Always Do Your Best-ish

At Odyssey's little theater, Olivia Parker can hardly wait for director Zoe Grant to post the cast list for the play Olivia has written about Irena Sendler, the real-life hero who rescued thousands of children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Olivia assumes she will play the lead in her own play, so she is stunned when Zoe casts her instead as Janina, Irena's elderly mother, a part with only three scenes. Worse, the role of Irena goes to Valerie Swanson. Olivia protests that Valerie is a two-faced phony, but Zoe insists that Valerie's forceful spirit is exactly what the character needs, while Olivia has the strength and warmth to play the mother well. Olivia grudgingly agrees to take the part.

Meanwhile, at Whit's End, Renee Carter is programming her first Imagination Station adventure, a Civil War story about a Union officer named Sperry McGerk. During a test run the program glitches wildly. The hero announces, "Excuse me while I climb into my M4 Sherman Battletank," an air raid siren wails, and the townspeople panic over a Confederate missile attack. Mr. Whittaker spots the problem: Renee reused an artificial intelligence matrix from an old adventure instead of building a new one, and her townspeople have no names, families, or backstories. Renee thinks all that detail is a waste of time, but Whit encourages her to try it his way.

At rehearsal, Olivia grows more and more frustrated. Zoe showers attention on Valerie's big scenes while telling Olivia her acting is simply "fine," and Valerie sends Olivia off to fetch her water. Sulking over ice cream at Whit's End, Olivia complains to Renee, who offers the old theater saying that there are no small parts, only small actors. Then Olivia has an idea: since she wrote the play, why not write the mother a bigger role? She rushes off with her sundae to go.

Her improvements do not go well. First she stuffs the mother's lines with flowery speeches about flesh of her flesh and a mother's pain. Then, in the middle of the Gestapo arrest scene, she fires a gun loaded with blanks and performs a long, dramatic death for the mother, arguing that it would motivate Irena, even though Zoe points out it never actually happened.

Renee's second test run fails too. When Whit questions the soldiers in her Confederate army, all 489 of them give the same name, rank, and hometown, because Renee copied one backstory onto every man and even used a single vocal processor for the whole army. Whit explains that the Imagination Station was never designed to handle such shortcuts and that every little detail plays an important role in storytelling. Renee wants to reprogram the machine itself to allow shortcuts, but Whit tells her he would rather she learn the rules of the machine before trying to break them. Once he leaves, Renee opens the source code anyway, whispering, "Sorry, Mr. Whittaker, but you'll thank me for this."

Back at rehearsal, Olivia interrupts one of Irena's most serious scenes by sweeping onstage singing, proposing a musical dream sequence about the mother's encouragement. Valerie threatens to quit, and Zoe finally puts her foot down: no more changes to the script, which she loved as it was first written. Stung that Zoe seems to side with Valerie, Olivia quits the play.

At Whit's End, Renee consoles Olivia by inviting her to be the first kid to try her rebuilt adventure. Inside the Imagination Station, they find themselves in 1863 facing an entire army, and Renee proudly explains that she found a way to program all those soldiers in a single afternoon. Then everything goes wrong. The soldiers decide the two girls are Northern spies, the computer refuses to end the program, and the girls flee through a forest with soldiers behind them and a tank blocking their escape. Just as they are trapped, the adventure shuts down. Mr. Whittaker has stopped it from outside after every alarm on the machine went off.

Downstairs, Renee apologizes but admits she still does not understand why the small stuff matters, and Olivia agrees; if nobody notices your work, why waste the time? Whit answers with the story of Mary, who poured perfume worth a year's wages on Jesus' feet. Some thought it a waste, but Mary wanted to give her very best in a simple act of service, and God deserves nothing less from any of us, whether we are foot washing, programming, or acting. Olivia admits she got a big head and wanted more praise, and Whit reminds her that all the seemingly little things we do work together to accomplish God's bigger plan. When she learns Zoe is already holding auditions to recast the mother, Olivia dashes off to reclaim the part, while Renee promises no more shortcuts and gets to work on the details.

On opening night, the play is a hit. The audience loves it, Valerie soaks up the praise, and Olivia, uncomfortable costume and all, tells Zoe she is having a great time. When the diva-ish demand comes from offstage for a missing water bottle, Olivia cheerfully excuses herself and says she'll take care of it, content at last to give her best in a small role.