SSS: Set Pieces, or Why Staging Matters

I was in a play back in high school where we didn’t really have a set. Sure, we put out a table and a couple fake bushes when the script called for it, but there was nothing onstage to give the audience an idea of where the play was taking place.

Now there were a couple reasons for this. We were putting on the show in a black box set, meaning that we could easily build and take apart our stage area and take the play around to different places. So part of the lack of stage design was a practicality thing: our set had to be something that we could easily take with us on the go. Instead of building a set, the audience got to use their imagination to fill in the details! Genius, right?

Maybe… But the fact is that we never ended up actually taking the show anywhere. And honestly, our lack of stage design was more because our set guy never designed anything more elaborate. So we were left with a table and a couple fake bushes.

That experience taught me something though. Staging actually matters. Not having a set, I think, hindered our ability to perform the play as effectively as we could have. This play involved a world where nothing was the right colour. I think the grass was supposed to be purple. So not having a way to showcase that lessened the impact the story could have had.

Honestly, I think the same goes for storytelling generally. The more realistic the set in a movie, the more you buy the action taking place. If your Victorian drama looks a little too much like twenty-first century London, people aren’t going to buy your story. In the same way, if all you do when telling a Bible story is stand on an empty stage, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to add an extra little pizazz.

Of course, we also have to be realistic. In my experience, church budgets usually have you doing some pretty fancy maneuvering to stay in the black, and neither your Kidmin pastor nor your potential volunteer storyteller usually have the time to paint a mural the size of the stage each week. Plus, your set pieces have to be things that can be easily set up and don’t interfere too much with the jobs anyone else might have to do on stage (like your song and actions people!). What we’re looking for, then, is a cheap but effective way to add some sort of prop or staging element that gives the kids listening something concrete to focus on. 

Let me give you an example. I was asked to tell the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac a few months back, one of my all-time favourite Bible stories. Now I’ve come up with some interesting ways to tell this one in the past (including a parody of “I Will Survive” that I’m still quite proud of), but I was using a supplied script this time.

So I’m looking at this script and thinking to myself, Is there any object in the story that I can bring in as a prop? Or, if not that exact object, then something similar. I was teaching on the feeding of the 5000 a few weeks back and instead of bringing in 5 loaves and 2 fish, I brought in 5 buns and 2 packages of goldfish. The kids were immediately interested (and begging for goldfish), but the point is that I had given them something to visualize.  

But back to Abraham and Isaac. Most of the props in this story aren’t things that you necessarily want to or can easily bring into a kids’ Bible lesson. Strapping a kid to a table is frowned upon, bringing in a giant knife to show a group of kids tends to get you in trouble, and I don’t know anyone who has a ram they’d be willing to lend me for the story’s climax. So honestly, up until the morning of, I figured I’d just have to be really engaging this time.

Some would say this is when you whip up a PowerPoint using child-friendly images of the story. I’m not against this – I get that it can enhance your story by giving the kids visual representations of what a scene could have looked like. But PowerPoint for kids can quickly become distracting. There’s a danger that they’ll be paying so much attention to the picture that they stop listening to the story. Having a visual on stage with you, however, keeps their attention on both the prop and your story simultaneously.

I didn’t go the PowerPoint route here, but I did start thinking beyond the obvious objects in the story. And I eventually realized that there’s one detail here that’s not immediately obvious but still pretty important and that’s fairly easy to make a copy of… So off to the supply room I went to grab a couple of boxes and blankets. I put a small table on stage, put the boxes on top, somehow made one of the boxes into a point, and then covered the whole thing in brown blankets. And presto, there’s a mountain on stage!

Whenever possible, I try to make my props and staging be something that’s already on stage when the kids come in. That way, they’re already thinking about what the prop could possibly be about. They’ll get distracted with songs and stuff pretty quickly (and rightly so), but before you’ve even started your morning program, you’ve already got them wondering.

I loved watching the kids’ faces when they walked in that Abraham and Isaac morning. Some looked at the stage confused, some looked at me trying to guess what was going on, but most of them just reacted with something like, “WOAH!” or “WHAT’S THAT?” or “THAT’S AWESOME!” Right off the bat, that’s a win for me!

Anyways, song time is over and offering’s been done – now it’s story time. I acknowledge the mountain but don’t make a big deal of it. I wander around the stage a little bit, steering clear of the mountain while I talk about when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son or when Abraham was gathering up the supplies for the offering. 

But then I get to Genesis 22:9, where the Bible says that Abraham and Isaac arrived at the top of the mountain where the sacrifice was to be made. And then I did something so game changing, so revolutionary, so mind blowing that it got gasps from the crowd…

I stepped up on a chair hidden behind this pile of boxes and blankets.

Now this might sound unimpressive. And honestly, I want it to sound that way. But you have to understand something. I might have done nothing more than step up on a chair, but to the kids, I climbed the mountain! It didn’t matter that there was no Isaac with me or that I didn’t have a giant knife or a ram; what mattered was that I had moved with my story. I used my props and my environment to imitate what was going on in the story. In a small way, I made the story come alive.

I didn’t have to spend a cent on these props. They were all things that the church already had. But because I took five minutes to build a fake mountain on stage and find a way to climb it, the kids were suddenly far more interested than if I had just talked at them about what Abraham and Isaac did.

I realize there’s a fine line here. There can be a danger that props or set pieces can end up distracting from the story. But in my experience, that usually happens when you’re going for flashy over functional. When you do something simple but relevant to your story, it actually makes the story more memorable. Why? Because when the kids think back about the prop and the way it was used, then they’ll also remember the story and what they learned about God from it.

That’s why I think staging matters. I’m not talking about set pieces that make your Sunday School stories hyper-realistic; I’m talking about using your stage to enhance the storytelling experience. I’m talking about moving around your stage and using your props in ways that reflect the action in the story. And if you pay attention to these little details, your presentation will actually make the story and its lesson stand out more in your kids’ minds.  

And if you get a couple of “woah’s” in the moment, enjoy them. It means you’ve got their attention. Just make sure you point them back to God once you have it. Glorify God with staging that enhances your storytelling. After all, that’s why we do what we do.

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Just a small aside: I get the irony that this is one of my few blog posts without pictures. But I sadly didn't think to take pictures of the stage set up at the time and didn't want to pass someone else's stage set up as my own. So like in that play I talked about, use your imagination... :P Otherwise, see you again on Thursday when we hear a little more about Easter!

~Brentagious