Tonight in Provo, New Play Project begins a series of shows featuring five of their most popular plays:

“A Burning in the Bosom,” by Melissa Leilani Larson
“Foxgloves,” by Matthew Greene
“Gaia,” by Eric Samuelsen
“Adam and Eve,” by Davey Morrison
“Prodigal Son,” by James Goldberg

I have a vested interest in these revivals as I helped publish, through Peculiar Pages, the volume Out of the Mount which features these and fourteen other excellent plays produced by NPP over their short yet remarkably fruitful existence.

Currently, you can get two-for-one tickets to the first weekend’s shows if you invite ten or more Provo-local Facebook friends to the Facebook Event. They are also doing straight-up ticket giveaways to tonight’s show on their website and Facebook page.

I’m quite jealous of anyone close enough to see the show. I’ve gone on and on elsewhere about how much I love “Gaia” (1) and “Prodigal Son” (1 2) but all five of these plays are excellent and worthy of your attention (1 2 3 4 5 6). (Seventh witness via William Morris.)

Go and witness for yourself (Sept. 16-20 and 24-27, 7:30pm; $7 general admission, $6 students with ID).

And pick up a copy of Out of the Mount.

Then return and report.

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For those unable to attend, just buy the book already! Dally not!

And in the interest of full disclosure, Peculiar Pages is not only the imprint that will be publishing Monsters & Mormons, but it also asked me to provide a blurb for the anthology. Which I was initially nervous about, but happily did after reading the manuscript. Here it is:

With these 19 plays, the New Play Project ably makes its claim as one of the most ambitious and vibrant going concerns in the world of LDS culture to all of us mission-field Mormons who have only heard rumors and testimonies. Out of the Mount delivers comedy and tragedy and social commentary, allegory, politics and healthy doses of armchair philosophy and theology in plays that mainly focus on (as most good plays do) relationships that unfold via crackling dialogue. Whether it’s Clark Kent and Lois Lane applying for a marriage license or Adam and Eve feeling their way towards some sort of post-fall rapprochement or young couples falling in and out of love, these playwrights are writing for these latter-days, even when there’s nothing particularly LDS about their characters and settings. That said, what I love most about this anthology is that we get—especially with the fantastic concluding trio of “Gaia,” “Prodigal Son” and “Little Happy Secrets”—works that artfully and poignantly explore key aspects of the grand drama that is the Mormon experience.

You can buy Out of the Mount here; but you should also check out Theric’s series of posts on the anthology (including excerpts from some of the plays) over at the Peculiar Pages blog.

If you know anything about Angela Hallstrom, you should know that she is a person of taste and a keen parser of literariness.

And if you followed my Twitter reviews of her new short story collection (archived here–scroll up for the key), then you know that I did not feel equally positive about every story she collected. In fact, some I didn’t really care for at all. But not liking a story in a collection–or even several stories–is a far cry from disliking a collection.

Let me explain.

Darrell Spencer is one of the most respected fictionists among Mormon literary snobs and perhaps his most talked-about story is “Blood Work”–I’ve heard gushing over this story so many times I was sorely tempted to read Dispensation out of order just to f-i-n-a-l-l-y read it. (I felt the same way, incidentally, about Lee Allred’s “Hymnal” which I had heard so much about I would have broken all my fingers and paid double this volume’s asking price just to f-i-n-a-l-l-y get it into my newly crippled hands.) But I, Theric, am a true expert in delayed gratification and I proceeded in order.

En route to Spencer, I was introduced to some excellent stories like Levi Peterson’s “Brothers” (the best evidence I’ve come across that he deserves the love we give him), Stephen Tuttle’s “The Weather Here” (which might [?] be postapocalyptic–or [?] set in hell), Coke Newell’s “Trusting Lilly” (a bit obvious but absolutely lovely), Margaret Blair Young’s “Zoo Sounds” (which should have come off like a gimmick but was truly moving and excellently written), Larry Menlove’s, “Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon” (proof that God loves everyone–in the form of fiction that will offend your mother), and Karen Rosenbaum’s “Out of the Woods” (which breaks a lot of my rules [it's mostly flashbacks, for instance, a terrible cliché], but is clever and fresh all the same). And then I arrived at “Blood Work.”

