I must confess, the thing I was most excited about when writing this play was the chance to portray Jesus as a child! However, as it turned out, I wimped out a bit: my two year old Jesus, though enthusiastic about talking, is not very articulate yet. (He’s clearly one of those children whose verbal skills develop a little more slowly than usual, but don’t worry, children who lag in most areas of development – speaking, walking, reading, etc. – tend to catch up with their peers very quickly later in life, and the twelve year old Jesus will be confounding the teachers in the temple in no time.)
After the boy Jesus, my next biggest interest was the relationship between Joseph and Mary, his cautiousness and conscientiousness as opposed to her impulsiveness, and I suppose that part of the writing went okay, but what really got me excited in the end was the blind woman. I read once that when J.R.R. Tolkien was writing the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Strider first appears in a dark corner of the Prancing Pony, he had no idea who he was at first. He just saw him in the scene in his imagination and dutifully wrote him in, and only later “discovered” who he was! Well, it was somewhat the same with me and the blind woman. There were some problems I was going to have to solve in this play, such as how to represent the faulty handling of the “prophecies” of Jesus’ birth by the gospel writers, which occurs only in the narration of this story and not in the story itself, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it until the man in the first scene began talking about the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem. I suddenly realized at that point that one or both of the women at the table, and maybe even Joseph, wouldn’t have let the young Jesus hear that gruesome story, and thought about what they might do about it. It was then that I “saw” the blind woman sitting over there in a dark corner like Aragorn, the disguised Heir of Elendil.
The woman allowed me to voice the prophecies within the action of the play, and also reinforced the Egyptian theme. Behind the “light that illuminates every person” is a dark and mysterious past, a past that looks forward into the future only through obscure or broken prophecies that don’t work in reverse, as a way to get back to that past from the present. When Reason became Flesh, it began its life in Egypt, the Cradle of Magic.