Which apostle am I? It’s a secret,” Adam Stokes told me with a conspiratorial wink. We were sitting in the back room of Stokes Store in Wind Ridge and Adam was back from Wheeling with a carload of produce, not just for the store’s six-day-a-week deli selection of salads and subs, but for the supper happening the next evening at the Christian Church across the road. Not just any supper, but the Last Supper Live! Saturday night at 7 p.m. Family friendly. Plenty of room to park. Bring a friend.
When Adam’s Facebook page announcement was posted a week earlier, the “I’ll be there!” clicks began to add up to a full house. I clicked and gave Adam a call.
This performance explores the mindsets of the Apostles as they gather for a Passover meal of fruits, bitter herbs and unleavened bread. Jesus has just told them that one of them will soon betray him. As the narrator finishes the opening prayer and viewers open their eyes, that moment of shock and awe is captured freeze frame by the actors before the performance begins.
When Pastor Bruce Judy came to shepherd the Methodist Church in Rogersville in 1992, he brought with him his family and the script for the Last Supper play he’d once performed in McKeesport with his father. Three years later, as son Pastor Jake Judy can best recall, “He started it here. I got involved a few years later, when I was 20 and I’ve been doing it for 20 years now.”
The play was in lockdown with the rest of us in 2020, but managed a single performance at Rogersville Methodist Church last year after vaccines were available, a tip of the hat to the pastor who brought it here. This year, as normal began to blossom with the advent of the spring holy days, Last Supper Live! was ready to do three performances once more, bringing together “12 ordinary men” to ask the question “Lord is it I?”
The spiritual lesson to be learned, Lay Minister Adam Stokes, who’s been in the act since 2017, tells me, is based on the reflections of ordinary men. The apostles that Jesus called to follow him – fishermen, tax collectors, rabble rousers, scholars, laborers, doubters and even traitors, were the ordinary men of their time.
Today’s ordinary men – pipe liners, iron workers, firemen, school teachers, lawyers, shopkeepers, farmers, boat captains, coal miners and pastors reflect these old lessons of doubt, faith and redemption to a new generation as they take the show on the road, first to a local performance, then beyond the county line for two other performances before Easter.
Play protocol allows for anonymity so I went to the performance, not to name names but to be delighted to learn I knew almost every one involved. These apostles, it turns out, are my neighbors, coworkers and friends.
The table for the April 9 performance was set with goblets, pitchers and candle holders that were handmade by local potters Jim and Linda Winegar of Graysville in those early years when Pastor Bruce Judy was recruiting local talent to be involved with the show and also be part of the Pioneer Festival at West Greene High School that he and his congregation were an integral part of for a decade.
This year’s Last Supper cast was an amalgam of old and newer performers; afterwards when I asked individuals how they got involved it was always: “Someone asked me and I said yes.”
This year’s cast members are from Baptist, Methodist, Brethren, Presbyterian and Christian Church congregations. They finished out the 2022 Easter season performing at Center Presbyterian Church in McMurray on April 10 and Pastor Jake Judy’s United Methodist Church in West Alexander on April 16.
Stay tuned! Last Supper Live! will be back next year at three different churches and one of them will be in Greene County.