And it was the most tawdry mess of— Let me put it this way: One step further and it would have been a parody of modern literary fiction. It was absurd.

I make this claim well advised that every proper Mormon literary snob (except me) will jump to Spencer’s defense, which is why I feel no guilt about railing him here. Clearly my opinion is in a minority. Angela, for instance, told me that “Spencer’s story grows richer for me w/ each reading. Definitely a literary story, concerned with language (some may say above all else, although I disagree) but a great example of the genre.”

This is Angela Hallstrom’s opinion, people. She wrote Bound on Earth. She deserves major props for turning Irreantum into a respectable fiction rag.

So what’s the deal?

Here’s something she said in regards to another story I knocked for its literary sins:

One of my favorite pieces in the whole anthology. Not the strongest in terms of storytelling, I agree with you there, but the language and imagery and the powerful yet subtle way she threads her themes throughout the piece knock me out every time I read it. And that last paragraph? Slays me.

Anthologies are great because they do allow such a range of style and tone and focus. It will be interesting to see which stories speak to different readers and why.

This is exactly right. If I had liked every single story in Dispensation, where’s the room for conversation? At that point, why not just reread the Book of Mormon if it’s so dang infallible?

An anthology of this sort–its job is not to provide you with loveydovey feelings all the way through. Its job is to represent the state of the artform, present an argument for What Is Excellence, and then force you to contend with that argument and the barrels of evidence accompanying it.

To me, one of Dispensation’s strongest selling points is that it is 448 pages of fiction. That’s 28 stories. That’s 71.25 cents per story. That’s a steal, folks. A steal. Even if you only like half of them, that’s under a buck-fifty per story you do like. About the same as my beloved One Story subscription. (Note: Dispensation’s currently on sale at the publisher’s site for 20¢ off per story.)

It’s so big you’re bound to like something–several somethings. And of the stories in those 448 pages you don’t like? Well. Now we have something to talk about.

Because if you don’t think that Eric Samuelsen’s “Miracle” is one of the best stories you’ve read this year I will drop dead in shock then defend it vociferously from the grave.

And that’s what an anthology should do.

It should get us talking.

Want to know what’s excellent in the world of Mormon fiction? Here’s one reader’s argument.

What’s yours?

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Contents:

Lee Allred, “Hymnal”
Matthew James Babcock, “The Walker”
Phyllis Barber, “Bread for Gunnar”
Orson Scott Card, “Christmas at Helaman’s House”
Mary Clyde, “Jumping”
Arianne Cope, “White Shell”
Darin Cozzens, “Light of the New Day”
Lisa Torcasso Downing, “Clothing Esther”
Brian Evenson, “The Care of the State”
Angela Hallstrom, “Thanksgiving”
Jack Harrell, “Calling and Election”
Lewis Horne, “Healthy Partners”
Helen Walker Jones, “Voluptuous”
Bruce Jorgensen, “Measures of Music”
Laura McCune-Poplin, “Salvation”
Larry Menlove, “Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon”
Coke Newell, “Trusting Lilly”
Todd Robert Petersen, “Quietly”
Levi Peterson, “Brothers”
Paul Rawlins, “The Garden”
Karen Rosenbaum, “Out of the Woods”
Lisa Madsen Rubilar, “Obbligato”
Eric Samuelsen, “Miracle”
Darrell Spencer, “Blood Work”
Douglas Thayer, “Wolves”
Stephen Tuttle, “The Weather Here”
Brady Udall, “Buckeye the Elder”
Margaret Blair Young, “Zoo Sounds”

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Content warning:

I’m not giving one. You have a coupla drunks in one story and a trio of serial torturers in another, an arthritic testimony here, a broken clavicle there–but nothing that, in my laissez-faire opinion, you need to stress about (those items are, after all balanced out by an altruistic rich guy, some faithful missionaries, and a pioneer woman successfully coming to terms with The Principle). The nature of this anthology just gives us “appropriateness” as one more thing to discuss. Besides, they’re,  I mean–

Perhaps my greatest disappointment with this book is that I didn’t feel like taking a shower after reading the Brian Evenson tale!

