A Hollywood left-winger inspires a Kansas college to perform his "educational" play.
Bethel College's spring drama was "Dead Man Walking" - a 1995 film directed by Tim Robbins, which he later adapted to a stage play, according to a school press release. The work details Sister Helen Prejean's "walk" with a Louisiana death row inmate.
The school's website reports that "Robbins and Prejean started the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project in an attempt to get voting-age students to engage in a dialogue about the issue of capital punishment." So, last week students participated in the "national theater program" after meeting the requirements issued by Robbins and Prejean - schools must incorporate a discussion of the text or of the death penalty into various disciplines.
According to the press release, Robbins' work was incorporated into an English class where the book was used as text as well as in a Bible and religion class on "Nonviolence Theory and Practice." The school also held a "conversation about the death penalty" in its auditorium.
"When I read the information, I got excited about Bethel entering the nationwide dialogue on the death penalty," said John McCabe-Juhnke, a professor of communications arts at Bethel - the oldest Mennonite college in North America. "This is the kind of theater we should be doing here."
Oh, I bet it is...
Let's review.
A Mennonite college puts on a play about the death penalty by a radical left-winger from Hollywood - who, by the way, demands further dialogue about the issue "in an attempt to get voting-age students" engaged about capital punishment.
Ummm...
Mennonite college (conscientious objectors).
Tim Robbins (ultra-liberal, anti-death penalty advocate).
Yep, I'm sure the students at Bethel College got a well-rounded education on the death penalty and addressed it with an open mind, don't you think so?
