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Last updated on: May 5, 2007 at 2:57 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2007-05-05T14:57:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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CH-CH-CH CHECK IT OUT: ‘AND CARL LAUGHED’

Kelley Ryan has been my best friend since we were freshwomen in college and she is brilliant. I mean that literally. Brilliant. She is an actor, a director, a playwright, and the world’s most marvelous drama teacher for the lucky, lucky students at Clayton High School in St. Louis.

Last fall, Kelley and a retired colleague from Clayton, Nick Otten, wrote a play for the students to perform called, “And Carl Laughed,” about the real-life Roman Catholic priest — the Rev. Carl Kabat (a religious order priest from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, just like Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago) — who has spent much of his life being civilly disobedient. Specifically, Kabat and a few of his friends who together make up the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here-Plowshares group, break into nuclear weapons sites and do things like, most recently in North Dakota, paint messages that say, “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.” Oh, and they do it all dressed in clown outfits, invoking what St. Paul said in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth that “we are fools for Christ’s sake.”

Here’s a link to Weapons of Mass Destruction Here-Plowshares web site, with tons of information about what Kabat and his cohorts are up to, their latest actions (and prison sentences), etc. And here’s a brief account of the group’s protest in North Dakota last July from the ABC News affiliate KLTV:

A trio of protesters dressed as clowns decided to take nuclear disarmament into their own hands last week when they broke into a nuclear missile launch facility in North Dakota.

Carl Kabat, OMI, a retired Catholic priest from St. Louis, and Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli, both military veterans from Duluth, Minn., were arrested after breaking into the Echo-9 missile launch facility, which houses a Minuteman III missile with nuclear warheads and is located in McLean County, west of the town of Garrison.

Staff Sergeant Trevor Tiernan of the Minot Air Force Base told ABC News members of the 91st Missile Security Forces Squadron responded “within minutes” of the protesters approaching the facility’s fence. When asked for an exact number of minutes, Staff Sergeant Tiernan again said it was “within minutes.” But when ABC News talked to Michael Miles of Nukewatch, the group for which the three men are volunteers, he said the airmen showed up “45 minutes” after the three protesters broke into the site.

Whichever it was, it was enough time for the three protesters to cut through the outer fence with bolt cutters, pound the concrete lid of the missile’s silo with sledgehammers and paint “Disarm” on the casing.

The activists were apprehended by the airmen once they arrived and held until local authorities came. Kabat, Boertje-Obed and Walli were all charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, both Class A misdemeanors, which carry a one-year prison sentence and $2,000 penalty in North Dakota. Bond was set at $500 for each.

According to McLean Sheriff Don Charging, the FBI had issued federal retainers on the activists. And they have each been charged with two federal counts of sabotaging national defense material. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for July 5.

In a statement posted on the web by the activists the day they broke into the missile launch facility, the men said, “We have chosen to start the process of transformation and disarmament by hammering on and pouring our blood on components of the Minuteman III nuclear missile system.” As for their costumes, the men wrote, “We dress as clowns to show that humor and laughter are key elements in the struggle to transform the structures of destruction and death.”

All three men are volunteers for Nukewatch, a Wisconsin-based group dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons, which issued its own statement on its website detailing the men’s actions. Speaking on behalf of Nukewatch, Miles said the trio’s actions are in accordance with the group’s purpose.

In January, “And Carl Laughed” opened to rave reviews in St. Louis, and the kids (and the playwrights) have been invited to perform their play at the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland this August. Above you can see a video montage of scenes from the play. For more information about the play and upcoming performances, click HERE

Below is a piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch written by that wonderful religion scribe Tim Townsend. It’s lost to the archives of the paper’s web site now, so I’ve posted it in its entirety below for your reading pleasure.

“And Carl Laughed” is terrific and what Kabat and his fellow clowns are doing is truly the Lord’s work. So, as the Beastie Boys say, ch-ch-ch check it out.

School play depicts imprisoned priest
By Tim Townsend
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Wednesday, Jan. 17 2007

In any live stage production with a tiny budget, cheap props have to serve a
multitude of purposes. In the play “And Carl Laughed,” which opens Thursday at
Clayton High School’s Little Theater, that prop is the lowly plastic bucket.

Yes, a bucket can be a drum or a seat. Yes, it can represent the nose cone of a
nuclear missile. But sometimes a bucket is just a bucket, and in much of “And
Carl Laughed” a bucket is what it is.

Throughout his career as an anti-nuclear weapons activist, the Rev. Carl Kabat
has used the bucket — as storage unit, as luggage, as furniture — in as many
ways as the 15-member Clayton High company that is bringing his life to the
stage.

Kabat, 73, is a priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the same
Roman Catholic order of priests that runs the National Shrine of Our Lady of
the Snows in Belleville. He was born on a farm in Scheller, Ill., about 80
miles southeast of Karen House, the Catholic Worker house in St. Louis where he
worked with the city’s homeless before returning to prison last year. Kabat has
gained notoriety for performing acts of civil disobedience dressed in clown
suits. The priest’s friends say he’s spent 16 of his 73 years behind bars.

In 1984, Kabat and another activist attacked a nuclear weapons silo near Kansas
City, Mo. with sledgehammers. The priest received an 18-year sentence but was
out in seven, his longest stint in prison.

“And Carl Laughed” is the story of a man who learns to be comfortable in his
own skin (which he then paints with clown makeup) even as he becomes
increasingly uncomfortable with the world around him. The play, which was
written by Clayton High School theater teacher Kelley Ryan and retired Clayton
High English teacher Nick Otten, is a surreal meditation on loyalty to one’s
conscience and quixotic ambitions with a heavy dose of liberation theology, a
sprinkling of Cirque du Soleil and a dollop of Samuel Beckett.

The play has its world premiere Thursday night, and the company has been
invited to present “And Carl Laughed” in August in Scotland at the Edinburgh
Festival Fringe, which bills itself as the world’s largest arts festival. Ryan
said the company will tour the play sporadically in the months between this
weekend’s production and the festival in Scotland.

“And Carl Laughed” features two actors playing Kabat — one as a priest, the
other as a clown. As the priest becomes more frustrated with seemingly
fruitless mission trips to help the poor in the Philippines and Brazil, the
clown side of his personality begins to take over.

Ryan and Otten researched court records of Kabat’s cases. They wrote to Kabat
in prison asking for his stories, and he provided them.

For his clowning in North Dakota, Kabat is finishing up a 15-month sentence at
a federal prison camp in Terre Haute, Ind., on a charge of destruction of
government property. His friends say he may be out as early as July 22, just
in time to see “And Carl Laughed” before the company takes it to Scotland in
August.

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