Davison Passion Players prepare for Lenten performances

Mar 21, 2014

OTISVILLE, MI: With Lent underway and Easter approaching, the Davison Passion Players will continue an annual tradition of performing a play that portrays the days of Jesus Christ's life before he was crucified.

And over the past 15 years, director Tim Hazel said, performers have begun to really master their penchant for drama.

"When I first came in...we were just there to tell the story. What we're doing now is reenacting the story," Hazel said. "That's where I think our dramatic effect has really grown."

Every year, the Davison Passion Players perform a play during Lent to coincide with the Christian season that commemorates the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. Hazel, a Burton resident, has been participating in the plays for 20 years: first as an actor portraying characters such as Jesus, Judas and a priest. In the early 2000s, he began to alternate with another participant to handle directing duties.

In previous years, the players have performed a piece that tells a broader story about the biblical time period and integrates the crucifixion of Jesus into the story. This year, Hazel said, they went back to a script they hadn't used since 2005: one that focuses on Jesus' final three days before death.

"We thought we'd come back to where we originally started: the last couple days, and what Jesus went through for us," Hazel said. "We thought it'd be nice to go back to our roots. We have some people in Davison that come year after year. They've seen the other scripts for a while, and we thought it'd be nice as a board to bring this back where they remember the beginnings are."

Davison Passion Players President Allie Pastue said their passion plays started in the early 1970s, as a youth group project for St. John Catholic Church in Davison. It continued into Davison Dramatic Theatre, and about ten years ago, turned into Davison Passion Players as a 501(3)(c) nonprofit.

Interested participants go to tryouts in November and December, and begin weekly rehearsals on the first non-holiday Sunday of January.

They will have several performances leading up to Easter Sunday: a show in the Forrest Township Hall on Mar. 30, a performance at Holy Cross Lutheran Church on April 6, a performance at Roland Warner Middle School on April 12, and two performances at Davison High School on Good Friday, which is April 18.

Aside from those performances, the group plans for the following year and has a summer barbecue.

"We like to perform at schools because we like to speak to all different denominations. You don't have to be Catholic to come to one of our performances, or Methodist, or whatever," Pastue said. "Everybody's welcome, and if we can just touch the heart of someone out there, we've done what we came to do. We want to enrich someone's Easter experience."

The players clean the mostly-handmade costumes after spending the past several months in storage, and get new items when necessary (for example, soldiers in the play have new helmets this year).

Pastue said this year has about 37 participants, many of them related to each other and returning from previous years. A few of them continue to do more acting in the future, she said, but many of them solely do the Davison Passion Players performances.

"It's really a good Lenten experience for our families to do this. It helps us get in the spirit of Lent and it's a sacrifice to spend this much time on it, but it's important to us," she said. "Something brings them in; it's got to be Him.--ML