Blog

You can  see more photos here.

After performing Big Fish Little Worm and The Revelation on the Costa Brava for a Church of the Brethren missionaries' retreat we spent a day in Barcelona, where we spent most of our time at La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's Cathedral, which is still in the midst of a 15...

Reese Howells, whose story is in the book Intercessor, founded the Bible College of Wales, which I got to visit after my performance tour of England. He directed his faculty and students to pray that Germany would invade Russia, which brought about the end of WWII. 


I had the pri...

I got to perform my play about Quaker abolitionist John Woolman at Youth Quake at Lake Junaluska, NC, early in 1998. I'm posting it in the year it happened with reflections 20 years later. It was at that performance that Dale Savidge decided he'd represent me, so it's cool to realize he's been repr...

Rich Swingle's one-person play, A Clear Leading (later titledI Dreamed I Was Free), on the life of John Woolman, was inspirational; we saw the struggles, the mistakes, and the slow but deep clarity that formed Woolman's famous leading. 
--Claudia Wair
Friends Journal
April 1998

Off West Broadway Theatre Company was instrumental in me getting started as an actor. While I was living at The Lamb's Church they began to produce plays in the smaller of their two Off-Broadway theatres. I showed up to help with construction and painting and anything that needed to be done. Before...

I put together tours across America the summers of 1994 and 1995, so I'm pretty sure I got the date right on this. We're in Bryant Park, Midtown Manhattan for Mac Nelson's birthday party. He was best man at our wedding. 

While I was an intern at The Lamb's Church of the Nazarene on Times Square from 1993 to 1998 I performed in a number of productions in both the main Off-Broadway stage and the smaller black box theatre. That space went back and forth between Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway status by adding or rem...

In July of 1995 I stopped accepting any work that wasn't connected in some way to the performing arts. So I haven't had a 9-5 since 95! Praise the Lord!

I arrived in NYC in 1993, and my friend, Dorothy G. Ubben, is posting some great photos from the four years I lived at The Lamb's Church when it was on Times Square in a building designed by Stanford White (known for his iconic structures throughout the Eastern Seaboard). I lived on the sixth floor...

If you're getting this as an email, I've embedded a post from Facebook, so you may need to click here to see it.
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FRichSwingle%2Fposts%2F10156538854302279&width=500

Mary Dyer being led to her hanging. Nineteenth c. artist unknown.

When I was in seminary I had a Church History class with Dr. Richard Lovelace, a student of Yale College, Westminster Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary. He gave us a list of Church history figures, and we were to write a pap...