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Ann Bauer has a degree in music education from UNCG, but the former social worker hadn’t used it much — not until Father Louis Canino asked her to write the soundtrack of a play about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals and the environment.

“I said, 'I don’t think so, Father Louie,’” Bauer recalled of the request, which initially intimidated her. “And he asked me to pray about it.”

After reading the script for “Francis — Everyone’s Saint,” Bauer, who works with Canino at the St. Francis Springs Prayer Center, a nonprofit spiritual retreat in Stoneville, eventually turned in the first song, “Celebration.”

That song, written for the play’s opening scene, celebrates the founding of the Franciscan Order 800 years ago. The play starts Friday and runs through Sunday at the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro.

“He had full permission to say, 'No way,’” Bauer laughed. “I think I was kind of hoping he would.”

Canino, who had noticed Bauer’s musical talents through the years, didn’t. Actually, he was impressed.

“She would tell me, 'You can’t imagine!’” Canino said with a chuckle of the writing and rewriting of the lyrics and instrumental pieces. “Sometimes it would be six hours and nothing would happen, and then it would happen.’

“I just love the music. It’s haunting. You’re not supposed to brag about your own show, but since it’s the music and I didn’t do it, I guess I can. Every day I wake up there are different tunes going through my mind.”

Canino wrote the play during marathon sessions at a weekend stay at his brother’s cabin in the Adirondacks.

He was focused; this would be a very important year for Franciscans, who are celebrating throughout the world, he said.

“When I was at the tomb of St. Francis last year, they averaged 10,000 people a day,” Canino said. “Here’s a person who was really a wild man as a teenager — and his life was transformed. Christ spoke to him and he listened and he accepted the invitation to renew himself and in renewing himself he’s renewed to a great extent, and transformed, some of our broken, fragile world.”

Canino says he tries to creatively say what he hopes is apparent.

“Regardless of our faith tradition, our creed, our ethnicity, we are members of just one family, God’s family. If only we can reverence that spark of divine in others, we wouldn’t have these wars and also the conflicts and turbulences that we see in our world.”

Auditions whittled an all-volunteer cast from about 70 to 35 — with more than 80 others behind the scenes. Canino put a Baptist in the lead as St. Francis in a cast representing a number of faiths.

Canino doesn’t want to give too much away about the play, but he says it gives a modern-day twist to the story of a saint whose life he examined in another play two decades ago.

“Father Louie wanted to do something special, so he wrote this wonderful play about the life of St. Francis, but also a play for our day and age,” Bauer said. “He was a peacemaker in his time and he believed we should take care of the earth and those things are relevant today.”

Canino would give Bauer a few lines of what he wanted to hear during each scene.

“I really tried to picture myself in the scene and to hear what the music would sound like in that scene,” Bauer said. “I play the piano and I just fiddled around until something sounded right.”

Bauer spent hundreds of hours since May on nine songs and an overture — using her husband Joe as a sounding board.

“He would come home at lunch sometimes and he would say, 'I don’t know about that.’ But if we both agreed on it, it was a go.”

Then, she would take the song to Canino.

“I think the more songs I did the more comfortable he was with it, and he’d say, 'Oh, just go ahead and do whatever you’d like,’” Bauer said.

Bauer is most thankful for the group of people who from the beginning prayed for the music and the play and everyone involved.

“I feel it’s God’s hand in all of this, and we are not getting in the way of what he wants to say.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com