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.

Why did you decide to raise funds for a staging of “Little Happy Secrets”?

I attended the 2009 production in Provo not quite sure how I would feel about the show. I had heard the premise, but really I attended because I knew the director and playwright. The script really impacted me. I felt immediately that this is one of the great pieces of Mormon drama and I knew I wanted to be involved in bringing it to a larger audience. Fast forward one year and I’m now based in Davis County shopping around for a script to produce in Salt Lake City and I remember “Little Happy Secrets.” It’s perfect: a script I believe in, a playwright I’d like to support, and a small enough cast that I think we can manage a quality production at a premiere SLC venue.

Funding then became the next big question. I produce part-time while working during the day in a completely different industry. As a recent graduate the majority of my income goes towards paying debts and saving for car repairs. It’s just not feasible for me to lay down $4,500 for 6 months and risk not being able to make that money back. Theatre is a pretty risky investment and while I’m more than happy to invest my time and resources, I just can’t live in my car in the mean time.

When I ran across Kickstarter I realized that here is a method for funding a project while rallying support from the grassroots level. If the public really wants to support this play, then I’ll produce it. If they don’t, well, then I’ll just have to postpone my goal of helping this playwright and this play.

How did “Little Happy Secrets” playwright Melissa Leilani Larson react to the idea?

I know that this play is very dear to Mel (as I’m sure all of her plays are). She was very pleased at the possibility of taking the show to S, but not so confident we could raise the $4,500 needed to do it. She’s had many opportunities to hear how “Little Happy Secrets” has touched the relatively small audiences that have seen it, and I’m sure it’s only strengthened her own belief in this extremely important piece of drama.

Tell me about the method you are using, which I find very interesting: has it been used for projects like this before? How did you come up with the level-of-giving incentives? And what are you doing to publicize it?

I follow a good number of blogs and one day I stumbled across this website called Kickstarter. The basic idea is that someone has a project/play/movie/invention/album that they want to do. They set a goal of the funding needed to accomplish that goal and the deadline for when the funding needs to be in place (up to 90 days). They then offer level-of-giving incentives for the backers to the project. Friends, family & strangers pledge money towards the project and if the funding goal is reached by the deadline then the funds are released to the project owner. If you don’t reach the goal, then no one’s credit cards are charged and no funds are dispersed.

What does that mean for us? Well, we’re trying to raise $4,500 for the production (to pay for the space, and other basic production costs). Our deadline is July 31. If we raise $4,499 dollars and miss our goal by $1 then the project doesn’t happen.

Sad, I know. But I love this idea! Share the excitement of producing a show with individuals who want to show their support! After all, why produce a show if no one’s going to come see it? Theatre is about sharing and I thought this would be a great way to begin to connect with our local (and not-so-local) audience and introduce the script. It kind of requires an introduction.

Now, publicizing this campaign…that’s proving a challenge. So far the pledges we’ve received have been directly from word-of-mouth, and we’re thrilled that it has done so well. We’re contacting a few organizations we feel might be interested in the project and working on a few videos to help spread the word.

If you think about it, $4,500 isn’t very much money to stage a play, especially with theater rental costs. And yet that’s a pretty big number in relation to giving/fundraising in the world of Mormon culture. What are some of the challenges you face with this effort? What can AMV readers who aren’t local do to help the effort?

Get the word out. $4,500 is a very attainable number. Only 450 people need to donate $10 and the show happens. That’s the trick, though: spreading the word to 450 people willing to pledge that ten bucks to a good script and a good producer. I was talking with a NYC producer last year and he said something interesting, “Good theatre doesn’t make it to Broadway. Financed theatre makes it to Broadway.” This is an opportunity for our supporters to help produce good theatre. Our project is the first in what I hope becomes a long string of smaller productions being brought to a larger stage by the supporting public. So please, pledge any nickels and dimes you might have and then help spread the word!

Thanks Dave!

To donate to the “Little Happy Secrets” staging, visit the Kickstarter project page. There are some really cool incentives for pledges at various levels, including tickets to the play (which, if you aren’t local, you could donate to friends or family in Utah), a signed chapbook edition of “Little Happy Secrets”, an audio CD (at the $15 level this would also be a good choice for non-local supporters), top billing, dinner and more. As of right now (the evening of July 6), Dave and Melissa have raised $1,098 from 33 donors.

