Lifting the Veil

In October of 1938, two evangelists/faith healers, Burroughs Walters and Kathryn Kuhlman, elope to Iowa to be married. The bride fainted at the civil ceremony. The play covers the first one hundred minutes of their wedding night, the bride seriously second-guessing her decision to marry, feeling compelled to return to her flock in Denver. The bridegroom, frustrated on his wedding night, compels her to stay. Lifting the Veil is a play depicting the battle of two scripture-filled minds and wills.

This play is a "what-if" tale, loosely based upon the obscure marriage of Kathryn Kuhlman and Burroughs Waltrip. Burroughs became an early developer of Christian evangelistic radio ministry, while Kathryn, decades after her marriage, would hold evangelistic and faith-healing meetings that would draw crowds of tens of thousands. She became the most influential woman evangelist since Aimee Semple McPherson.

According to Kathryn Kuhlman's biographers, in 1938, Kathryn was in her early thirties and already the pastor of a thousand-member church she had founded in Denver. The itinerate evangelist and faith-healer from Texas, Burroughs Waltrip, filled her pulpit twice-the first time for a month with his wife, Jessie, and two sons in tow, the second time sadly pronouncing that his wife had abandoned him and taken the boys, and a divorce was soon final. Kathryn and Burroughs subsequently fell in love, announced a merging of their ministries, and shortly afterward a union of their lives in wedlock. Kathryn fainted during her wedding vows. Upon awaking, the bridegroom helped her finish them. Kathryn would become possessed by forlornness over the internal tensions of a passionate love for Burroughs and the price-tag of her decision to marry-a decision that eventually closed the door on her ministry in Denver and required a submission to Burroughs's ministry vision in Iowa. The wedding night would provide the threshold to an intense collision course of biblical imagery, ministry vision, and the requirements of love.