Celebrating Hallowtide with Back from the Dead

Just wanted to post about a production I've been involved with for the past five years which is perennially enriching.

Sorry for my absence: traveling and happy meetings have put off this post till after Halloween. But that’s ok: I’m hoping enough of you are still reveling in autumn to enjoy it!

In 2002, a young priest named Fr. Brian Nolan of the diocese of Baltimore had an inspiration for how to catechize the youth he was serving about the truth of what Catholics call the Four Last Things: judgment, hell, purgatory, and heaven. He excitedly asked a group of parishioners what they thought of the idea, and they not only agreed: they helped him mount the production. The result was what he calls an “evangelization drama” entitled Back from the Dead. This dramatic production debuted that Halloween at the beautiful hillside cemetery of Mount St. Mary’s, and has become a staple event of the adjoining Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton. During the weekends before Halloween, participants walk through the historic cemetery after nightfall, led by a mysterious gravedigger, where they encounter saints, martyrs, and others who speak about these post-death realities. The drama has continued to be offered nearly every year since that time, and just closed their 2024 production. Its popularity can be gauged by the Seton Shrine website tells people to buy tickets ahead of time because they usually sell out.

I admit, the idea of Back from the Dead might sound cheesy or inauthentic. However, my tastes are populist, and I am sympathetic to the idea of an evangelization drama. It need not consist merely of thrown-together youth group skits—although, having seen a ton of such skits growing up, some of them are actually pretty good can and can be profound. And knowing that the roots of Western theater are liturgical helps put this in perspective for me. Drama has its roots in pagan Greek liturgy and began in the Catholic Church in the form of extensions added to the celebrations of Easter, gradually growing to the steps of cathedrals and eventually turning into spectacles mounted on huge wagons with scripts and special effects, all paid for by local guilds and put on during the great festal seasons of the year. These productions captured a range of human experience and included comedy, tragedy, spectacle, at time dancing freely on the line between the sacred and the irreverent. During a time when there wasn’t a meaningful division between sacred and secular literature, as is shown in the tales of King Arthur or the Divine Comedy, Catholic theatrical writers could use the constraints and needs of the drama to brilliantly merge the human and divine in their plays. It must have been amazing.

I say “could” and “must” because unfortunately we really don’t know—and may never know. This is because in the generation before Shakespeare, a thorough and deliberate purge of English Catholic theater took place, a cultural genocide of unimaginable scale, with government officials burning the spectacle wagons by the hundreds and destroying so many scripts that what remains are basically fragments, such as Everyman and The Second Shepherd’s play. It’s thought that William Shakespeare was the among the last children to ever be able to witness these theatrical productions, and if so, their loss must have affected him profoundly.

So generally speaking, yes, I am in favor of any attempt to recover the lost culture of English-speaking Catholic drama, and a liturgical drama around Hallowtide (Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’) sounds like a good place to begin. Theater needs spectacle, and few holidays invite spectacle like Halloween, with its spooky ghosts and monsters. But never having made the trek to the Seton Shrine to see Back from the Dead, I had to rely on hearsay until our local youth theater director went to see it, and came back full of enthusiasm, determined to mount our own local production.

The first problem he faced was that our historical Methodist town has no Catholic cemetery. We do have an amazing historic cemetery in the center of town, with spiked iron gates, real granite slabs of gravestones, Victorian mausoleums, broad paths, and a haunting atmosphere. But it closes punctually at sunset and the town fathers were understandably leery of letting a Catholic theater group congregate there to do strange things after dark. Another more modern local cemetery was more open to the idea—but their burial grounds consisted of acres of fields with level-to-the ground memorial stones, more peaceful than spooky.

The second problem was that the drama group always has a massive fall production and allocating resources to a second fall production is always tough. But then COVID shut down the theaters, and our director saw the opportunity to mount a completely outdoor production with social distancing built in—and pounced.

I went to see it that first year, and was taken in by the opening monologue, given by either a gruff gravedigger or a heavily-veiled Southern lady holding a candelit lantern:

So you’re walking through the cemetery tonight? What’d’ye expect to see? Goblins? Spooky ghosts?

The dead would like to have some words with you tonight.

…The monks used to greet each other with the words: “Remember your death.” Are you preparing for your death?

Don’t worry—the dead will help you.

…Remember your death, prepare for your death. Live your life in light of your death.

Because when it’s all over, there ain’t no second chances. No do-overs. Don’t waste it.

What are you waiting for? An invitation? TONIGHT is your invitation to never forget.

Listen closely…. shhh.