1. Admin: Bradly Baird on the artifacts of LDS memory
2. Anneke Majors: Minerva Red
3. Eric Russell:  In Defense of the Critics
4. Eric Thompson: Half Faked
5. Harlow Clark: Gadianton The Nobler, Reflections on Changes in the Book of Mormon, Introduction to Textual Variants Part IV
6. Jonathan Langford: The Writing Rookie #3: Off Balance
7. Katherine Morris: “Bread of Affliction” and Cultural Self-Consciousness
8. Kent Larsen: Why we need Mormon Culture
9. Laura Craner: Beware Brother Brigham (a review of the book by D. Michael Martindale)
10. Mahonri Stewart: Of Prophets and Artists: A Household of Faith Or A House Divided?
11. Patricia Karamesines: The Rhetoric of Stealing God
12. S.P. Bailey: The Things We Bring Home
13. Theric Jepson: The Hero’s Journey of the Mormon Arts
14. Tyler Chadwick: The Tragic Tell of Mormon Morality, Part IV
15. William Morris: Damn you Norman Manea!

Feel free to get all nostalgic and hagiographic in the comments. To peruse our archives by date or category, click on the drop down menus over there on the left. Or to see what each contributor has written, click on Contributors and the “posts” link next to his or her name.

Production Information-

Theater Company: New Play Project
Where: Provo Theater Company (100 North, 105 East, Provo, UT)
When: Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays, May 29-June 8. 7:30 pm evenings, 2 pm Saturday matinees.
Tickets: $8 for general admission, $6 for students and seniors. Tickets can be purchased or reserved @ www.newplayproject.com or through NPP’s managing director Adam Stallard at (801) 691-4494.

General Release-

The New Play Project is opening a much negelected page of Mormon History with the world premiere production of national award winning playwright Mahonri Stewart’s The Fading Flower.

The play centers on David and Hyrum Smith, youngest son of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his wife Emma (who was pregnant with David when Joseph was martyred). Having been raised to adulthood when we encounter him in the play, the story tells of David’s courtship with his sweetheart Clara Hartshorn; his support for his brother Joseph Smith III’s role in the Reorganized Chruch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (now the Community of Christ); and his conflicts with Latter-day Saint leaders in Utah, including Brigham Young and David’s cousin Joseph F. Smith, while a RLDS missionary trying to covert the LDS members in Utah.

While in Utah, David encounters information about his father from LDS leaders and members that completely alters his world view and has significant repercussions for both the LDS and RLDS faiths. The story, unknown to most Mormons, is fraut with drama, tension and powerful revelations.

“I’ve wanted to play David ever since I read the play almost three years ago,” said Amos Omer who is playing the pivotal role of David Smith, “He is one of the most complex figures in Mormon history. The role has presented some interesting challenges, but I’m very glad to have had the opportunity.”

“When researching this play, so much of the information was new to me,” said playwright and director Stewart, “I consider myself well read in my Church’s history, but this information electrified me when I first came across it. As an LDS culture, we leave Emma and her children behind in Nauvoo. The formation of the RLDS Church and its efforts to proselytize to the Mormons in Utah… well, it’s a complete mystery to most of us.”

Much of the action and conflict centers around Joseph Smith’s widow, Emma. Local, veteren actress Kathryn Laycock Little is portraying the vital role, ” I feel Emma has been judged harshly by many people, but I can empathize with her choices. This play has given me an opportunityto play a part of the Smith history that I had never really thought of before.”

Although the play tackles some difficult issues, such as Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage, Stewart said that he strives to present information in a “faith promoting and historical context. I try really hard to be respectful of my own LDS faith, the former RLDS faith and these powerful individuals who are represesented in the play, while still being intellectually honest, spiritually honest and historically honest. Obviously, I come to conclusions which reflect my own faith and worldview, but I’ve also made efforts to give balance to the story.”

