KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

Joseph Landry (from left), Diana Roccograndi and Randall Terry, of Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex, perform a skit in front of Sen. Mark Warner's office in downtown Roanoke on Friday.

In the back of the motor home, the director put his two actors through a quick dress rehearsal.

"This has got to go like clockwork," said Randall Terry as they blocked a silent skit Friday morning. The infamous anti-abortion activist was dressed in surgical scrubs and a doctor's white coat. A stethoscope hung from his ears.

Terry, 50, and his staffers readied their props: plastic toddler dolls, a trick knife, a Halloween syringe, a bottle of fake blood.

"We're going to be executing babies," he joked as the trio, trailed by another staffer with a camcorder, stepped out onto Salem Avenue in Roanoke toward Sen. Mark Warner's downtown office.

This was the first of Terry's 10 scheduled stops on his five-day, five-state tour to criticize Democrat-led health care reform plans. For the notoriously theatrical founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, it was a return of sorts to an old stage.

In the 1980s and '90s, Terry was among the most outspoken and flamboyant opponents of abortion and, with his public displays, racked up dozens of arrests, including a three-month stint in federal prison for, according to The Washington Post, delivering a dead fetus to Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

He stayed active in his protests even after it became a federal crime to block abortion clinics, leading to a string of lawsuits against him and his organization. He was replaced in 1991 as the leader of Operation Rescue and is now director of the group Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex. A high-profile divorce, failed political bids and a bankruptcy filing followed. A New York Times profile on Terry in 2001 listed his debts at $1.7 million.

And aside from a stint in 2005 as spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents, who opposed her husband's efforts to discontinue her life support, he's kept a low profile until this year. In March he was arrested for trespassing during an anti-Obama protest at the University of Notre Dame, and he later offered a public response to the slaying of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller.

"He reaped what he sowed," Terry told interviewers in May.

Friday morning, at the entry to Warner's offices, the activist displayed a sign that read: OBAMA DEATH CARE: One dead patient at a time.

"At the core of Obama's health care policy is the murder of babies and the murder of the elderly," he said. "If this bill passes and they expect us to pay ... there will be horrific consequences to pay."

The consequences, as he explained them, would be contempt for the government; vandalism; and acts of violence against those perceived to be involved with abortions, but he denied involvement with violent anti-abortionists.

"This is not a threat, it's a warning," he said, then told his troupe, "Let's do skit one," and began to stab at baby dolls with a plastic knife. Given a pale-handed "thumbs down" from a staffer in an Obama mask, he pretended to give a lethal injection to another employee who was costumed as a trembling elderly woman.

"You really can save money if you kill granny," he said.

Those and other displays were performed twice before an audience of just three reporters, three cameras and the frosted-glass windows behind him.

Asked to comment on the visit, Warner spokesman Riki Parikh said, "We live in a democracy and people are free to express themselves in a variety of ways."

Area clergy members who have spoken out against abortion did not return phone calls Friday regarding Terry's visit to Roanoke.

"We usually have a few people come out. It's really early today," said Andrew Beacham, who works for Terry and is helping document the tour. "We're a little limited because we only have one camera."

Citing a G.K. Chesterton quote he's used in past writings, Terry defended his decidedly ghoulish protests. "That which is ridiculous deserves to be ridiculed," he said.