Posted by:
longtallsally
(
)
Date: May 07, 2013 11:59AM
I love this play. Besides being extremely funny and entertaining with wonderful music, dancing and great costumes,it has layers of complexity that keep me thinking about what was conveyed. There is the obvious layer--the contrast, masterly portrayed, between the brutal reality of war-torn and disease-ridden Uganda and the tools that Elder Price has to "help"--a thin starchy offering of Book of Mormon lore. In the play we are then subjected to a distilled potion of helpful suggestions for Elder Price so that he can establish a mental framework to deal with cognitive dissonance. (The song "Turn It Off" is one of the features of this distilled potion, to which I mentally substituted the words "put in on the shelf") Meanwhile the facial expressions and body language of the missionaries captures Mormon cultures so very well that that part was entertaining to me all on its own.
But there is another layer to this play--one which has more universal appeal. It is a sociological portrait of how new religions are formed--a psychological portrait of the mental adjustments people make in the face of change and conflict, and a message about the provisional abilities of organized religion, no matter how well intensional, to ease the troubles of humankind.
I thought there seemed to be a sort of salute to Shakespeare in this production: there was a play within a play, reflecting distorted images of events, there was an important role for the fool (elder Cunningham) and there were men playing women's parts (the mothers of the missionaries at the start were played by men.)
About the audience:
My son, who is an experienced theatre-goer in New York City, and makes a study of such things, said that the audience was not the typical Broadway audience. He surmised that there were many men in the audience who did not especially aspire to attend a Broadway play and were likely attending their very first one. He thought the audience consisted of a more highly educated crowd than usual, say "more techy" and "hip" (his words)--not the usual heartland-of-America tourist crowd.
My son-in-law, who has very little exposure to LDS culture, was astonished by the insipid role of Jesus in the play--that was a new idea to him. He was also wondering why there was an absence of content about Mormon women, suggesting that because of this the play was a bit flawed--some time should have been devoted to women's reality. I told him that this lack demonstrated further the play's mastery of its subject--mirroring Mormon women's not-quite-important-enough-to-notice--not-quite-ready-to-be-people status in the Mormon universe.