Christmas Play Is Timeless Triumph Over Youthful Chaos

Lauren Moylan tried to compose herself. The sixth-grade boys were throwing popcorn and fruit at the girls. The girls were hurling insults back at them.

The final rehearsal for the Christmas play at St. Francis de Sales Elementary School in Sherman Oaks was descending into chaos.

“Is anyone listening to me?” shouted Moylan, the school’s drama teacher. “If you guys don’t listen, you’re going to be very embarrassed.”

The big event was less than a day away--when the school’s 34 drama students, in grades three through eight, would present their play in front of family and friends in the school auditorium.

Three weeks before, there was no Christmas play. But Moylan’s drama students wanted to put on some kind of Christmas show, and not just a nativity scene with Mary, Joseph, shepherds and wise men.

Instead, they wanted to present “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” a play by Barbara Robinson that Moylan assigned for practice in dramatic reading. It’s a play within a play, a comedy with a moral, a tale revolving around a raucous church pageant in which the six Herdman siblings (“the worst kids in the whole history of the world”) bully the other children and take all the leading roles.

Everyone hates the Herdmans--foul-mouthed, messy children who know nothing about Jesus. But an epiphany strikes the Herdmans, particularly tough Imogene, in the role of Mary, who softens as she silently exults in the birth of Jesus and the joy of Christmas.

The audience, too, realizes that the Herdmans--outcasts like Mary and Joseph--deserve kindness and respect.

Doing the play, the students thought, would be a kind of Christmas gift to their school.

Moylan agreed, but said the students would have to give her their full cooperation. Her young thespians would have just 2 1/2 weeks to memorize lines, learn how to act their parts and practice, practice, practice.

Now, on the Friday afternoon that began their Christmas break--and the day before the show--the students seemed to have forgotten their promise.

Hyped with sugar from candy canes and green-frosted cupcakes, boys and girls were chatting and laughing about the parties and presents ahead. Some ignored Moylan to giggle at Principal Sister Ellen Marie McGovern, who was walking around in red elf shoes with jingling bells.

They failed to pay attention even when Moylan threatened to call mothers. Even when she threatened purgatory.

At one point, Moylan briefly left the auditorium. Her 8-year-old daughter Blair grabbed the stage microphone and ordered her peers to “be quiet, NOW!”

Perhaps it helped that Blair plays Gladys Herdman, a girl so mean that she bites.

“I must be crazy,” Moylan recalled saying to herself as she drove home that night, replaying the practice in her mind. The students forgot lines. Left props at home. Laughed when they were supposed to be serious. And spoke so softly that no one off the stage could hear.

They refused to focus. Boys knocked soda cans off the stage. Girls compared lip gloss flavors. Moylan had to confiscate a Gameboy and a puppet.

The practice lasted 2 1/2 hours. The play was supposed to last only 50 minutes. How would they ever pull it together?

But the next morning, Moylan felt the excitement of opening day, hopeful but jittery as she drove to school. Daughters Blair and Beth, 11, practiced lines and tamed butterflies in their stomachs.

An hour before the afternoon show, the students began gathering in a room decorated with construction-paper wreaths. Moylan applied blush to the faces of the students, even the boys, as they nervously changed into homemade costumes.

Tea towels served as shepherd’s veils, tinsel halos and cardboard wings graced the angels--and a sleeveless white shirt adorned the cigar-smoking Imogene Herdman.

Alex Cassutt, a brown-haired 11-year-old with freckles and gray nail polish, worried that she would forget the baby Jesus doll. And even if she remembered, what if she failed to carelessly dangle the baby as her character, Imogene, was supposed to?

Blake Wells, 11, hoped that he would sound whiny enough in his role as the whiny but wise husband of the pageant’s director.

And Lindsay Cole, 12, feared that she would trip and fall before a mocking crowd.

“What you’re feeling right now is called adrenaline,” Moylan said during the pep talk. “You actually use adrenaline to give your best performance.”

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Eleven-year-old Andy Meagher wondered how he could give his best performance if he couldn’t find his priest robe.

“Costumes aren’t our biggest thing,” Moylan reassured. “We’re dealing with the bare minimum here. That’s the beauty of doing a play that was thrown together.”

But despite the rush, Moylan paused to ask her students if they understood the meaning of the play.

“It teaches us that really mean, nasty kids can become nice,” offered Sloane Martin, 10.

Moylan smiled. “I want to tell you how proud I am of each and every one of you,” she said. “You have worked so hard, and I am so proud.”

Drama club members then said a Hail Mary and headed for the school auditorium, where the play began before 120 proud parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, many with videotape recorders and cameras.

Audience members laughed, clapped and smiled at the appropriate times. Some even cried at the ending.

Alex remembered the baby Jesus doll and dangled it perfectly. Blake sounded whiny. And Lindsay never tripped or fell.

Hardly anyone forgot their lines.

Indeed, a beautiful performance. Nearly flawless.

When it was over, beaming parents hugged and kissed their children.

Boys and girls marveled at their success. One boy danced in a circle. Others basked silently in self-pride.

All held their heads high.

Everyone congratulated Moylan on accomplishing the impossible. Some even joked that it was a miracle.

“It was a great gift to see,” said Fred Jaegle, whose daughter Emma played an angel.

A gift not only for the parents, but for the students, too.

Nine-year-old Gabriella Del Hoyo told her friends that being in the play was more important to her than the light-up watch she hoped to get for Christmas.

“It would be good if I still got the watch,” she said, “but I think if I only got to pick one thing for Christmas, it would be the play.”