Acting on Faith in Arkansas

The little girl cried out in the dark: “Don’t let Jesus die!”

Down below, on a vast outdoor stage, Roman soldiers in bright gold armor flogged Jesus Christ, laughing at the sport. A dusty crowd cheered with each crack of the whip until finally Pontius Pilate shouted “Enough!” But the mob, jostling close, would not quiet. “Crucify him!” they shouted. “Crucify the false prophet!” With a shrug, Pilate gave the order.

As Christ, bent and bloodied, lifted his cross on his back, 6-year-old Sarah Davis huddled close to her mom.

“Where are they taking him?” she asked. Around her, men and women wiped away tears, or let them fall, as “The Great Passion Play” drew to an end.

Every summer for the last 38 years, tens of thousands of families have made their way to this remote patch of the Ozark Mountains to witness Christ’s death and resurrection.

Some drive for days to renew their faith, or to redirect their lives, through the ministry of drama.

The actors are all amateurs: By day, they deliver mail, repair toilets, teach history, exterminate bugs, coach football, fly planes for Wal-Mart.

At sunset, they pull on rough robes or plastic armor, then stride into the 4,100-seat amphitheater as priests and Pharisees, disciples, guards and lepers.

They lip-sync their lines to dialogue recorded years ago for broadcast over a screechy sound system.

Mary sounds robotic. Judas speaks with a Texas drawl. The script is stilted; the music, melodramatic.

Still, the play has become a touchstone of Christian culture, running five nights a week, from late April through October, since 1968. More than 7.5 million people have reportedly seen it.

Ticket sales fluctuate, but in many years, this is the nation’s best-attended outdoor drama, topping even famed Shakespeare festivals.

Families hold reunions here; they route vacations through northwest Arkansas.

Donna Bailey, 54, a nurse from Tulsa, Okla., has come five or six times, though the play never varies. “It keeps me humble,” she said.

Nancy and Tyron Wheeler come back every year on their anniversary. “We use it to recenter our marriage and our lives,” said Tyron, 44, a finance manager at a car dealership in Enid, Okla.

“Living in the world we live in, it’s easy to get away from your values,” he said. “This reminds us that our lives are supposed to be a reflection [of Christ’s]. It gives me peace.”

“The Great Passion Play” was created by the late Gerald L.K. Smith, a mesmerizing and virulently anti-Semitic orator who traveled the nation in the 1930s and ‘40s, trying to rally support for “saving” white Christian America by deporting blacks and Jews.

By the early 1960s, Smith had alienated most of his followers. He retreated to Eureka Springs -- a spa town fallen on hard times -- and dedicated his life to launching the Passion play and building a 67-foot-tall statue of Jesus, made of white mortar layered over a steel frame.

The enormous Christ of the Ozarks, blank-faced and vacant-eyed, still looms over Eureka Springs.

The play draws more than 100,000 tourists most years to this town of 2,300 -- which has reinvented itself over the last 15 years as a funky haven for gay couples, aging hippies, Hell’s Angels and anyone else who feels out of place in the Bible Belt.

Christian tourists might not venture into Road Dawgs Leather, but they do walk the dizzyingly steep and narrow downtown streets to admire the Victorian architecture.

Bed-and-breakfast spas offer massages and facials; antique and craft stores beckon with eclectic treasures.

The resort atmosphere attracts the raunchy along with the righteous, but the mix somehow seems to work.

“This is a very loving, forgiving town,” said Mojo Reardon, 58, who sells lingerie at a hip boutique. “As long as you’re not hurting anyone, people leave you alone. If you’re a little esoteric, so much the better.”

Those uncomfortable with the town’s freewheeling atmosphere can keep busy on the Passion play’s 600-acre grounds. A $49 pass buys a theater ticket, a buffet supper and access to several attractions run by the same nonprofit foundation that manages the play.

The new Museum of Earth History uses murals and dinosaur sculptures to present the Book of Genesis as science. (“If you hurry, we can get you in on the first four days of creation,” a tour guide says, urging a dawdler along.)

The Bible Museum tells of the martyrs who risked all to translate the Scriptures into English.

Most popular is the New Holy Land Tour: a 2 1/2 -hour tram ride through a biblical theme park.

The narrated tour winds past a replica olive press, pagan altar and Moses’ tabernacle in the wilderness, built exactly as described in the Book of Exodus. At several stops along the way, tourists step out to meet actors portraying Jesus’ disciples, or to sing “Amazing Grace” in a model of the Bethlehem stable where Jesus was born.

In the summer, kids are everywhere, wearing T-shirts that say “Jesus Is Lord” and “St. Peter’s Youth Ministry” (and also “Pink Floyd” and “Abercrombie Football”). In the fall, senior citizens fill the trams.

