Behind the Mormon curtain Essay Example For Students

Behind the Mormon curtain Essay At TheatreWorks West in Salt Lake City, an original play, The Ballad of the Mountain Meadows, is in rehearsal. Playwright Raymond Hoskins, who is also acting in the show, is at odds with artistic director Fran Pruyn. Hoskins is defending what for him is an artistic imperative: honest representation. Pruyn is mediating on behalf of what for her audience is a cultural imperative: idealistic representation. The audience will be largely Mormon, and the historical event she and her company are dramatizing is a massacre of more than 120 non-Mormon immigrants in 1857, perpetrated by some of the ancestors of that very audience. Unlike other regions which may be dominated by a particular group, Utah, which is 70 percent Mormon, seems to be characterized by a collectivist mentality which by definition reduces individual perspective to personal threat. A spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or LDS, Don LeFevre, has defined the Churchs wary position by stating that ecclesiastical discipline toward those who question authority is partly designed to safeguard the purity, integrity and good name of the church. While the LDS history of pragmatic support for the arts continues to this day, a people once on the literal and ideological fringe of America have become what one scholar has termed super-Americans. American or not, Mormon art then and now has emerged out of a uniquely un-American collectivism. An LDS artist who challenges or defies church positions faces more than social censure; church membership may be at stake. If he or she is employed in one of the organizations vast holdings such as Salt Lakes CBS radio and TV affiliate, Beneficial Life, Bonneville Communications and Brigham Young University, the largest church-owned university in the nation job security may also be jeopardized. Often billed as the showplace of the LDS Church, Brigham Young situated south of Salt Lake City in Provo sets the standard for free-expression in the rest of Mormondom. Ariel Ballif, resident set designer at Pioneer Theatre Company and co-owner of Theatre 138 (once the only Salt Lake theatre outside the University of Utah), attended BYU as a youth and remembers Noel Coward comedies produced without cocktails and cigarettes, and Coca-Colas being the initiating lubricant for the hallucinations in Harvey. Things appear to have loosened up considerably since Ballifs days at BYU. Last season, Heubener, a play by Russian professor Tom Rogers, was restaged after a 15-year moratorium; initially banned from production at Ballifs Theatre 138 or elsewhere by church and/or university officials (Rogers will not say which), the play tells the true story of Heubener, a 17-year-old Mormon in Nazi Germany who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets copied on a church mimeograph machine. After the boy and three friends were caught by the SS, Heubener was excommunicated by the church leader in his German district before he was executed by the Nazis. Heubeners church membership was restored posthumously. Is a BYU production of Heubener a sign of more liberal statewide artistic standards, or does is it simply mean that theres finally enough critical and historical distance from the issue to make it safe? BYU anthropologist David Knowlton asserts in a recent Associated Press article that there is an organized inquisition in process at BYU, under the guise of a proposed academic freedom policy. If this is the case, sensitive issues like feminism, sexuality and artistic expression are not likely to fare well. Says Knowlton, I make the point that an ecclesiastical approach to academic freedom and theology is not workable. He has been threatened with excommunication from the church if he continues speaking to the press about non-church-sponsored gatherings such as the annual Sunstone Symposium, a broad-based, extra-ecclesiastical gathering to discuss Mormon ideology as it relates to current social and cultural issues. In what the Denver Post has called the Church State, its arguable that there are consequences for any artist who challenges church positions; after all, art in Utah must by definition appeal to an audience with a history of obedience to church policy. The strength of this public obedience becomes evident in state politics. In 1981 when the military announced that Utahs west desert was the preferred site of the MX missile system, Spencer Kimball, then LDS church president and prophet, issued a statement to an overwhelmingly pro-MX constituency condemning the selection of the site. Virtually overnight, the Mormon population capitulated. According to polls taken after the church statement had been issued, 80 percent of Utahns opposed the plan. Though to a certain extent all artists must play to their social terrain, in Utah the social terrain is holy ground. When artists deal with, for example, the redefinition of womens roles or the homosexual lifestyle, they are taking issue with divine edict. Mormons revere a prophet who, like Moses, literally speaks for God through revelation; church policy has an uncanny way of becoming public personality. When Carol Lynn Pearson, a Mormon writer and actress best known for her book, Goodbye, I Love You, a stirring account of her ex-husbands AIDS-related death, suggested in her one-woman show, Mother Wove the Morning, that women need to