to contact other venues in the area, including assisted living facilities and schools. This can be a success.
When I first started memorizing the Gospel of Luke, it was unclear whether I would present it publicly. It was a sort of compulsion. At first, it didn’t really matter whether there was an audience.
But at school, I took a class called “Preparation for Senior Project,” and I proposed The Gospel of Luke Project as my senior project. It was accepted, and so in a way that locked me in to a path towards a presentation.
Image by Gemini
It is the responsibility of the student to develop the grading rubric for their own senior project. Putting that rubric together, I decided to make a requirement to perform The Gospel of Luke in at least three different venues. This requirement will have to be fulfilled in the 2026 Fall semester at Boise State University, and so now, at the beginning of the Summer, I’m trying to lay the groundwork to make those three performances possible.
I have not yet presented this to an audience. The prisons are interested, and there are a couple of Catholic churches with some interest.
I happen to be taking a Summer class called Career Hacking, from the College of Innovation and Design. It involves developing the materials and information necessary for an in-depth job search. I am adapting the class from a job search to the development of The Gospel of Luke Project. It is a great class, and now I am accumulating contacts to help advance the project. So the real push to get into venues will begin in earnest when the contacts list has been completed.
Things are about to change, in many ways. I will go from rehearsing a private memorization project to trying to get in front of audiences throughout the Idaho region. I have never done something like this before, and there will certainly be mistakes and wrong paths.
There is no easy way to survive as an actor, and especially as an older actor in Idaho. This became more clear when I did a research paper last semester for a class at Boise State University, on the subject of career outcomes for Theatre Arts graduates in the state.
Of course it’s not impossible, but a successful theater career in Idaho would immediately place one in the outlier category.
There is another factor that is blatantly obvious, but not much discussed, among those pursuing this career. And that is that many times, actors are paid to humiliate themselves. To illustrate this, simply pay attention to a few commercials on television or YouTube. Actors are exaggerated, pandering, and clownish in every imaginable. way.
Image by Gemini
When this is pointed out to actors, they invariably reply, “But those commercial actors are making good money.” This is not a satisfactory reply if one actually values one’s dignity.
And the degrading roles and situations are not limited to commercials. The theater industry has historically been considered on a level with prostitution and circus performers, on a very low rung of integrity and desirability.
Keep in mind that I am not talking about the fortunate few who enjoy the adulation of celebrity, but the countless others who struggle to make a livelihood in the theater industry.
There is something strange in theater being ubiquitous at elementary schools and early education, and then becoming such a compromised profession as soon as it leaves the educational realm.
For a few reasons, I am attached to this profession, and I feel obligated to at least attempt to survive within it. I will elaborate these reasons in later posts.
And given the landscape, it seems that to come through it with a semblance of self-respect, it is important to exercise as much control as possible over the content of performances. This has been a major factor in my choosing to perform the Gospel of Luke.
Not only does this align with my previous audiobook and radio broadcast experience, the nature of the story is truly interesting, as is the profound effects of this story on American culture.
This is something that I can devote myself to without feeling compromised or degraded. It’s relevant and important. What remains to be seen is whether I can pursue this project in a way that can sustain me, and possibly open new paths to future projects with integrity.
Last year, I began to memorize the Gospel of Luke. Just a little bit at a time, without a clear destination in mind. It might be called a compulsion. I had memorized things before, and this was another chance to sit with a long text and commit it to memory.
There were many things that could have derailed this project. It never made a lot of sense, it has been a lot of work, and people seem generally ambivalent about its future prospects.
But throughout this time, there have been nudges that kept it going. Little things read online, conversations overheard, that reminded me that this is important, somehow.
And now, with over an hour memorized, I am looking for venues in which to perform it. It should not have lasted this long, but it has become my senior project at Boise State University, and I’ve been in touch with prisons and churches, looking for venues.
This has yet to be performed in public. But that it has lasted so long, and continues to grow as a project, is remarkable. Somehow it has stayed alive. This Substack is meant to be a documentary of where this project goes from here.
