Passion Play

He has one all his own, and it has had a 21-year run—

..."Ben Carson, M.D.," a children's theater production seen by a generation of Baltimore area school kids who read Carson's memoir Gifted Hands as part of their curriculum.

Quote is from this. Politico intends the hook of this rambling article to be reactions to Carson's new endeavor by Prince Havely, the actor who has made a career of playing the man—

...allegations that Carson fabricated significant features of his autobiography—the stabbing of a childhood friend in a "pathological" rage and the candidate's claim that he was admitted to West Point on a full scholarship—have not swayed Havely's faith in Carson. "I don't doubt anything he says."

Need it be said? Some not particularly astute reactions from a party with an interest in accepting anything Carson does. While Havely says the political run came as a big surprise from someone he thought he knew so well, in all the surpising events, Politico reports—

What is shocking to Havely is that the play is not being staged this year—the first time, he says, since its debut in 1994.

Havely suspects that the directors and crew at Toby's Youth Theatre in Columbia, Maryland, where the play was born, wanted to avoid any association with Carson's politics. The theater's spokesperson rejects that notion, saying that the book on which the play is based is falling out of favor with teachers. "No political agenda on our part," Janine Sunday of Toby's told Politico in an email. "Just trying to make connections between theatre and the core lessons the students are learning."

"It's the perfect time to do the show," Havely says. "My jaw is on the ground."

Grist for the Politico mill, at least.

The play sounds like pretty standard uplift—well-meant, if crude, and offering a heroic figure with whom audiences are meant to identify—

"This young boy with the knife would have ended up in jail or reform school!" the narrator says as Havely, in a surgeon's smock, turns around to face the audience. "That man with the knife led a team of 70 on a groundbreaking operation!"

If they were a captive one, schoolkids were not the only audience—

The show went from a local novelty to a sprawling exposition of Ben Carson literature, including his self-help book Think Big.
...
Over the years, the Carson family remained devoted to the production. Sonya Carson, Ben's mother, came to a performance of the play every other week, according to Havely. She was a constant critic of her son's character and her own, letting Havely and the play's directors know when the fictional "Mama" got a little too sharp-tongued. In a 1997 feature about Sonya Carson in Parade Magazine, she asked the author to accompany her to the play, where she basked in the "moist eyes" of the students around her.

Havely says that area teachers would arrange for children who had been operated on by Carson to attend the play. Havely would feature them in the post-show Q&A session. He believes the idea of kids seeing Carson's patients in their classrooms and social circles served to accentuate the force of the Ben Carson lore.

The real Carson saw the play at least once every year starting in 1994. The surgeon, Havely says, didn't just come to watch. Once, while bringing a group from the Carson Scholars Fund to a performance, Carson stood up in the front row to play himself in the play about himself. "It was cute, because I got ready to end the play, and I go, 'I have an answer for that: it's think big!' He's in the front row and he goes, 'Let me take that from here.' And he comes up, and everybody applauded. It was the coolest thing," Havely says. On several occasions, Carson brought Havely to dinners and Scholars Fund events to appear in character for a selection of the most memorable scenes.

The Passion of Dr. Ben is of a piece with the museum.

You can't help but notice who seems to have pride of place here.

Ben Carson inside his home in Upperco, Maryland, in November 2014.
Photograph by Mark Makela