My group Ekphrasis: Fellowship of Christians in the Arts is hosting a dramatic reading of Charles Williams’s unpublished play The Chapel of the Thorn.
When: Monday, March 17th (St. Patty’s Day), 6:00-10:00ish
Where: Lehigh Valley Presbyterian Church, 31 South 13th Street, Allentown, PA 18102
What: A reading of a verse drama, The Chapel of the Thorn, by Charles Williams. I am editing this play for publication and need to hear it read aloud so that I can write about its performability. Members of my group have been assigned to read characters.
Bring food and friends. Please let me know if you are planning to attend (and have not already told me), and I will cast you in a role and send you the script by the end of this week.
Here is a blog post about the play, and here is the first 10% of the text.
The Oddest Inkling 
In a 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia article on St. Patrick which C.W. could easily have known, Patrick Francis Cardinal Moran relates that it “was only shortly before his death that Celestine gave this mission to Ireland’s apostle and on that occasion bestowed on him many relics”, and that, on one occasion, St. Patrick, finding that “a vast concourse was engaged in offering worship to the chief idol Crom-Cruach […] with a circle of twelve minor idols around it”, “proceeded thither, and with his crosier smote the chief idol that crumbled to dust; the others fell to the ground.” C.W.’s St. Cyprian, referred to in The Chapel of the Thorn, seems a similar missionary. And, interestingly, St. Patrick’s Day comes exactly a week after that of St. Cyprian of Corinth, on 10 March – but this martyr does not seem to be C.W.’s St. Cyprian.
I wish I could be there, taking a part – alas, phoning in a contribution, long-distance, does not seem commodious.
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