explore the female side of deity, Mormon leaders indirectly took her to task. Six days before the show opened for a repeat run in Utah last year, Gordon B. Hinckley of the LDS First Presidency publicly denounced any discussion of the generally accepted but largely tabled Mormon notion of Mother in Heaven. That Pearson includes in her show the testimony of Mormon first lady Emma Smith undoubtedly reinforced the concern of the church hierarchy. If her local bishop takes disciplinary action against Pearson on ecclesiastical grounds, her church membership may be in jeopardy. Commedia dell"arte EssayThe spectrum of local theatre that does travel outside Utah rarely includes a portrayal of the dominant regional figure the Mormon character. There are few exceptions. Wendy Hammonds Ghostman, a tale of child sexual abuse in a small Utah community, creates tragic characters who are incidentally Mormon. Emmett Fosters autobiographical solo show, Emmett, A One-Mormon Show, which played at the New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s, is part-nostalgic and part-derisive about growing up gay and Mormon. It is those playwrights of Mormon heritage focusing on more universal themes who seem to enjoy greater success in exporting plays that reflect the region. James Arringtons one-man show Farley Family Reunion is farcical folk theatre not unlike National Public Radios Prairie Home Companion. Las Vegas, which culturalist Jean Baudrillard called the great whore across the desert, is the setting for Aden Rosss comedy Ladies Room, which takes place in the lounge of C aesars Palace, and for David Kraness related pieces, 1101 and 1102. Kranes has also explored the thin line between the real and surreal as suggested by the west desert terrain in his Cantrell. The strongest depiction of Mormon themes and characters in recent American drama can be found in Tony Kushners Angels in America, currently running at the National Theatre in London and due this season in Los Angeles and New York. Kushner presents what may be the two most resonant, non-historical Mormon figures ever seen on stage and that such characterization has issued from a non-Mormon playwright says as much about the failure of LDS dramatists to transcend the self-consciousness of their social and cultural boundaries as it does about Kushners ample talent. Kushner teases out of Mormonism its most fascinating (and unfortunately diminishing) theological trope: the conviction that humanity is on the threshold of revelation. Whether Kushners model of Mormon drama will inspire other Utah playwrights to explicate the Mormon faith and culture honestly remains to be seen. Kranes, who is also an English professor at the University of Utah, generally sees his LDS students producing work that is pegged at one of two poles: apostate and angry, or in service of the faith. There are forces that confuse, complicate and put pressures on those who would be Mormon artists, says Kranes. Mormonism is not used in the same way that, for instance, Judaism is used by novelist Chaim Potok; that is, to wrestle with the angels of his belief. There is no space for Mormons to question their tradition within the tradition. Nancy Melich, theatre critic at the Salt Lake Tribune for more than 20 years, agrees. For the Mormon artist, she says, the emphasis is always on the church. The Mormon label makes a statement to the public that ultimately isolates the artist and the community from the rest of society. Strictures from within, however, are not the only constraints on Mormon writers. Tom Rogers, who has written several plays at BYU dealing with Mormonism, has taken a post-office box outside of Utah hoping to market his plays more successfully. Rick Gould, too, has been frustrated in his efforts to get further training as a playwright. Though his best work deals comically and dramatically with Mormonism, there has been pressure from the academic program to which he has applied to eschew the subject and draw instead upon his half-Japanese heritage to accommodate the fashions of multiculturalism. Meanwhile, in the wake of favorable reviews for The Ballad of the Mountain Meadows, ticket sales at TheatreWorks West are escalating. Earlier, to everyones surprise, actor and company board member B.K. Henrie, a direct descendant of a Mormon leader of the massacre detailed in the play, became unnerved by the material and walked out of rehearsal. Individuals with the same names as some of the Mormon characters are reserving seats for the controversial show. Raymond Hoskinss script is lyrical, his own acting arresting. Fran Pruyn moves her cast through a series of living tableaux which hold in awesome tension the dreams and expectations of the ill-fated Arkansas and Missouri settlers en route to California. Hoskinss indictment of Brigham Young (Richard Scharine) as indirectly responsible for the massacre is evident as the character mounts a raised pedestal engraved with the famous Sunstone, which adorned the cornerstone of the violently destroyed LDS Nauvoo Temple, to deliver speeches lifted directly from the public record. This drama has been staged with the influence of the early Mormon hierarchy ever-present; Utah theatre in general seems to play in the apse of the LDS church. The weight of history and religious influence generates a tension which fuels both Mormon and non-Mormon artistic enterprise in this unique crucible of American culture.