Gillette Elvgren

The author brings a career of academic and professional directing experience to inform readers how to select, prepare, and mount a production for the stage. At the same time, he expresses the disciplines, joys, and rigors of the faith-based walk as a framework for this creative journey. The author's exploration of the aesthetic requisites for stage directing are combined with a consideration of what it means to be a practicing artist under God's creative mandate. He demonstrates how one's worldview as a believer in Jesus Christ finds reflection in a world of visual and aural metaphors within a stage production.

The author has written and produced numerous plays for the Church, the Academy, and professional theatrical environments. In this book, he provides aesthetic keys for the faith-based writer and offers a close examination of ways to write the play from its inspirational calling in terms of structure, characterization, and theme. Readers will benefit from the author's exploration of how subjects such as destiny, mystery, sin, incarnation, and redemption, to name several, can effectively work on the stage. In addition to theological and theoretical frameworks, the author offers practical writing advice to help Christian writers integrate belief systems into intense character arcs, powerful dialogue, imagery, and theme. The author also provides essays and chapters on how to discover and create production venues for writing efforts in one's own immediate community, with exercises at the end of each chapter for personal writing development.

The Problem with the Dot is rooted in the idea that culture is a garden to be tended (Gen 2:15) rather than a war to be won and uses the analogy of an ecosystem to expand the details of the individual components of the theatrical ecosystem to: 1.Help those with minimal exposure to theater understand the indivisible construct of the theatrical ecosystem; 2.Identify areas of Christian neglect within each component; and 3.Emphasize strategic corrections that will result in the holistic restoration of a healthy global culture. Each chapter strengthens the case for a long-term holistic approach to the care and cultivation of global culture through the theatrical ecosystem, culminating in a call to action that is magnified by the unique opportunity presented by the 2020 global pandemic that forced a hiatus on all theatrical productions. The market will reset, and artists will revive theaters. It is my prayer that when this grand reopening occurs around the globe, Christians are an integral part of the new beginning.