(The title’s a mouthful, I know.)

This is the first post in a five or six part series (to run on Thursdays) that explores the ethics of Latter-day Saint literature and criticism. Working within a framework of the redemptive paradoxes inherent in Mormon theology and the moral universe it embraces, the series attempts to probe the place of this ambiguity in the central, recurring conflicts in Mormon letters (particularly in light of the debate between those who think Mormon literature should primarily serve orthodox, didactic purposes and those who think it should provide a more challenging aesthetic), to present an economic reading of why much popular Mormon literature remains in the former camp, and to show how one contemporary Mormon writer has attempted to transcend this paradox—and thus to serve a more deifying need—in their own writing.

I. (Mis)Reading the Mormon Tragic Quest

In his recent review of Eric Samuelsen’s new play Inversion, Jerry Johnston introduces what is and should be a demanding discussion on the ethics of Mormon literature, then bows out before giving the dialog due course or even before acknowledging that he only tells part of the story. Because he takes the easy way out, I have to wonder how much homework he actually did before piecing his Mormon Times article together and posting it on the Web. This failure to really examine or review the subject at hand becomes apparent in his first sentence, ten words that could have been lifted directly from the playbill: “Eric Samuelsen is a faculty playwright at Brigham Young University.” While such a comment may imply that Samuelsen’s work, for all intents and purposes, is Church-sanctioned fare, it doesn’t really reflect, as Johnston suggests it does, the depth of the playwright’s artistic, cultural, and theological “gene pool.”¹ And yet, Johnston may have avoided this initial moment of shallowness by simply throwing “Eric Samuelsen” into Google’s search engine.

With this few seconds of typing and the click of a button, he might have been directed to Mahonri Stewart’s interview of Samuelsen on A Motley Vision. Beyond revisiting here what he already knew, Johnston might have learned that Samuelsen found his artistic inspiration to “write about [his] own culture”² by piggybacking on Spencer W. Kimball’s desire, as articulated in “A Gospel Vision of the Arts”, that “someone [would] […] do justice in recording in song and story and painting and sculpture the story of the Restoration, […] the struggles and frustrations; the apostasies and inner revolutions and counter-revolutions”³ of the Latter-day Saint soul. In this, Johnston might have also discovered that Samuelsen feels a “disconnect with Utah culture,”⁴ with the conservatism, both in culture and politics, that pervades the Beehive State and its predominant religious institution and way of life. Knowing this, Johnston might have been able to add a little depth to his reading of Samuelsen and not have been so stunned that this non-conservative professor from a deeply conservative university had joined with “a Salt Lake [theater] troupe with a penchant for mounting plays that would make a lumberjack blush” to stage his “bizarre”⁵ new play, especially since Inversion is not the first union of this playwright and the players of Plan-B.

With a bit more digging, Johnston could have also uncovered Samuelsen’s 2008 Association for Mormon Letters’ Presidential Address in which Samuelsen discusses his present view of Mormon arts and letters, including his fears about the corporatization and commodification of word and image and his assertion “that Literature is testimony. It’s a writer telling us what the world looks like from where he’s standing, or even better, imagining how it would look if he were standing somewhere else.”⁶

In the end, this few minutes of directed reading might have helped the reviewer better understand the avant-garde creator of such an avant-garde world as Inversion, according to the review, presents. Instead, Johnston spurts a few sketchy lines about the play’s sketchy plot and its inconclusive conclusion, then tries his hand at something of an interpretation, though, as he admits, he “can’t be sure” about his reading. (But really, when can we ever be sure?) Not having seen the play, I can’t dispute with him on interpretive grounds. I might guess, however, that the title has more to do with inverting our assumptions about certain things (including American/Mormon culture and the moral dilemmas of the universe) than with just the temperature inversion that smothers the “mountain rescue station [in which seven young people are trapped] […] in fog.”

