Play time From Broadway to Blue Hill, theatrical readings offer evenings of old-fashioned storytelling

The other night, after exercising at a local swimming pool and reading the newspaper, Edwin Schneider became Father Brendan Flynn, a Catholic priest in charge of coaching a boys basketball team at a school in the Bronx.

While he had the boys’ attention, the priest took the opportunity to remind them about the virtues of good personal hygiene. (Here, for effect, Schneider raised one of his large hands, forefinger pointed upward.) It’s OK to have long nails, he instructed, but they must be kept clean. Then he dismissed the group: “Get dressed, come on over to the rectory, have some Kool-Aid and cookies, we’ll have a bull session.”

Having delivered his speech with conviction and priestly authority, Schneider looked up. Rapt before him was not the team of grade-school boys, of course, but 16 friends and neighbors gathered for a monthly play-reading group at the Blue Hill Public Library. This night, the script was John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Doubt,” which is now on Broadway.

Schneider, who is a member of the library’s board of trustees, helped form the play-reading group in the winter of 1997. “I wanted to have a way local people could keep up with what was on Broadway,” said the retired attorney. While the focus was initially on contemporary drama, classical works such as “Antigone” and “Lysistrata” have also been on the lineup. A reading of “Medea” two years ago drew more than 25 people, the largest crowd in the group’s history. This year’s classics offering, “Philoctetes,” however, drew only three people: Schneider, his wife, Justine, and one other regular attendee. “The three of us had a wonderful time,” said Justine. “It’s wonderful on an amateur basis to be able to participate in the arts.”

Other libraries offer all sorts of public activities: teen play-reading groups, book discussion groups, lectures and film series. Porter Memorial Library in Machias is staging an evening of haunting tales read fireside by college students and community members on Oct. 28. But an informal survey of librarians indicates that the Blue Hill group – residents coming together after regular library hours to read plays outside of a theater setting – is unusual in the state. Although in Limerick, not far from Portland, a summer play-reading series was so successful that its volunteer organizers decided, after 10 years, to put it on hiatus last year so they could have a proper summer vacation.

“We started the group as part of a revitalization of the library,” said Marian Budzyna, president of the friends group at Limerick Public Library. “We also wanted to build community. In modern times, a sense of community is hard to come by. Anything participatory is hard to come by these days.”

Community doesn’t find any better placement or fit any more easily, after all, than at a library. To be a member of the Blue Hill group, you don’t have to know the play, own the script or even have a library card. You can be young or old – the range the other night was 30s to 80s. You can wear jeans or arrive in the clothes you wore to work that day. Participants are not actors, per se. They are regular people, perhaps with actorly inclinations. Or not; some people just listen. Mostly, they love reading and being read to. Some of them read well. Others mix up words, get stuck at page turns, stumble over pronunciation, ham it up. None of that matters.

As leader, Schneider queries the group for script suggestions, but in the end he makes the choice. “Doubt” made the list after he and Justine saw it on Broadway this year. He organizes the dates (usually the third Wednesday of the month) and acts as emcee, time keeper, reader and casting director. During a brown-bag dinner hour that starts at 6 p.m., Schneider provides background information for the play – a review, a discussion of characters, his impressions of the writing. For “Doubt,” which is set in 1964, Schneider talked about the prickly interactions between a parish priest and a steely nun who accuses him of behaving inappropriately with a young black student at the school where she is principal.

Throughout the reading, which begins at 7 p.m., Schneider assigns roles. There were six Father Flynns that night. Six nuns. Others rotated in two supporting roles. Schneider does not force anyone to read, but he knows where talent lies, and sometimes, he simply overrules a person’s resistance.

He did this the other night with Ralph Pettie, a co-founder of the group. Pettie, who has an entertaining wit and a gift for oration, insisted he would not read Father Flynn’s angry sermon about the damaging effect of gossip. But Schneider persisted. Exasperated in a friendly way, Pettie took the text from Schneider with one hand. The other he rested on the back of his neck as he read: “A woman was gossiping with a friend about a man she hardly knew …”

For the part, Pettie, a former high school English teacher, slid from his usual Maine accent to a slight Irish brogue. The room became utterly silent, each person pensively frozen, like a room full of sculptures. Head in hand. Hand on chin. Chin on wrist. Eyes closed. Somewhere behind those closed eyes surely lingered a distant memory of childhood bedtime stories or of radio days and parlor-room recitations when imagination, rather than TV, provided the imagery.

Except for the light in this room, the rest of the library was dark. Yet here was a priest, the Bronx, 1964. “And that,” concluded Pettie’s Father Flynn at the end of the sermon, “is gossip!”

If applause had risen after Pettie’s monologue, no one would have been surprised.

But the only clapping came at the end from Schneider, who lauded readers and listeners alike, and invited them back next month. He has ordered copies of August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” he said. Then he turned to a woman who was headed to New York City later in the month to see the stage version of “Doubt.” “I think you’ll like it even better now,” said Schneider. To which Pettie added wryly: “After tonight, it will be a total letdown.”

For information about the Blue Hill Public Library play-reading group, call 374-5515 or visit www.bluehill.me.lib.us/. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.