Despite heavy marketing to churches and military bases, the Passion play rarely sells out these days; the audience tops out at 700 to 900 weeknights, 1,300 on Fridays.

But the ushers pack everyone into the center section, so the amphitheater feels full of anticipation, even awe, as the two-hour show -- played without intermission -- begins.

The performance here is not the oldest or most elaborate retelling of Jesus’ end.

The famed Black Hills Passion play is in its 66th season with a cast of hundreds in Spearfish, S.D.

The New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., puts on an Easter drama worthy of Cirque du Soleil -- complete with acrobats, fog machines and instant video replay of the Resurrection.

And Mel Gibson’s film last year, “The Passion of the Christ,” told the story Hollywood-style.

Here in the lush mountaintop amphitheater, “The Great Passion Play” was denounced in its early years as crudely antiSemitic.

The script was rewritten in 1982, after Smith’s death.

The current version still portrays the Jewish high priests as greedy, power-hungry connivers who force a reluctant Pontius Pilate to order the Crucifixion. But publicity director Mardell Bland says she has heard no complaints about anti-Semitism for years.

These days, she said, audience members seem to comment most often on the production’s authentic feel.

The set is a nearly full-scale replica of an old Jerusalem street, so big that it’s impossible to wire it to amplify live dialogue. The packed-dirt stage, as long as two football fields, runs from an imposing temple to an open-air market to a dissolute harem all in purple. When the story moves to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus and his disciples climb the wooded hill behind the stage to pray among the trees, under the stars.

As the play starts, a woman with a toddler on her hip stoops to draw water from a well.

Behind the stage, in four bare dressing rooms, other actors rush to adjust their head scarves and tie their rope belts. They take off their watches, pocket their eyeglasses, tug battered brown sandals from an overflowing bin.

As they step onto the stage moments later, a camel ambles past. A donkey brays.

The amphitheater feels as if it’s been transported 2,000 years into history.

“It’s just awesome. That’s the only word for it. It makes you feel God is right there in your presence,” said Doris Henady, who rented a tour bus to bring her grandchildren and several dozen old friends here from Joplin, Mo.

This time of year, the Passion play loses some of its cast to college or Friday night football.

But throughout the summer, the director can count on about 180 actors on any given night. They earn $15 to $22 a show, depending on their role for the evening. (Most have memorized the soundtrack and can lip-sync several parts convincingly.)

Many return year after year, sometimes bringing their newborns or their elderly parents onstage with them as extras.

“It’s like a family,” said Laine Dignan, 24, a history teacher who has been performing here since she was in high school.

Because the soundtrack is so loud, the extras milling onstage can gossip unheard as they shuffle from scene to scene.

On a recent night, they traded tales of colonoscopies gone wrong and swapped tips for high-fiber diets.

“How many layers you wearing there?” one woman teased a well-padded friend as he joined the bloodthirsty mob calling for Jesus’ execution.

But many of the actors don’t engage in such banter. Toes gritty with sand, they get so swept up in their roles, they actually dicker about prices as they browse the fake market, though no one in the audience can possibly hear them.

Some become so emotional, they can’t bring themselves to jeer at Jesus as the script requires. If they do muster a halfhearted shout of betrayal, they fall to their knees after, begging forgiveness.

“When they put Jesus’ head in your lap and you’re wiping blood from his face, you have to feel something,” said Joanna Miller, 66, a kindergarten teacher from Springdale, Ark. She often plays Mary.

“I’m not a crying person. But once in a while, it will just hit me and I’m overwhelmed by emotion,” Miller said.

Said actor Jeff Goostree, 37: “Night after night, I lose it.”

A corporate pilot for Wal-Mart, he drives an hour each way from his home in Rogers, Ark., to perform.

“When the lights come on, you don’t see the crowd,” he said. “You forget where you are. You forget everything.”

The play ends with a dramatic Ascension: Radiant under a white spotlight, Jesus rises to the treetops with the promise “I am with you always.”

The wires that hoist the actor 65 feet are clearly visible. That hardly seems to matter. Every night, the crowd erupts in cathartic applause.

“When he ascends to heaven, it gives you the same feeling you get when the American flag comes down the street,” said Elois Russell, 67, who has driven here three times from Minco, Okla., to experience that shivery blend of pride and hope.

“You see how personal it is: Every strike he took was for me,” said Tammy Hammer, 42, a general contractor from Bonita Springs, Fla.

The story has such power that some come to see the play as a talisman.

Anne Grand took her 18-year-old son to the amphitheater the day he graduated from Army boot camp. As crickets set the still air vibrating, they watched with a hushed and reverential crowd.

“My biggest fear is that my baby will go to war,” said Grand, 43, a nurse from Baton Rogue, La. “If anything should ever happen to him, I need to know I did everything I could to prepare him.”

She prayed that her son the soldier would find strength in Christ’s suffering and salvation.