Meridian Magazine

Mormon Times

Direct link to the mp3 file of the podcast

I live in San Juan County, Utah, which contains a portion of the Navajo reservation and has a significant Navajo population scattered throughout. I hear the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo mentioned frequently, especially in wintertime when local schools stage a reenactment.

In 1863, James H. Carleton ( the same James H. Carleton, I think, who buried the victims of the Mountain Meadow Massacre in May of 1859 and erected the original marker on the site) ordered Kit Carson to convince the Navajos to surrender to the U. S. Army. When the Navajos proved resistant, Carson burned their crops and killed their flocks, starving many Navajos out of their traditional homelands. The Army then forced an estimated nine thousand Navajos to make a three-hundred mile march to Fort Sumner in the Pecos River valley. The trip took almost three weeks. Many Navajo men, women, and children died along the way.

Conditions during the internment at Bosque Redondo proved less than advantageous for everyone involved, and in June of 1868, after the signing of a treaty granting the Navajo people 3.5 millions acres of their original homeland, the Dineh — “The People” — walked back to their four sacred mountains. The story goes on from there, but that’s enough to provide some background.

I found the idea of my daughter playing a Navajo making The Long Walk difficult to wrap my mind around, but I let her do it. She practiced with the cast for a few days and then performed for three nights, including on Pioneer Day. As instructed, I braided her long hair every night. Out of curiosity to see how this was going to work, I attended the pageant on the third and final night.

Being a convert to the church and a new arrival to this area, I lacked the ingrained pioneer narrative to understand all of what I witnessed at the pageant. At one point, during the opening, international-flavored talent show, my daughter appeared next to me in costume, a dress made of fabric meant to simulate buckskin. Bright ribbons of Native American-themed trim decorated the dress’s neck and hem. White polyester or rayon yarn dangled from the arms forming “fringe.” Still, the overall effect was striking — and a little disturbing, since I really didn’t know what to make of the sight.

If my daughter’s Indian get-up proved difficult to take in, the pageant itself posed greater mysteries. Years ago, when I lived in the East, I made the obligatory pilgrimage with my Mormon youth group to the Hill Cumorah Pageant. I was able to comprehend the storyline, which followed the church’s overarching narrative in general. By contrast, the storyline of The Voices of San Juan Pageant meandered along a local narrative and through regional identities with which I’m unfamiliar. While the pageant was well-acted and visually engaging, and the setting — a high desert meadow bordered with a stooped canyon wall and thunderstorms flashing dramatically in the background — was quite pretty, I spent much of the evening feeling bemused.

The pageant opened with a slide show of local sights, mostly photographs of scenic grandeur, flashed across a large screen. A voice-over announced in Navajo and then English, “God himself will help tell the story if your heart is pure.” Hm, maybe that was my problem.

The body for the pageant’s narrative is built upon an unusual chasis: an elderly Navajo man on his deathbed telling his life’s story to his two sons and a long-time white friend kneeling at his bedside. The old man explains that he’s not afraid to die, but that he wasn’t always at peace with death. He tells how a white man who had been drinking and driving struck and killed his beloved wife. He says, “Pain choked out other feelings …. Black anger grew inside.” For a long time after his loss he loathed white men, even sending his kids to the reservation where white influence would not touch them.

He needed a job, he tells his sons and his friend, but everything he found involved working with white men. Finally, he took a job at a trading post. While working there, he fell ill, and only the white trader he worked for came to look in on him. At this point in the pageant, the light on the old man dims and audience members watch a younger version of the man act out elements of the the story.

The trader brought the missionaries to give him a blessing. While he was recovering, he had a dream. His great-grandfather came to him and told him to let his anger go. There are two ways to treat a rattlesnake bite, his great-grandfather said. You can pursue the creature until you kill it, which leaves your life still in peril, or you can get the venom out of your system with all haste.

When he fully recovered, the young man converted to the church. Then came the part of the pageant that I later understood to be one of the important themes of the pageant: Mormons and Native Americans share a common narrative — white authority abandoned and attacked them, driving both groups from their sacred homelands. The old man narrator relates how his grandfather appeared to his younger self during that same dream and told him how his great-grandfather had been forced to take The Long Walk of the Navajos to Fort Sumner. As this narrative within a narrative unfolds, spotlights light up the ground stage right and audience members witness Navajo men, women, and children walking along slowly, accompanied by a soldier escort. Some drop to the ground and die. My daughter said that angels came and escorted away those who died, but I was concentrating on finding her in the crowd and missed the angels. Finally, I saw her walking among the Navajos, her head bent down, her stride slow and laboured. On her back she wore a cradleboard. She looked quite forlorn.

