Word: marked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Today Willie has become not only an Austin but a Texas institution. He has performed with the Dallas Symphony and golfed with the then Texas Longhorns Coach Darrell Royal. Around the state he sees T shirts reading MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE AND WILLIE. He hears his name lightly mentioned for Governor. His father and stepmother-universally known as Mom and Pop Nelson-bask in the legend. Together they run Willie's Pool Hall in Austin, and Pop fronts a country band. Nowadays Mom and Pop also occupy Willie's $300,000 ranch house outside town. Willie's third...
...MARK'S GOSPEL...
...simple audacity of the enterprise is breathtaking. English Actor Alec McCowen, casually dressed in a sports coat and open-necked shirt, strolls onto a stage furnished only with a table and three chairs and recites, from memory, the entire Gospel according to St. Mark, then strolls off again. It is the sort of feat that inevitably is called a tour de force; yet a tour de force is precisely what it is not. The performance, quietly magnificent as it is, nevertheless is purged of all bravura. It is compelling theater that is at the same time nontheatrical...
During some disarmingly offhand remarks made before launching into his text, McCowen makes it clear that he has no theological reasons for choosing Mark over the other Gospels. His concern is with words, not the Word. Mark happens to be the shortest (two hours, ten minutes in this performance, with one intermission) and "the easiest one to tell aloud." The fact that most biblical scholars believe it is also the earliest and the closest to original sources seems to be an incidental benefit...
...operative word for McCowen is tell. He tells Mark's story, he does not intone it. He clears away the ponderousness and singsong preachiness of centuries of Bible reading to rediscover the urgent, living voice of a man who is recounting nearly contemporary events, many of them derived from eyewitness accounts...