The visionary at the top of the production team for Good’s new play, , is acclaimed executive producer .

She was pivotal in the production of , a musical centering on a rural Baptist Church in North Carolina in the WWII era (performed more than 500 times in New York in the 1990s). She was also producer of , a drama about an imagined meeting between Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis, which had a two-year run off-Broadway into 2012; it then moved to venues in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Sydney, Australia. Copeland and her employees have racked up countless other successful theater productions over the last 30 years.

“I love working on new plays,” Copeland told the 91¶ĚĘÓƵ news service. “I don’t want to do revivals – they don’t interest me. I want to see fresh creations, like The Preacher and the Shrink, be brought to their full potential.”

Upon Copeland’s recommendation, the director will be long-time theater artist , with whom she collaborated on the comedy Flamingo Court, which ran for two summer seasons off Broadway. Yuhasz, who brings directing, producing and acting experience (plus an MFA in directing, set and costume design), will be adding this directing stint to his regular workload as executive director of the non-profit in Norwalk, Conn.

The Goods, Copeland, Yuhasz, and a handful of other creative collaborators heard Merle’s script performed by talented professional actors in a “table reading” in April in NYC, which stoked everyone’s sense of enthusiasm for the play’s potential, said Yuhasz.

Post-reading, Good felt inspired to re-draft parts of his play, on which he had been working intermittently since 2006. Among other revisions, he cut about 12 pages from it to yield a faster-paced production.

“The play has a great story to tell,” said Yuhasz. “There are universal themes in it. It’s a story about relationships and how people evolve into a new place with them. I believe everyone [in the audience] will walk away with something different from it.”

Yuhasz said a director has to “get into the head of the playwright,” which he feels he is able to do with Good. In his playwriting, “Merle has a way of bringing out people’s hearts and souls, and the real world that they live in,” said Yuhasz.

On Good’s part, he is looking forward to watching Yuhasz do the casting in September. “He’ll assemble a superb, highly professional cast,” Good said.

Good stresses that The Preacher and the Shrink is not a “Mennonite play” or a “church play” or a “Christian play,” as they are often defined. “It is a play written for the general theater-going public,” he said. “It is not an allegory or a parable. It is first and foremost a straightforward story, with all of its complexities. It looks at the estrangement between a father, who happens to be a mainline Protestant pastor, and his daughter.”

When Good was living in NYC in the early 1970s, pursuing an MDiv at , he began to ponder the way psychiatrists were taking the place of pastoral religious leaders as “listeners” for people feeling troubled. This insight is explored in his new play, he noted.

After three years of graduate study in New York, Good (a ’69 grad of 91¶ĚĘÓƵ) and his wife Phyllis (class of ’70) returned to their home turf in Lancaster, Pa., where they ran a summer theater for a decade, among other business pursuits. Good, who was the lead in the first official play produced at 91¶ĚĘÓƵ, Murder in the Cathedral, oversaw 400 productions of 10 plays he wrote during this period, always on themes pertaining the Mennonites and Amish.

He also assisted in writing the script for Hazel’s People, a feature-length film about modern-living Mennonites made in the 1970s. It was based on his only published novel Happy as the Grass Was Green (1971).

In subsequent decades Good immersed himself in succeeding at the business of book publishing. This he has accomplished, in partnership with Phyllis. The flagship of their cluster of family businesses, , has about 200 books on the market currently. In recent years daughter Kate Good ’99 came aboard as assistant publisher. She’s an English major (like both parents) who earned an MFA in creative writing at George Mason University.

The Preacher and the Shrink will be performed Nov. 2 through Jan. 4 in an intimately warm venue chosen by Copeland. It’s , a complex of five small off-Broadway theaters at 410 West 42^nd Street near Times Square in Manhattan.

Good said members of his church, in Lancaster, have already chartered a 56-seat bus to take hometown folks to see the play, and the bus seats are almost all taken.

“I wanted to give persons and groups in Phyllis’s and my circle of acquaintances first chance at tickets,” said Good. “So I’m trying to get the word out in August before the play is marketed to the wider public, beginning Sept. 1.”

Those who are hoping to bring a group may want to plan early and reserve early. “There will be only ten Saturday matinee dates during the run,” said Copeland. “So if you have a specific weekend in mind to bring your group, it’s best to reserve early. The Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year seasons will most likely sell out first.”

The seven weekly performances of The Preacher and the Shrink will be Tuesdays at 7 p.m., Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m.

Tickets are available through Telecharge.com, 800-447-7400 (for group sales, call 800-432-7780). Groups also can be booked through Your Broadway Genius Groups at 877-943-2929.

The trip, called, will begin in Antalya, Turkey, on May 13, 2012, and end 18 days later. Using small sailboats, the class will cruise along the southern coast of Turkey, exploring remote, beautiful impressive sites such as Andriake harbor, Patara, and other key historical sites. From Ephesus, the group will take ferries to the island of Samos, Greece, then across the Aegean to Athens where the seminar ends.

Besides experiencing the Roman Empire from the sea, students will engage in intensive reading and discussion of the culture, politics, religion, and economics of the first century world. They will also learn to work together as sailors, said Stutzman.

Experiences change thinking about New Testament

Michael Swartzentruber, a first-year seminary student who traveled with Stutzman in 2011, said: “There is no better way to study the early church than on a boat, taking whatever the sea throws at you. Living that experience forever changed the way I read Paul and Acts.”

Betsy Fisher Rhodes and her husband Philip had just concluded their year in Nazareth, Israel, when they took this trip. “This course was a real highlight of my year abroad and will continue to influence my thinking of the church in the first-century as well as the church today,” Betsy said.

Stutzman is a veteran of sailing on the Mediterranean and following the journeys of Paul. In 2004-05 he and his wife Janet spent 16 months visiting every port linked to Paul’s travels in Acts. The journey is detailed in Linford’s book “Sailing Acts,” published by Good Books.

Students from will join graduate students from Jerusalem University College for this trip. It costs $2,825, including three semester hours of tuition and all expenses for the three weeks in the Mediterranean. It does not include international travel to Antalya and from Athens, passports, or visas for Turkey. Final costs are subject to adjustment, depending on exchange rates or tax increases.

Contact Linford Stutzman, director of the program of Eastern Mennonite Seminary, for further information and reservations.