The next segment portrayed Mormons making their own Long Walk. Jens Nielsen, one of the original settlers of the Bluff Mission in the southern end of the county, in company with one of his plural wives Elsie, faced trouble on the trek to Utah when his feet froze. Jens exhorted Elsie to leave him and save her own life, but she commanded him to get in the handcart and pulled him to the next camp.

During this scene, as Elsie pulls Jens along in the handcart, they cross metaphorical paths with the Navajos who reenter the stage once more toiling their way on the Long Walk. Neither group acknowledges the other. The Navajos walk in the opposite direction from the one they took earlier in the pageant, which suggests that, like the Mormons on the overland treks, they were journeying to their homeland. Elsie turns the handcart and takes up position at the end of the Long Walk procession, dovetailing the two narratives into a single shared storyline.

Other elements of the pageant’s storyline reinforce this intertwining of narrative roots. For instance, the pageant depicts the scene from the Book of Mormon where Ammon enters the land of the Lamanites intending to convert them. Ammon, played by a young white man, walks down a path and up over a footbridge. When he crosses the footbridge, several Lamanites, played by Navajos, jump out and seize him. They take Ammon before King Lamoni (who appears in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, too). In the VSJ Pageant, Lamoni is played by the tall, handsome, part-Navajo-part-white son of the neighbor who invited my daughter into the pageant. The voice over during this segment follows the Book of Mormon account. Lamoni asks Ammon if he desires to dwell in the land among the Lamanites, and Ammon replies that indeed he does, “perhaps until the day I die.” Lamoni grips Ammon’s shoulder in a gesture of welcome. I’m familiar, of course, with Ammon’s encounter with King Lamoni, but the distinct San Juan County historical context — the one I’m not very familiar with — puts a different spin on the story, one I can sense even if I can’t quite fathom it.

Like I said, I don’t know enough about the local history to grasp all the under- and overtones at work in this pageant. What does strike me, however, is the generosity with which the Navajos who have converted to Mormonism share their original and identity-defining stories with the white culture surrounding them. Regarding Native American arts in general, folklorist Barre Toelken, in his book The Anguish of Snails (Utah State University Press: 2003), says that:

… much of the traditional art is already addressed to us [whites], aimed at us, and performed in front of us (in many cases because of us). It reflects our presence as well as tribal consciousness. So our considerations are not just another charitable exercise in understanding “the other” but an attempt to recognize our own presence in the picture, a picture that, despite this ironic inclusiveness, is nonetheless constructed and understood from a different set of assumptions than our own (38-39).

My job as a neighbor to many Native Americans and as an occasional teacher of English composition at a local college with a high Native American enrollment is to try not to assume too much. My belief that I often do assume too much probably played a minor role in my disquiet with my daughter’s “playing Indian” in the pageant. That, and I’m unsure how to recognize my presence in the picture.

The Euro-American Mormon narrative strain in the pageant — the one where the Mormon pioneer storyline blends so smoothly with the Native American one — is completely foreign to me, not only because I’m a convert to the church and my pioneer narrative operates more on a metaphorical level but also because the assumptions behind the Mormon take on their relationship to Native Americans are varied and complex. The only material about the Mormon stance toward Native Americans I’ve read recently comes from Shannon Novak’s House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (U of U Press: 2008). To my ear, the material she presents on the subject of Mormons’ attitudes toward Native Americans sounds notes of former doctrine that has passed into the cultural half-life of folk belief, so I don’t know how much of what she says is relevant to contemporary Mormon culture as displayed in the pageant. Nor do I know how representative of churchwide attitudes and beliefs are the local Euro-American Mormon attitudes toward Native Americans. Also, I’m no expert on how doctrine shifts nor am I myself a representative Mormon where the older beliefs are concerned. But Novak says:

Young’s warning [that if Uncle Sam invaded Utah he would rouse up the Indians in alliance against the army] reflected a fundamental doctrine of Mormon theology: the belief in a close genealogical link between Latter-day Saints and Native Americans, a link that destined the two races to unite against their “Gentile” adversaries…. Based on … scriptural premises, American Indians could be construed as “both a cursed and a chosen people”…. And indeed, from the earliest Mormon missions to the Ohio frontier, Indians were seen as benighted “children of the forest” who were nonetheless junior partners in the epic struggle to restore Zion (174).

