Local church will stage Annie Jr.

• By GREG LANGLEY
• News Features assistant editor
• Published: Dec 14, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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On a typical Sunday morning on July 27, members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church gathered for worship at their church on Kingston Pike, a busy thoroughfare in Knoxville, Tenn.

At 10:18 a.m., Jim D. Adkission, 58, a local man who was not a member of the church, entered the building with a shotgun and began shooting. In the ensuing melee, two people were killed and seven injured before congregants subdued and disarmed Adkission. Greg McKendry, 60, died shortly after the shooting. He was a member of the board and an usher at the church. Linda Kraeger, 61, passed away at the University of Tennessee Medical Center that evening. McKendry and Kraeger didn’t expect to meet gunfire that day. Like the rest of the church group, they were enjoying a presentation when the gunfire erupted.

It was a musical being put on by the congregation’s children.

“When we heard about what happened in Knoxville, the shooting in the middle of a children’s play in one of our churches — we are a very small denomination — and it was just shocking and horrifying. We wanted to do something. We needed to do something,” said Jessica Z. Gray, director of religious education at the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge on Goodwood Boulevard.

“So we did a vigil that Sunday night, the week after it happened. There were a lot of churches across the country doing that. It was a service. We lit candles, we talked about our feelings, the stuff that you do at vigils after somebody is shot. We didn’t personally know these people, except we actually do have one person who is attending our church who used to attend that church. It’s that small of a world,” Gray said.

“In processing the next week, actually the week before we even got to the vigil, the minister and I were just really overwhelmed by the fact that it was during a children’s play, and that that play was stopped. That seemed wrong to us. We both come from theater.”

The play that was never finished in Knoxville was Annie Jr.

“We both come from theater backgrounds, and we talked about, ‘well, would it be OK even, would it be appropriate for us to do the show as our way of saying that the sun will come out tomorrow, our way of saying that there is optimism in the world?’” Gray said.

“It won’t actually make any impact for the people in Knoxville who were affected by this, not directly, though I did write an e-mail to the person who is in my equivalent of my job there and he was very touched by the fact that we’re doing it. We’re not doing it as much for them, specifically, as we are for the world, the community, saying ‘the show will go on. Violence will not win.’ So that was our decision.

“We decided to do it at Christmas because we usually do some sort of pageant at this time of year anyway. We don’t usually put this much rehearsal into it. It’s usually a much smaller deal than this pageant. It just made sense timing-wise. Then when we got the script, we were surprised that it’s actually a Christmas play. We didn’t know that when we planned to do it for Christmas. It kind of worked out really well,” Gray said.

The play is by and for children, Gray said. “No one in the cast can be older than 18. We have five teenagers and the rest are younger.
“We have children in the cast as young as 5,” she said.

There are 11 scenes in the one-act production. It runs just shy of an hour and features at least 17 songs, Gray said. “There are two big numbers with 27 kids on stage.” The music is recorded and piped in through the church’s PA system, she said.

Annie Jr. was inspired by the popular Broadway musical, Annie, which was, in turn, inspired by the newspaper comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. Annie Jr. is a shorter variation, and differs from the Broadway version in that the dog, Sandy, is in only a couple of scenes. “Sandy is played by a kid rather than a dog,” Gray added. There is no adult content in the play, she emphasized.
“We have two Annies,” Gray said, one for each performance. The rest of the cast stays the same. Daddy Warbucks is played by a 17-year-old African-American actor, she said.