Author Interview:  The Sower and the Seed

What does an author do if a story has narration, but no real speaking parts?  When a story is a good as "The Parable of the Sower," the author has several choices:  keep it straight as written or add characters based on the storyline.  Find out what was behind Carol Montgomery's free Readers Theater script, "The Sower and the Seed" when she faced the challenge of no dialogue in a classic parable from Biblical literature.  Carol Montgomery adapted Jesus' parable "The Sower and the Seed" as part of her master's project in 1982.  (Okay, she was 27 then!) Readers Theater All Year interviewed her in summer 2010.  Here is that brief interview:

Idea?

RT All Year:  Where did you get the idea for this script?

Carol:  Well, somehow I grabbed hold of the power of Readers Theater, but it seemed like there weren't many scripts available based on the parables as I recall. That was a long time ago, you know.  I knew I wanted to do my master's project in education on Readers Theater, but I didn't want to only do research.  So, the idea to take seven parables from the Bible and adapt them for Readers Theater just popped into my head.

Resources?

RT All Year:  What resources did you use to write the script?

Carol:  Oh, I just had a bunch of Bibles.  I compared versions.  And if the story was in more than one book of the Bible--like The Parable of the Sower--I chose one section of Scripture to focus on.

RT All Year:  How long did it take you to write the script?

Carol: Ha!  You're asking me after all these years? All I remember is that it took a while to compare the versions, but the actual writing wasn't too hard.  Actually, I revised it recently.  When I originally wrote it there was no male speaking parts.

RT All Year:  Why did you write the script?

RT All Year:  Which story about the script or the process of writing it would you like to share?

Carol:  Hmmmm, I guess the most memorable time performing the original script was when I was teaching the drama club with our home school support group several years ago.  I just remember Julie at the Fine Arts Festival as a seed in the script weakly speaking into the mike, "Help!"  Everybody laughed because they knew she was bringing the character to life;  Julie was not afraid to speak into a microphone.  I was just grateful people enjoyed it.  It gave me more confidence as a writer seeing an audience of parents so receptive to their kids having fun reading into mikes on stage.  I hope others will catch the Readers Theater "bug" and we help build an army of leaders who are not afraid to speak in front of a crowd.