All is Not Vanity

     Within the confines of a prison cell, a modest English preacher and tinker set about to write a persuasive little tract… He wrought instead an imaginative, piercing, rough-and-tumble folk epic, The Pilgrim’s Progress.  His insight and intensity spilled forth onto every page—for John Bunyan’s masterpiece was born of Christian persecution and an unwavering passion to enlighten a dark age.  The author’s foundation was the Holy Scriptures.  It has been said: “Prick John Bunyan and he bleeds the Bible.”  Yet he created a work of art so vigorously inventive in content and structure that his contemporaries felt it defied description.  They sensed it was inspired, though, and time has not proven them wrong.

     The influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress three hundred years after its first publication is immeasurable.  Its ideas have become so woven into the artistic, popular and Christian imagery which followed it-- the original source has become, for many, only a shadow.  Vanity Fair is a magazine. Things “Celestial” are most likely herbal.  We do still “wallow in the mire,” but any journey down a narrow path towards the Great City would most likely be that of a farm girl from Kansas .

     Thankfully, though, a measured influence of Bunyan’s work also continues.  The New World ’s first “best seller” has never gone out of print.  While David Simpich was preparing to build a marionette play about Abraham Lincoln, he discovered that this president—along with George Washington—held The Pilgrim’s Progress as a personal favorite second only to the Bible. This puppeteer also discovered through his research that, perhaps, a production of The Pilgrim’s Progress for the marionette stage could best exemplify the motivating force of this president’s life.

     For Lincoln was a pilgrim—as Bunyan describes one. His life’s journey was an intense struggle to locate and then navigate the Straight and Narrow Path illumined by one abiding light—The Truth (John 14:6). For David, this became Lincoln ’s story – stripped to its essence.

     Bunyan saw this enduring story shining through Scripture and brilliantly illustrates it in his narrative.  It is David Simpich’s express purpose to bring its sequence of events to life in a unique and powerful way through the art of puppetry – for marionette actors shine in fables and vivid, imaginative tales.

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