The current production in the Army Community Readers Theater literary season is "God's Trombones." It has three performers and runs just an hour, but with enough power to fuel an oratorio with a full choir of singers in the background and dancers downstage.

The subject is certainly large enough, spanning the Creation to the Final Judgment.

James Weldon Johnson, reportedly an agnostic himself, wrote the piece in 1927, subtitling it "Seven Negro Sermons in Verse," drawing on the cadence and repertoire of African-American preachers who shared and refined their themes until they became an oral tradition that filled churches on Sundays.

"The Creation" is the most familiar piece: "And God stepped out on space And he looked around and said: I'm lonely — I'll make me a world."

But the most moving section is "Go Down, Death — A Funeral Sermon," filled with hope. Read with compassion by Della Grahm, the poem describes how God sends Death on a magnificent white horse to bring a faithful servant home to heaven.

Grahm's emotional range allows for an equally powerful "The Crucifixion," opening with a sung extract from the spiritual "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" and closing with the lines "The thunder rumbled and the lightning wrote an unknown language in the sky."

At just that moment, gusty winds rattled the metal doors next to the stage for an exquisite, chicken-skin effect.

Readers Theatre veteran Rich-ard Pellett takes Old Testament stories "The Prodigal Son" and "Let My People Go," describing with genuine relish the "sweet-sinning women of Babylon" and how Pharaoh's "host got drownded" by the Red Sea.

Sylvia Hormann-Alper reads of how God knelt "like a mammy bending over her baby" to mold man in his image.

She closes with God separating goats from sheep on the final judgment day, inviting us to consider where we will stand "In that great day when God's a-going to rain down fire?"