There’s a game we sometimes play in the Upper School Theater Ensemble called Corrie’s Game. It was made up on the spot one day a decade or two ago by Mark Lewis, the director of Wheaton College’s Arena Theater, where my husband and I trained as actors (and stagehands, and designers, and builders, and stage managers, and directors, and etc.). Like any good artist, I shamelessly stole the game and brought it with me when I left. But like any good student, I also cite my sources: Our students have no idea who Corrie is—or Mark Lewis, really, for that matter—but they know Corrie’s Game by its proper title.

(Side note: I met the Corrie of Corrie’s Game—THE Corrie!—at Arena Theater’s 50 Year Reunion this past April. She was lovely.)

The game has several variations and can be played for several purposes, but the core template is always the same:

Rule #1: The ensemble sits in a line, all facing a stage area where a single chair sits, facing them.

Rule #2: The ensemble is given a prompt by the director to consider. 

Rule #3: To play, an ensemble member comes up and sits in the chair. They tell a true, from-their-life story in five sentences which is based on that prompt.

Rule #4: The story can be “heavy or light,” as Mark Lewis would say, but it must be honoring of someone or some moment.

Rule #5: Five sentences means five grammatically-correct sentences. No run-ons, no extras, no ending early.

Suggested Rule #6: The player should count the sentences on their fingers as they tell them, to help keep everyone (including themselves) keep track.

What happens after that depends on the day and the director. Usually, the person in the chair simply walks back to their spot with the ensemble and someone else pops up to tell their story.

At our last gathering in 2024, we played Corrie’s Game with the prompt: “Hope, unlooked-for.” I chose this prompt because last year’s prompt was “Beauty, unlooked-for,” and the year before that was “Joy, unlooked-for,” and they had both yielded beautiful, heartwarming stories that sent everyone off for Christmas Break in good spirits.

Hope, it turns out, isn’t so warm and fuzzy.

I should have known this simply from the difficulty I had in coming up with a story for my own prompt. Students, of course, aren’t given the prompts in advance when we play Corrie’s Game, but I had decided weeks before what this occasion’s prompt would be. I had the time to come up with something really great. But whenever I tried to think of something appropriate to share with this beloved group of teenagers at our last gathering of the calendar year, I came up empty handed. Every idea was either trite or, more frequently, much too heavy and personal for the occasion. 

I thought about changing the prompt right before class, but realized that I shouldn’t chicken out of a good thing just because it was giving me some push-back. The students came, we proceeded with class, and I gave the final prompt:

“Hope, unlooked-for.”

Silence.

Most times a game begins, there is silence, but it’s an active, working silence. It’s a silence that is full of thought, ideas pinging invisibly around the room as the actors consider what they might say, even if they’re pretty sure that they won’t go up and say it out loud. 

It was an active silence this time, too. I was glad for that. And then the stories came. 

They were beautiful and heartwarming in a way, but they were also hard. They were stories of lost loved ones, of night terrors, of lonely New Year’s Eves, of frustrated expectations, of families in a moment of crisis. They were a flicker of each actor’s private lives, here for five sentences and then dissipated—held ever so briefly by a room full of people who love that actor, but can’t possibly understand all of the weight that those five sentences held.

Thinking about it later, I realized that I shouldn’t have been surprised by the heavier tone which this prompt yielded. Joy and Beauty are, of course, complex enough to allow for a myriad of responses (“heavy and light”), but Hope is startlingly simple in this way. It immediately conjures memories of the times we needed it most. And oftentimes, those moments are hard to put a tidy bow on. They’re ongoing. Hope, by nature, is always reaching forward for something that can’t be seen quite yet.

It’s a miraculous gift. And it’s a very hard one to hold.

I did end up telling a story for the ensemble, and I’m grateful for that. 

As 2024 comes to a close, I hope that you are able to identify and articulate—even if just for yourself—a true, from-your-life story about a time this year when you experienced real Hope. Try doing it in five sentences. Count them on your fingers to help keep track. If the story feels messy or incomplete, that probably means you’re doing it right; five sentences is just five sentences. The story isn’t finished yet.