2 out of 4 stars
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Often the best way to reach out to a new audience is through something they already enjoy. Learning about history is far more fun when it's done via a movie or historical fiction novel, and I still remember playing Number Munchers - a video game! - to get better at math in school. This is true of other subjects as well, like religion, which explains why Mark Wright devised a play for youth that uses basketball as a metaphor for being a devoted Christian full of the Holy Spirit!
The Game of Life by Mark Wright is a 4-6 scene play with various roles for youth and adults. The basketball game is between Jesus and Death, with God the Father and the Devil as their coaches respectively. The game is split into quarters like NBA games, although there isn't a whole lot of actual basketball playing involved. Instead, each scene shows a different important lesson from the Bible and how we can be good Christians today. For example, the second quarter is set up with an operating table where God the Father and Jesus are inspecting different basketballs that represent humans being more and less full of the Holy Spirit, either celebrating their fullness and ability to bounce or helping to pump them back up.
The acts themselves are rather loosely defined. This is both good and bad: I'd personally prefer a very detailed script that people can alter a bit where they see fit, but some may enjoy how much freedom they have to fill out the action. Instead, many scenes have only a handful of things going on that seem like they'd be only a few minutes long. This would be perfectly fine as no one says a play would have to be the same length as an NBA game - high school basketball games have periods that are only 8 minutes long rather than 12, for example - but early in the book Mark writes that at least the first scene should be 12-15 minutes, and it's assumed the others would be as well.
My favorite part, personally, came after the play was over. Here, Mark goes into a bit of the history of basketball, discussing how it came to be and how it was actually created by a religious man in the first place. I'd heard of Dr. James Naismith before, but didn't know just how interesting his invention of basketball and his life were! By the end of the book I was wanting Mark to write a whole book about him.
The book requires at least 7-8 actors, and has optional additional roles in the operating scene and as the audience. Because this metaphor is all about basketball, whoever plays the lead role of Jesus will have to be at least somewhat good at the game; scenes require them to hit free throws and layups, and while the first scene isn't very detailed I'm assuming the players will want to run up and down the court actually playing basketball for most of it.
I love the idea of The Game of Life, but it really needed to be more specific. A good script details every spoken word and action, whereas this book merely describes an entire scene in a few pages. There are some great details, such as specific cheers the cheerleaders can use, and a few of the main scenes are perfectly detailed, like the operating scene. But as a whole, this 50-ish page book should've been at least twice as long if not 150-200 pages including all the additional information already included. It also needs some editing; I managed to find 13 errors in total such as quotation marks being attached to the wrong words, incorrect capitalizations, and even a use of "wou1d" instead of "would". My rating of the book is 2 out of 4 stars, although I can still recommend it to those looking for a unique VBS/youth show idea. Just keep in mind you'll have to fill in plenty of gaps with the action here.
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The Game of Life
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