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"Facing East," Carol Lynn Pearson's play about a Mormon couple
grieving by the gravesite of their gay son, which premiered at Salt
Lake's Plan-B Theatre Company last month, will be resurrected on New
York and San Francisco stages next spring.
Utah political activist and arts patron Bruce Bastian donated
$50,000 to develop the play, and will fund productions by Plan B in
rented Chelsea (New York) and Mission District (San Francisco) theaters,
with a budget estimated at $150,000.
"I'd say, yes, this is a pretty significant event in Salt Lake
theater history," says playwright Russ Lee, who is newly returned to
Utah after living in Boston, New York and Los Angeles but isn't involved
in this production. Lee's play "Nixon's Nixon" was produced at Salt Lake
Acting Company in 1996, and has received several New York productions,
including an off-Broadway revival this fall. "It's pretty rare because
it's so expensive to mount something in New York."
Bastian's hopes for the play about the aftermath of a gay man's
suicide are simple - and grandiose. "When I saw the play in Salt Lake, I
wanted to figure out a way to get it out to a larger audience," says the
philanthropist and board member of the Human Rights Campaign, a national
gay and lesbian lobbying group. "If the play saves a few lives, how much
is that worth? It sure as hell is worth a lot more than contributing a
bunch of money to politicians."
Plan-B is negotiating with the actor's and director's unions to
transport the Salt Lake cast and crew with the play, rather than holding
New York or San Francisco auditions. "There's a power in it being a
fully Utah production," says director Jerry Rapier, who claims Salt Lake
audiences turned the work into a "gay-son-and-mother-date" play. "Given
the particular subject matter of the play, there's an energy in that."
Pearson, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, is a poet and playwright who received national attention with
the 1986 publication of "Goodbye, I Love You," a memoir about her
ex-husband's death from AIDS. The writer claims she feels "a calling to
help hurting human beings" dealing with conflicts between faith and
sexuality.
"Of course, some kind of run in New York does give a play a certain
legitimacy, theatrically," Pearson said in a phone interview from her
Northern California home. "I hope that will give us that new kind of
fuel to take the play to wherever it might find a home. I still hope for
a tour of Utah."
Stories written by Utah writers already have been produced in New
York City and elsewhere. Utah writer Julie Jensen's "Two-Headed," which
premiered at the Salt Lake Acting Company, was produced in 2000 by an
off-Broadway theater company, while the work of other local writers,
including Tim Slover, Charles Morey and David Kranes, have been staged
by regional theaters. "Pirated," a musical by Weber State University
professor Jim Christian, which received premier productions at Weber and
Pioneer Theatre Company, has been optioned for a Broadway production.
But what's unusual about the next runs of "Facing East" is that the
entire Utah production will be transported lock, stock-and-graveyard to
New York City and San Francisco, providing the cast schedules
accommodate that. In fact, Pearson's play is thought to be just the
second show incubated before local audiences in recent years to be
transported to Manhattan.
Coincidentally, the other play, "Confessions of a Mormon Boy," also
concerns gay themes, and was written and performed by Steven Fales,
Pearson's former son-in-law. Fales' one-man show received a staged
reading at the 2001 Sunstone Symposium, and later played at the 2004 New
York International Fringe Festival.
Plan-B is negotiating final rental contracts for a one-month run in
May-June 2007 on the second stage of Chelsea's Atlantic Theatre Company,
and three weeks in August at San Francisco's Theatre Rhinoceros, which
describes itself as the world's oldest company "continuously producing
professional queer theater." Plan-B will produce, market and sell
tickets for the runs in the 99-seat New York theater and the 117-seat
California house.
"New York is the center of the theater world," says Rapier, Plan-B's
producing director. "And there's no one who's involved in the theater
that I know who hasn't had the dream of being able to work, just once,
in that arena.
The New York run will serve as something of a homecoming for
longtime Utah actor and choreographer Jayne Luke, who created the role
of Ruth, a grieving Mormon mother, in "Facing East." As a young
20-something actor, freshly graduated from Brigham Young University - as
she describes herself then "a young chubby ingenue" - Luke lived and
auditioned for five years in New York City.
Now 56, she's thrilled at the prospect of returning to work on a
Manhattan stage. "I can't believe this is happening to me," she says. "I
like to say that New York is the heart of the theater world, and the
rest of us are the arteries. I think it's so courageous, as it takes a
huge amount of energy to do this. Bruce Bastian is going to fund it, and
Jerry's going to do all the work."
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* ELLEN FAGG can be contacted at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621.
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