Oink Oink, Buster! (Scene Three)

The Stanislavsky System of acting provides us a great method to enter this story of the Prodigal Son, to be the son. His simple question to the actor: “What’s my motivation?” Each actor plays the scene differently, calling on her/his own history to bring to the character’s similar situation.  Let's do it.

Scene One has the son who we assume is the main character packing up his belongings, preparing to blow this boring scene, this day-to-day routine, for the excitement of the city. You are the son, packing up your stuff to leave. What’s your motivation? When have you wanted to take your stuff and go?
Scene Two has the son living the wild life, the profligate scene, being the big shot, the big spender. Be the son. What’s your motivation? What is the face you are showing the crowd? How are you feeling inside? When in your life have you acted big, phony, superficial? When in your life have you spent more than you had; why?
Scene Three finds him feeding the pigs. While in the previous scene he was surrounded by people who fed off him, now he is surrounded by pigs doing the same thing, but without the perfume and the fine clothes. Be him. Smell the pigs. Feel the roughness of the feed on your chapped hands, and the shoving of the pigs on the sides of your legs, making you catch your balance. Feel the ache in your empty stomach and look at the feed in your hands. Feel the tears on your face as you realize what you left behind, and the clenching of your teeth in anger at yourself. When have you felt these things in your own life, this shame and regret?

Intermission. Take time to just sit, or take a walk, and let the character roam around in you, to process all of these scenes. What sticks with you? What moved most in you? What have you learned or remembered about yourself as runaway, as show-off, as fool?

Scene Four. You are walking along the road, practicing your line, preparing to meet your father, to ask for a second chance you know you don’t deserve. In every step you take, you feel closer to food and security, but you feel that much closer too to possible rejection and utter despair. When have you experienced this act of facing up to your having been wrong? Revisit that time and sit with it.
Closing Scene. (I discover that I am in this scene now, and in honesty will change to the first person.) I’m looking down at my dusty, cracked feet on the dusty, cracked earth of the path to my father’s house when I seem to see something move on the periphery of my vision. I look up and see the hill near his farm, and see a speck on the trail up there, moving toward me. In my rags, I fear that it is a hired hand ready to throw the bum out, keep me away. I’m too tired to turn back, too hungry and thirsty. I fall in a heap on the path and just weep....  Now I hear my father’s voice, and I look up. He is the one running down the path, and he is shouting back to toward the house, shouting for his workers to come down and help him bring me . . . home. I the cool tears on the side of his warm face as he embraces me, and feel the syncopation of his sobs, and my sobs, as we hold each other there in the road. I smell the familar smell of his garments.  I hear the running footsteps of the hired hands….

I hope you’re with me. How does it feel to be loved beyond deserving? How do you feel about your father? We’ll meet him tomorrow. Watch today for experiences of these emotions – escape, superficiality, shame, despair, rescue and reconciliation. Recall and reflect on them in your Examen.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.