Bill Kemp has a passion for Passion plays.

“The Passion story is not only the central story of my faith,
but it’s also a very long narrative,” says Kemp, a writer and
Methodist minister. In the Christian tradition, the Passion tells
the story of Christ’s last supper, his arrest and trial, and his
crucifixion. It’s a story Kemp has returned to again and again in
his own writing.

“The Passion has a lot of loose ends and side stories for me to
work with,” he explains.

Kemp’s latest work, a Passion play called “Holy Sacrifice: A
Passion Play,” will be presented as a staged reading this Friday by
Bradford Little Theatre as part of BLT’s annual
playwright-in-residence program.

The reading, which is free and open to the public, will be held
at 7:30 p.m. at the Bradford Area Public Library, which is
co-sponsoring the event. Refreshments will be served, and after the
reading, audience members will be able to talk with Kemp about the
play and about his writing in general.

“Passion plays are supposed to be dramatizations of the events
of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but I try to step out of that
narrow mold,” Kemp explains.

“Holy Sacrifice,” for instance, puts the story of the Passion
side by side with that of Abraham and Isaac, which took place some
two thousand years before Jesus’ birth. Abraham was asked by God to
demonstrate his love for God by sacrificing his favorite son,
Isaac. At the last second, God spared Isaac’s life.

“Abraham believes that he is following a legitimate revelation
from God as he goes to sacrifice his son,” Kemp says. “His wife is
not so sure.”

Kemp says that issue is “very relevant for today’s world,”
distinguishing the difference between insanity and religious
zeal.

Lining up Abraham’s story with the story of the Passion was
easy, Kemp says, because the stories have some common elements and
both involve sacrifice. “The hard part was the fact that Abraham’s
story leaves us with so many unanswerable questions,” Kemp
says.

The result is a play that raises more questions than it answers,
he added, but it’s also a play infused with optimism.

Kemp started writing as a child, composing poems and short
stories for his own amusement. It wasn’t until he got his first
computer in the mid-80s that he started “writing well.”

“Being able to edit on the fly and check spelling at last gave
me a product others could read,” he explains.

During his time working in Bradford at Hill memorial Untied
Methodist Church, from 1988-97, he began seriously working on plays
and articles. Then, in 2001, he had an epiphany of sorts. “I
decided I was ‘a writer’ because writing was the one thing I
couldn’t see myself not doing with my life,” he says.

Now, much of Bill’s professional writing focuses on helping
churches that are in transition. He’s written a workbook that
congregations can use to work through those transitions. He’s also
written other nonfiction works, including “Going Home,” a book
about death and dying that he co-authored with BLT President Diane
Arnett.

“I’m hopeful that the other writing I do is meeting a need in
the church,” he says. “Writing enables me to work through a problem
and resolve it in some way. In my non-fiction, the problems are
practical ones, such as how to prepare for death or how to run a
church committee meeting. In my playwriting, the problems involve
the questions I have in my mind about biblical characters and their
stories.”

So, when he tackled his first Passion play, he focused on “the
problem of belief,” as he describes it, telling the stories of
Pilate, the Roman judge who passed sentence on Jesus; Thomas, the
doubting apostle; and Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s most important
disciples.

Kemp’s second play, “Dinner at Mary’s,” dealt with what happened
in the kitchen while Jesus and his apostles ate the Last Supper.
Kemp has also written a dinner theatre production of the passion
play that works the story around the meal itself.

Despite the religious nature of the material, Kemp says his
Passion plays, and “Holy Sacrifices” in particular, offers
something for people who may not be interested in the theological
aspects. “There are everyday human issues being dealt with, like
‘How does one do justice’ and ‘How much free will do we have about
the big choices of our lives?'” Kemp says. “The Passion narrative
is a great story in terms of how characters interact and wrestle
with their own good intentions and failed dreams.”

Still, as familiar as the story of the Passion may be, Kemp
always finds surprises when he sees and hears his work performed,
and he expects Friday night’s reading to be no different.

“I enjoy watching the actors putting their own spin on my
words,” he says. “Theater is ‘live,’ unlike books, so the word in
drama is always a surprise. For me, it’s always been a good
surprise. What happens is always more than I wrote. There’s an
invisible – maybe divine? – third hand at work.”