Illinois Oberammergau

In competition with Union City, N. J., Bloomington, Ill., Hollywood, Calif, and a half-dozen other U. S. towns and cities which hold some sort of Passion Play, Zion, Ill. last week set itself up for the third year as the "American Oberammergau." In Zion's rambling Shiloh Tabernacle on Palm Sunday opened the Zion Passion Play, bigger and longer than ever before. It will be performed every Sunday through June and this year for the first time the show will cost 25-c- to $1.50 to see.

Forty-five miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, Zion, Ill. was founded in 1901 as a theocratic community, along with the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, by famed, robust Dr. John Alexander Dowie. Two years ago Zion's General Overseer Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who believes the world is flat and lives on

Brazil nuts and buttermilk, inquired what the Church's annual Easter pageant was to be. Usually it was a work called Lord of Life but, as the current Zion souvenir program relates, "When God's clock struck the hour for the presentation of Zion Passion Play, He had ready a young man." That young man was Elder Jabez Taylor, now 29, one of the Community's twelve ordained ministers. Having discovered he hated to preach, "Jay" Taylor had taken to directing church plays, and for Overseer Voliva he worked up a Passion Play which cost $7,000, brought in $4,000 in collections during its 17 performances. Last year the stage was remodeled, the cast enlarged to 150 and a play costing $15,000 was performed 27 times. Overseer Voliva missed only one performance, noted that collections totaled only $7,500. Last week Mr. Voliva, who had been in Florida worrying about sit-down strikes in

Zion's usually profitable building industry, arrived in time for the opening Passion Play, now performed by 300 pious members of the Community. He was sure that this year the show would gross $15,000. Zion Passion Players pray to God before every rehearsal, every performance. Their prayers have not always prevented mishaps. Chief worry is whether the wires will hold fast in the smash climax of the Play's 27 scenes, the Ascension of Christ, whose role is played by a 24-year-old office-supplies salesman named Le Roy John Peacy. Once a wire broke and 30 angels and 250 onlookers nervously watched Mr. Peacy precariously gyrate heavenward in damaged harness. Passion Play performances have presented Director Taylor with a number of other headaches, such as the time Pilate (Secretary Ralph R. Pihl of Zion Industries, Inc.) fell asleep onstage; the occasion on which someone forgot to roll the rock from Christ's tomb in the Resurrection scene; the equally painful moment when the seven-foot cloth used to lower Christ from the Cross was missing when it was time for the Descent. Last week's premiere, however, went off well enough, struck an audience of 1,600 as no less professional than the average U. S. show of its kind.

Connoisseurs of such Catholic Passion Plays as the Union City production would have noticed several striking differences at Zion. To begin with, Zion's Passion Play is not strictly a Passion Play, i. e., it does not concern itself solely with the agony and death of Christ, but is a sort of theatrical biography of The Savior, beginning with the Sermon on the Mount and concluding, unconventionally, with the spectacular, if mechanically precarious Ascension. Mary, Mother of Jesus, instead of being young and comely, is white-haired, stout and comely as played by Blanche Kessler, telephone operator in the Zion Administration Building. However, Zionites like their show immensely, cluck appreciatively in the Sermon on the Mount scene when the Christus holds on his lap a babe whom everyone recognizes as his one-year-old son John Le Roy Peacy.

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