Retired Slippery Rock University professor Norma Laughner taught a drama class where Concordia residents wrote, directed and acted in their own plays.

Butler County is filled with a variety of people doing interesting things. This weekly feature offers snapshots of some them by asking five questions. The latest installment appears below.

————

Residents of Concordia, 134 Marwood Road, Cabot, recently had a taste of the theatrical life. As part of seniors learning class, students wrote, directed and acted in their own plays.

Connected to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, Concordia resident and retired Slippery Rock University professor Norma Laughner taught the drama class where the assignments included writing a short playlet.

Laughner, a former speech professor who has lived at Concordia for nearly four years, said three of the assignments were brought to the stage at Concordia and acted before an audience recently.

“We had 92 people in the audience, and we only had 50 programs run off,” she said.

QUESTION: How difficult was it for the residents to write plays?ANSWER: We actually stayed with the Old Testament. The class was called “Drama From the Bible.” We told them, “As many different translations that you can get a hold of, choose a story that interests you.”One chose Samson and Delilah, another Sarah and Hagar and Lorraine Kesterson chose the story of Deborah and Sisera.They worked on those during the five sessions of classes. They handed in their scripts, and I handed them back and they did them again. They revised them a couple of times.They worked hard on them, actually. That's the difficult part of working with older people. Sometimes they can't work that hard.It's amazing how much they want to learn. They sign up for things they didn't know and they never had a chance to do in their whole lives. A lot of people have poetry in their hearts and don't know how to write it down.

QUESTION: Did one theme predominate the playlets?ANSWER: It seemed to be that the subject got to be life and death. Justice triumphs.There's the case of a woman who couldn't have children who allowed her husband to lie with her slave to produce a child for her, the first surrogate mother.Sympathy and lack of sympathy, subterfuge, a lot of interesting themes that are still appropriate today.

QUESTION: Have any of your students expressed desire to go onto a longer form?ANSWER: I have already announced a repeat of the class, but it will be the New Testament. Several of them have already said they are coming back for another go-round.

QUESTION: Is one playwright a favorite among your students?ANSWER: No, not really. We didn't have a lot of time for a lot of background for other plays and playwrights. It takes time to lay the groundwork for these classes because they are coming in cold. It took a lot of time to get them to even think about what they were supposed to be doing. It takes awhile to sort out what they need to be doing to produce a play. But once they got it, it was very, very good.

QUESTION: Any thoughts about staging a full-production of an existing play using Concordia residents?ANSWER: Oh yes, I would love to do that. But we would need more stage equipment for such a thing. It is so hard to do things on a bare stage.