CABOT - Robert Fulghum's best-selling book, "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten," is coming to the stage at the Saxonburg Summer Theatre.

Fulghum's book and the stage version mix great humor with poignant messages.

"It is an amazing mixture of humor and pathos, song and dance," said director Gay Johnson

The play is comprised of 15 separate scenes, each one with a message.

"The show is not a typical play in the sense of having defined characters who go through a dramatic arc of some kind or live through a period of time. Rather, it is a series of vignettes or anecdotes that are told, sung or acted out by one or more of the five players," said Steve Hartshorn one of the actors and one of the members who requested this play for the group.

"For my part, I was taken with the scene entitled 'Beethoven' because I saw it being done with such power and passion as to be amazing. Fortunately, Gay cast me in that part - now I just have to pull it off," said Hartshorn of his character.

The first scene charts attitude changes from kindergarten to college to adulthood. Other scenes include: how it is better to be found than to hide, how yelling kills, how music inspires, how to tell a problem from an inconvenience and how you know you are grown up when you have to grab the stuff that is clogging the drain.

While the essays in "Kindergarten" portray a grown-up look at life, the material has tremendous family appeal.

The cast includes Diane Beckstead, narrator and piano; Christian Bruggeman on drums, Jack Johnson, Jim Knapick, Maria Michalowski and newcomer to the stage, Dee Cypher of Valencia.

"It is different than acting. We are in essence storytellers. Each of the actors uses his own personality to illustrate the dialogue," Cypher said.

"This particular play is a narrative with many short vignettes, which together lead the audience to an insightful conclusion."

For Cypher the audience is her main concern.

"The most challenging thing about the narrative for me is to connect with the audience in a meaningful way. This is my first real stage experience, and I'm not sure how I appear to an audience," she said. "The rest of the cast has been very helpful in this regard."

This will be the final show for the Saxonburg Summer Theatre in the little barn on the property of Concordia Lutheran Services. Concordia needs to use the barn.

With the theater's future, uncertain, this may be its last production, ending a 10-year run of quality acting in a country setting.