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RED BOOKS: OUR SEARCH FOR ELLEN WHITE
A Scene-by-Scene Synopsis
By
Greg Schneider

Scene 1: The Great Disappointment
     Opens with the closing paragraph from The Great Controversy, Ellen White’s combination of salvation history and apocalyptic.  The passage proclaims what we wait for--and what we fear: “The Great Controversy is ended.  Sin and Sinners are no more.  The entire universe is clean!  One pulse of harmony and gladness beats throughout the vast creation . . . the entire universe declare(s) that God is Love!  ” [Am I the gold God loves?  Or am I the dirt He will purge?]
     The scene depicts hope, disappointment, and a falling away that leaves a solitary Ellen White humming her yearning hymn of heaven and homeland up to the point of a question mark, suspended by a final unsung note.

Scene 2: Introduction
     Who we are and what we’re doing here in this play.  It’s about a wound in our community.  What happened?  My character proclaims the obvious: I’m “the old guy,” and hints that I am one of the many who carry the wound.

Scene 3: She Was Always There
     Richard (my college friend and now college President), Miljoy (my student and class reader), and Aubyn (my former student and now colleague) remind the audience what it was like to grow up with Ellen White as part of the air we breathed.  [Aubyn’s story requires the white-and-Asian cast to do their impression of a black church service.  The real Aubyn Fulton suggested to me that we left a lot to be desired--but that at least we got the hats right.]

Scene 4: Ellen Plays (and Is Caught)
     The scene opens with Ellen giving a Christmas bonus to her stuffy gray-and-black-clad young secretary and telling her to buy a red dress.  Then Ellen plays with the kids, does deeds of care and generosity, and buys herself a red dress from a chic Parisian shop.
     She is checked in her play and finally stripped of the red dress and framed up as the black-clad Ellen-the-Icon by an angry, oppressive Churchman.  The scene ends with mockery of the very serious Ellen and James White.

Scene 5: Our Mothers
     A devout mother, full of tenderness and full of Ellen White’s writings, tells her son that “Mrs. White” is why she raised him as she did.  Another mother tells her daughter why she “stayed away”--her parents punished her by sending her to her room to read Mrs. White’s book, Education.  Jonathan Butler, ex-Adventist historian (University of Chicago Ph.D. and recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for a biography of Ellen White he never completed) shows up to talk about Ellen White as the neurotic, pissy, and PMS-y Mom you have to “duke it out with” in order to “find yourself,” a far cry from the sweet old grandmother he supposes the current generation to have.

Scene 6: A Good Ol’ Times Seminar
     The son of the devout Mrs.-White-filled mother introduces his father, a caring man alienated from his son by an obsession with end-time events.  The son takes off on a flight of fancy about Adventist end-time evangelism as a kind of Hollywood summer blockbuster movie, replete with a sexy whore of Babylon, lots of violent special effects, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as the toughest motorcycle gang in the cosmos. 
     But then he is upstaged.  A young man after the father’s own heart brags about his reading “rampage” in the prophet’s writings and proclaims his devotion to the God of Ellen White.  The father’s response casts aspersion on the son and sets the son off on a desperate, but secret, rant: “You may be tired of this world we’re living in, but I haven’t even had a taste of it yet. . . .  It’s not fair!  Let me make up my own mind as to whether this world sucks!” 
     “That,” he sighs, “is what I wish I could say.”

Scene 7: Baggage
     Young Adventists, hemmed in and filled up with Ellen White, head off to college in the second half of the 20th century.  Speaking of their frustrations, resentments, and guilt, the Greg Schneider character declares, “We were starving!” [Query: Is the food I’m now feeding my students pure or polluted?  Fear of pollution is what caused the Crash.  Is purity possible, or even desirable?  Maybe the whole food metaphor is not that helpful.]
       Elizabeth Reeves walks on to deliver a rapid-fire list of what people told us Ellen White said you should NOT do.  Most notably, you should NOT go to the theater--so here we are, all sinners together.  There are things we got from Ellen White that keep us from going forward, but we can’t leave those things behind either.  That’s the baggage.
     Greg discourses on education as a key part of Ellen White’s legacy, and Zach and Tim get ready for college in 21st-century party style.  Greg labors, with no great success, to sober them up with talk about how things were at an Adventist college in the 70s.

Scene 8: The Crash
     The Crash wasn’t an accident.  Critical historical research in Ronald Numbers, Prophetess of Health (1976) and resentful disillusioned polemic in Walter Rea’s The White Lie (1982) “book-end” Aubyn Fulton’s experience at PUC.  He tells us there was a cascade of ideas and events and debates that brought a very intentional backlash, symbolized here by the books being pushed in upon the debaters.
     Greg shifts from narrator to participant, rushing upstage to hold back the crashing books--in vain.  [Still, was it a battle lost, or did he manage to hold back the crash long enough for his friends to roll out from under?  Maybe that latter story is what the play allows now that life did not allow then--a fantasy that heals.]
     In the dimness after the Crash an anguished Jean Sheldon (now a Berkeley Ph.D. and Associate Prof. of Religion at PUC), cries out, “Why did I leave!?” and admits that had she not, she would have been torn in half.

Scene 9: Out to Lunch
     The truth is like chicken pox: better to get it when you’re young.  If you wait until you’re an adult, it scars.  This lunch is, maybe, a scar that Richard Osborn bears from his graduate school days when he found that everything he’d been taught about his prophet’s unique, original inspiration was false.

