Inmate Shane Hall, who wrote and directed a nativity play that was performed last week inside the Two Rivers Correctional Institution, warms up the crowd with Christmas music.

This was no Sunday school nativity play.

Yet, it wasn’t so far off. The cast included Joseph, Mary, shepherds and baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes. There was a manger, a star and a donkey. If one squinted, the room almost looked like a church fellowship hall.

In reality, inmates performed this nativity story inside the multipurpose room at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla. Underneath their robes, the actors wore their prison blues, stamped with “INMATE,” in fluorescent orange.

Just before 6 p.m., audience members all clad in similar prison garb arrived for the play. A shepherd at the door distributed programs and directed the men to a table with maple bars and apple fritters. As the room filled, the hubbub of conversation grew louder.

Shane Hall, the inmate who wrote “Christ is Born Prophecy Fulfilled,” warmed up the audience with Christmas tunes. The former pastor strummed an electric guitar bought at the prison commissary and launched into “There’s a New Kid in Town.” Other band members played acoustic guitar, bass guitar and drums. Off to one side, Joseph Opyd played electric piano. Doing double duty as actor and pianist, Opyd wore his costume for the role of Angel Gabriel, a white tunic, shiny silver belt and a halo set firmly on his head.

As they performed, the instrumentals entwined with Hall’s Oklahoma-accented baritone.

“How about a little ‘Silent Night,’ boys?” he called out.

The band dialed down their volume for the old favorite, sang all the verses and then segued into “O Holy Night” and then “Mary, Did You Know?” By the latter, audience chatter had stopped. The men started singing along, not in perfect tune, but it mattered not. Eyes glistened. About two-thirds of them stood.

It was time for the main event. The idea for the play had come to Hall as he lay on his bunk. He got up, sat at the metal desk in his cell and started writing. Forty-five minutes later, he says, he was finished.

The play stars some prophets — Moses, David, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah and Zechariah — foretelling the birth of Jesus. This is important, Hall and several of the actors said during a conversation before the play, because some of these prophets were a lot like them. They had done things they weren’t proud of in their earlier lives.

“Moses was a murderer, King David committed adultery,” Hall said. “They were just like us. They were men who have done sorry things.”

“A lot of people God chose to tell his story were the lowlifes,” said Michael Dodge, who played Moses in Hall’s play.

Dodge said he never read the Bible on the outside. He considered himself a Christian, but didn’t really know what that meant. Then, sitting in county jail, he started praying.

“Hitting rock bottom, you have nobody else to turn to but God,” Dodge said. “God definitely revealed himself to me.”

Dodge eventually started attending Daysprings Ministry services at Two Rivers, where his faith took hold and he met Hall and others, including Michael Yann, who played Zechariah, and Jose Avila-Flores, a shepherd in the play. When Hall asked them to be in the production, none was comfortable, but all said yes.

Following a Christian lifestyle inside a prison isn’t so easy, the men say, so they depend on each other.

“Different pasts and circumstances led us here,” Avila-Flores said. “We have found a community. We have found hope behind these walls.”

The play unspooled, with Hall speaking between each scene. The cast included one non-inmate. Elena Ropalo, a Tri-Cities real estate agent who volunteers at the prison, played Mary.

The play included almost no props, just some scrolls, a donkey head made from cardboard and the swaddling clothes for baby Jesus. The makeshift theater lacked a curtain, lights, a green room or even a stage. Yet somehow the message came through.

For Hall, it was all about those prophets who foretold Jesus’ birth, those guys who made good despite their rough beginnings.

“It doesn’t matter about our sordid pasts,” Hall told the audience. “It matters what we do going forward. You are so much better than those doggone blue shirts.”