On top of all my other layers of unknowingness, I don’t know anything of the origins of the Voices of San Juan Pageant. How or if such attitudes as both Toelken and Novak describe co-mingle in its script, I can’t be sure. Generally speaking, such narrative confluences display ironic tensions and harmonies that can be likened to those expressed in geological confluences, such as where two rivers come together, each with its own energy and origins. Mystery, surface and depth tensions, and grand spectacle are to be expected.

What I do think is that I will trust the invitation of my Navajo neighbor and allow my daughter to play a Navajo taking The Long Walk in the local Mormon pageant, should the opportunity arise again. Hopefully, my daughter walking, by invitation, a Navajo narrative path, won’t be assuming too much. Furthermore, she will get to walk a few hundred feet in somebody else’s moccasins, the meaning of which will dawn on her, and perhaps me, little by little each time.

A quick search on the Internet showed that, currently, seven Mormon pageants run during the year, most of them during high summer. They are the Hill Cumorah Pageant in New York (”Come feel the Savior’s Love”); the Mormon Miracle Pageant in Manti, Utah; the Nauvoo Pageant in Nauvoo, Illinois; the Mormon Handcart Pageant in Nephi, Utah; the Oakland Temple Pageant in Oakland, California, which lds.org says has been suspended indefinitely; the Castle Valley Pageant in Castledale, Utah, which my son attended one year; the Clarkston Pageant, also called the “Martin Harris Pageant,” which starting this year will be performed only on odd-numbered years, and the Voices of San Juan Pageant, which appears to maintain a web presence only through comments visitors make on personal blogs, etc. Mesa puts on a Easter Pageant every year. Wikipedia describes some of the Mormon pageants as missionary tools and “faith-promoting family events.”

If anybody else knows of a Mormon pageant I haven’t mentioned, please add it in the comments. Also, I’d like to hear other people describe their pageant experiences in the comments. I’m very interested in knowing what you think of Mormon pageants and in hearing what role they’ve played in your lives. Or if you can supply greater insight into the origins or backstory of the Voices of San Juan Pageant, by all means, lay it on me; I need a crash course!

BYU Experimental Theatre Club to premiere “Prometheus Unbound” July 31-Aug. 9

Written by award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart

The Brigham Young University Experimental Theatre Club’s world premiere of “Prometheus Unbound” will begin Thursday, July 31, and run Friday and Saturday, Aug. 1-2, and Thursday through Saturday, Aug. 7-9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nelke Theater of the Harris Fine Arts Center.

Seating will begin at 7 p.m. Tickets are $8 for presale through the BYU Fine Arts Ticket Office at (801) 422-4322 and www.byuarts.com. Tickets may also be purchased the night of the performance for $10 at the door. There will be no performances Sunday through Wednesday.

The show is directed by Penny Pendleton and is sponsored by the BYU Theatre and Media Arts Department.

Derived from a long tradition of plays about the Greek titan Prometheus, the play by national award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart taps into the traditions of Aeschylus and Percy Shelley. Stewart’s unique take on the story follows a group of heroes recruited by a temple aide claiming to have received a vision that will guide them in their quest to free the titan.

“I consider it a kind of spiritual allegory or mythological morality tale,” Stewart said. “This ancient story has a modern context.”

This marks the first major collaboration between the BYU ETC and students from neighboring Utah Valley University. Students from both universities are involved with all levels of the production: directing, stage managing, costumes, lights, acting and producing.

“This has been a great opportunity to acknowledge the work that each university is doing to create professionals in the arts,” said ETC board member Dave Mortensen.

For more information, visit byu-etc.com