I’m convinced, however, that the most damaging and damning aspect of Johnston’s review is not this failed reading of Samuelsen and his play, but rather the way his failure to read and write carefully results in overgeneralizations about and misrepresentations of Mormon culture and theology. Because of this and because of my belief that lazy, unkempt, patronizing, or shallow scholarship, even if masquerading as journalism, is intellectually dishonest and thus fails to fully serve its audience, I really take issue with what Johnston does next. With this comment, “What I am sure about is Inversion is not the kind of fare Mormons will flock to,” he launches into a excusive discussion of the reason why he didn’t like the play (as evidenced by the language and tone of his review) and why most Mormons won’t—or at least why they perhaps shouldn’t—like it either: because, he says, “Mormons, for the most part, like their theater tidier. They like a story that has a message.”⁷ While I agree that we Latter-day Saints, above most others, are obsessed (and perhaps rightfully so) with the quest for meaning and truth and that as humans we generally like our path to understanding straight and broad, without much risk laid against our hard-won (or not) faith, I don’t agree with the implication of this tidiness: that the moral universe and Mormon theology can (let alone whether or not they should) be tied up in a little bow and distributed as lesson favors at church to our friends and even to some of our enemies or that Mormon writers should maintain a clean and comfortable platform if they want to keep their audience engrossed or even if they want to keep an audience in gross. Such attempts, in my mind, trivialize and in effect undermine the tragic depths to which our forebears, including Christ and Joseph Smith, moved in their efforts to establish and redeem the truth by examining and reexamining, in action and in thought, the central contraries of existence and of the Mormon religious experience.

By reducing the Mormon tragic quest into such shallow and simplistic assumptions about the nature of the paradox driven universe, Johnston (my scapegoat for the impulse of cultural Mormons to strain at an ethical gnat even as we swallow a theological camel by failing to consistently engage with our own mythos) negates or at the very least underestimates the power and influence of Mormon theology and the Mormon God to persuade us into productive engagement with the eternal ambiguities of existence. Indeed, by essentially denying the demands of paradox their well-earned though sometimes culturally neglected place in Latter-day Saint literature, history, and theology, Johnston undercuts the tragic doctrinal insistence of Lehi that, without opposition,

righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore if it [existence] should be [reconciled into] one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. […]

And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; […] wherefore, all things must have vanished away.⁸

Johnston’s shallow review thus discredits the work of the many Mormon artists like Samuelsen who don’t blatantly “include a lesson or two in [their] work,”⁹ who see literature as experience, as a witness of life (which, at least in my experience, is never written in black and white and absolutely ripe with meaning) and who strive to capture the opposition inherent in all things in their literary worlds without blasphemously moving to reconcile one side with the other (an attempt, as William Blake also concedes, that would stop our progression and ultimately “destroy existence”¹⁰) or to maintain a devoted following.

(Next Thursday’s post: “Part II: In Exchange for the Soul.”)

Footnotes:

1 Johnston, Jerry. “Playwright’s scripts are a departure from Mormon morality tales.” Rvw. of Inversion, by Eric Samuelsen. Mormon Times. mormontimes.com. 23 July 2008. 25 July 2008.

2 Stewart, Mahonri. An Interview with Eric Samuelsen. A Motley Vision. www.motleyvision.org. 2 May 2006. 8 Aug. 2008.

3 Kimball, Spencer W. “A Gospel Vision of the Arts.” Ensign. July 1977.

4 Stewart.

5 Johnston.

6 Samuelsen, Eric. “Towards a Mission, Minus the Statement.” Presidential Address given at The Association for Mormon Letters Annual Meeting. 8 Mar. 2008. http://www.mormonletters.org/events/AMLprezaddress.htm. (For some reason the link has gone dead. It was there, I promise.)

7 Johnston.

8 2 Nephi 2:11, 13.

9 Johnston.

10 Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors Edition. M.H. Abrams, et al, eds. New York: Norton, 2001. 1384.