Because the dead would like to have some words with you tonight.

That set the tone. And it only got better after that. We wound our way through the darkness, pausing to find figures suddenly brightly lit around a corner, or springing up in the midst of the audience to startle us. But they weren't the usual jump-scare boogeys. They had a different purpose.

…Did you know I’ve been praying for you? That’s what I promised I’d do.

…Last week, I was in a car accident, and when I came to, I knew I had died.

…I saw it. I saw a vision of Hell. And even if were to live many years, I believe it would be impossible to forget it.

The final figures on the tour brought out messages of hope amid grim darkness. The courage of Miguel Pro. The perseverance of the murdered priest Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko. The cheerful diligence of Carlos Acutis. The luminous joy of Gianna Molla. The witness of Edith Stein at Auschwictz. A trio of child souls in white that greeted us from heaven with gifts of flowers and the promise of prayers. And then as we passed the adoration chapel, a woman in white flew down the path towards us. “I’ve been sent to you from heaven!” she cried. And proceeded to give us an ecstatic description—or non-description, because she admitted her words couldn’t capture it—of what it was like:

“You’re home. And you know you’re home.”

By the time she left, I had gone past throat-clearing and sniffles to openly weeping. I came expecting to have fun being scared: I departed uplifted and encouraged. As we made our way back to the parking lot, I stopped at the ticket table with my own message: “How can I make sure this happens again next year? Sign me up.”

Since 2020, I have directed, produced, and designed our local production of Back from the Dead, and if you’re at all intrigued by what I’ve written, I encourage you to get a group together and do the same. It’s the perfect production for youth and young adult groups. The license from Fr. Brian Nolan’s partner company Doug Jackson Productions is a lifetime one that only costs $75, giving a group the rights to produce it indefinitely. Licensing gives you access to all the scripts, and every year or so, they add a few more, so directors can pick from a range of monologues, based on the actors they have. A few parts are mandatory, providing the skeleton upon which the entire audience experience rests. The production is mandated to be free with donations, and we have managed to do about three-to-five nights with audience coming first-come, first-serve. This past year, 500 people took our tour.

Each year, we have been able to enhance the production with more and better lighting, costumes, effects, and audience experience perks like a waiting area with concessions such as Halloween treats and hot cider. We recently have begun to add some monologues in Spanish. But the core remains the simple frame of actors speaking to audiences and connecting with them through a heartfelt performance.

And every year, we hear stories from audience members of how it has affected them in powerful ways. The same has been true of our actors. I regularly hear from teen actors that this is their favorite production of the three core annual productions our teen drama group puts on, and it’s not just because they can count on having more lines in Back from the Dead. Comedy is easier for most of us to act: tragedy and realism is a risk, especially for young actors. But Back from the Dead is different. Some of the monologues are more intense, like Teresa of Avila or the North American martyrs. Some of humorous, like Pier Giorgio or Miguel Pro, who were clowns and practical jokers in life. But others require a eucatostrophic form of acting which demand a powerful joyfulness. I think the teen actors are invigorated by the challenge, and every year, we have them switch parts so they never know if they’re going to be Joan of Arc, shouting an inspirational speech or Mother Seton offering a heartfelt sharing. It keeps the performances alive. And for the adult volunteer directors and producers, it’s a bit of a spiritual workout as well: most rehearsals are outside in the cold, so that’s nice and penitential. But you’re getting to spend time with scripts that are compilations of the words of saints, and that makes the scriptwork and interpretation far more meaningful than the most earnest and inspirational of standard plays.

As the Halloween holiday grows in popularity and commercialization, Catholic families everywhere continue to dialogue about how to celebrate it. Our family always celebrates both Halloween and All Saints, so I have no intrinsic problem with the opening holiday: Halloween is a contracting for the Eve of All Hallows, after all. But while All Saints costume parties are fun for small children, I have always been looking for a way to celebrate Hallowtide with teens. And I think it’s a mistake to not lean into the scary aspects of Hallow’s Eve, especially with teenagers and young adults. The fact is, death is terrifying. But death of the soul should terrify us more, and young people understand this. This production keeps that healthy fear of the true danger alive in our hearts, which is why I go to see it and help make it happen each year.

So if you are looking for how your local culture can recover the true significance of Halloween, I encourage you to look into facilitating an annual production of Back from the Dead. You can find out more about it at backfromthedead.org. Hearing the words of the dead during the dying of the year is life-bringing—or at least it seems so to me.

All photographs are by Jim Hale, who covered our local production last year for the Arlington Catholic Herald. You can read his article here.