Scene 10: Research
     Richard goes on with his University of Maryland doctoral program and imagines he will write a biography on James White, the Prophet’s husband.  He inquires with denominational officials at the White Estate.  Books snap shut, lids slam down.  He decides instead to write on an obscure frontiersman hunter from Colonial Virginia.  Maybe that’s why he’s now college president instead of banished academic.
     Fred Hoyt applies for a bit of money to help with historical research on the origins of the SDA church in New England.  He is turned down flat.  The committee will fund research on horned owls or oak trees, but about the origins of our church?  “We know everything we need to know.”

Scene 11: Fear
     Greg the narrator is incredulous.  “A scholar becomes impotent when he believes he knows all there is to know about a subject!”  Scholars are the question marks in a community that prefers periods or exclamation points; it takes courage to be a question mark.  But then Greg uses a pashmina scarf to transform into his wife, Candy--who gives witness to another kind of courage.
     Jonathan Butler reappears to relive the fear that beset him while researching at the White Estate.  Ellen White counterpoints the scholar’s fear with her own intense “sufferings of mind” over the call to be prophet.  Candy (played clumsily by her husband) takes heart from those sufferings, knowing that Ellen got her strength from God, not from inside herself.
     Fred Hoyt recalls the terror of discovering unacceptable stuff about Ellen White, of finding his prophet had lied to him, of knowing things no one else knew and not knowing what to do about it.  Yet the day he found that stuff in the sources, like every other day he did his scholarship, he had prayed.  “How’s that for an answer?”
     Fred and Ellen end the scene on their knees, praying: “O Lord, please don’t pick me out!  Why me?”
     Ellen sings us into the next scene with “On Christ the solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”

Scene 12: Casualties
     Books slamming shut now have the force of gunshots, and stricken academics fall to the ground.  The scene is mostly Jonathan Butler’s, though he talks as much about Ronald Numbers as about himself.  The humming in the background asks, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”
     At the end of the scene, Tim breaks in with a self-reflective challenge to the story we are telling.  He counters Mei Ann’s indignation over the way the academics were treated with his own indignation over the threat to his grandparents’ faith.  In their eyes, he says, “It’s you and your precious academics who are holding the guns!”  How resolve the impasse?  We all admit we don’t know, but we accept that “we’ve just got to keep going!”

Scene 13: Where We Are At
     Cambria, in a gloomy calm before a comic storm, reflects that she didn’t know “any of this stuff,” despite having grown up in Adventist church and school all her life, and now she knows where she’s at: a state of ignorance about her own history.
     The storm erupts with the transformation of stage and cast into “Faith Family Feud,” our way to lay out the answers we got when we asked lots of our people, “Who is Ellen White?”  It’s also a way to get in some Adventist inside jokes.
     [I think the Family Feud send-up suggests that Adventist sub-culture is permeable to a wide range of pop culture influences, and that this crossing of the boundaries causes us some anxiety.]

Scene 14: Ellen Framed
     The whole cast now gathers around Ellen-the-Icon, perched on her pedestal, and reconstituted as the Ellen 3000, an animatronic replica that spews quotes from the prophetic writings in order to scare kids straight.  The question at hand is, “How do we teach her?”
     It is a wistful scene with an undertone of anxiety because if we could have a real conversation with her she might clear up some issues that led to the Crash, as we worry that we may be headed for another one.

Scene 15: Labels
     After some spoofs of labelling, expectations, and stereotypes in general, we ask what does “SDA” mean, especially for those of us who have grown up in the sub-culture?  What if our lives don’t fit the standard expectations?  We affectionately mock the expectations, but then ask:  What is our attitude toward born Adventists who are now ex-Adventists?  Why can’t they stay around to help change what the label means?  Some declare that this is just not their fight.  Others, however . . .

Scene 16: Conversion
     Mei Ann becomes Julius, Korean-born Professor of Religion, and tells his story of how he decided to stay around with the community where he was planted.  Relinquishing the modernist Adventist demand to have a clear, comprehensive picture of the universe with a firm foundation in the infallible prophet’s writings, he finds faith in belonging among his people, rather than in the answers they have.  In this more “post-modern” faith, Ellen White becomes like the mothers most of us have, not exceptionally neurotic, pissy, or PMS-y, as Jonathan Butler portrayed her, but someone we love and whom we can’t do without, even though we have strong and likely permanent disagreements with her.  “I trust that God used her.”

Scene 17: Potluck
     On Julius’s nuanced, but upbeat note, we set out the Adventist Potluck table, singing and soon swinging to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” only to be cut short by yet another angry church person, who warns us against pulling the prophet down to our sinful level.  That sentiment is like a dish in her hands and Mei Ann takes the dish, sets it on the table, and invites the angry one to the dinner.  Several more voices appear, each with a dish to place on the table, while Ellen White, still framed, hums a reprise from Scene 1: “Shall We Gather at the River.”
     The next to last voice is Aubyn’s who underscores a point he has suggested in earlier scenes: what matters about Ellen White is the emotional link you have to her, and his children don’t have that link, they don’t know “Sister White” only “Ellen White.”  He takes the frame from Ellen and hangs it up.  Ellen’s humming stops.
     Julius comes out again, stereotyped Asian with a rice cooker in hand, expressing his respect for those who think things through and have the courage to leave Adventism.  He, on the other hand, will embrace the messiness of life.  He will stop struggling to end all struggle in a final moment of clarity.  Instead he will celebrate the tensions, and the struggle, learning to live and wrestle with it, even when it is painful.
      Ellen, relieved of her frame, says “Amen.” 
     The people at table echo, “Amen?” 
     Julius goes the head of the table and says “Let’s eat.”  People begin to lift the covers from their dishes and greet one another as the lights go down.