St. Paul's players

St. Paul's Players is a blended group of parishioners and community members who have a love for community theatre. A new ministry to St. Paul's in 2023, it is meant to introduce "church" as both a reverent and fun place to spend one's time. 

Parishioner Paul Moore is the founding Artistic Director of St. Paul's Players and serves as production designer and most effective motivator. He founded Back Alley Theatre in Grand Cane, LA, as well as theatre troupes in Shreveport and Jefferson, TX. Paul can cast a show with a few phone calls and build a set effortlessly (at least that's what it looks like to the rest of us!)

The Trip to Bountiful is a quiet, deeply moving drama about home, aging, family obligation, memory, faith, regret, and acceptance. First produced in 1953, it centers on Carrie Watts, an elderly widow whose consuming desire is to return once more to Bountiful, the small Texas community where she spent the happiest years of her life. The title is deliberately richer than simply the name of Carrie's destination. Carrie's “trip” becomes an inward journey from longing toward acceptance. Bountiful represents home, but also youth, belonging, family, security, fertility, memory, and the life we imagine we might recover if only we could return to where we began. Foote ultimately suggests that the past cannot be reclaimed—but neither is it meaningless. Carrie cannot remain in Bountiful, yet what Bountiful gave her can remain within her.

The religious element is especially significant. Carrie's repeated hymns, her knowledge of Scripture, and the play's emphasis on suffering, compassion, endurance, and acceptance give the story a distinctly Christian dimension without turning it into a sermon. Her faith does not remove suffering; it helps her find meaning and dignity within suffering.

For St. Paul's Players, that is one of the strongest arguments for The Trip to Bountiful: it is not an explicitly religious play, yet its treatment of faith, mortality, forgiveness, family responsibility, aging, home, loss, and grace makes it especially compatible with a theatre ministry interested in examining life and belief rather than merely staging overtly biblical material.

Ticket sales benefit the mission work at the Black Horse Ranch on the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte South Dakota.