In this final draft of The Lame Shall Enter first most of the problem areas in the script have been ironed out. The main alteration between this draft and others is that I tried to make it clear that this was being set in the mid 60’s and not in present time. I did this by making sure certain words were omitted that would not have been used in America in 1965, example, “movie theatre” was changed to going to “the movies”, and the Policeman says “sorry for the mess up” instead of “sorry for the cock up”. These simple changes helped to date the play in the past, which after much thought, worked better for the over all theme and story line, as well as for the characters. Rufus’s language and colloquialisms in the source text were written so beautifully (“minding my own bidness”) that it seemed ruthless to modernize him. Likewise the images of going to the moon and space travel were much stronger from this decade apposed to 2012. The wonderful thing about The Lame Shall Enter First is that there is no need to modernize or make the story “relevant” to the audience; these characters transpose time, and the struggle between faith versus reason is one that is universal to all audiences.
Final touches
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