PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : ‘The Mormons’ at Highways

Two lanky, sultry Mormon missionaries mince and moan in “Meet the Mormons,” a piece of outrageous camp starring Curtis York and Robert Daniels. Performed at Highways in Santa Monica this week (and repeating Monday and June 19), the evening is sui generis. The duo’s eccentricities are frequently charming, but the pace and tone sometimes go slack and voices too often zoom from purr to scream when a lower decibel level might be more effective.

York, who looks surprisingly plausible in lipstick, dangling earrings, black skirt and high heels, offers a memory of being 7 years old and attending a church-sponsored Mother’s Day ceremony in which potted geraniums were passed down the rows of children to each mother. The day had an ugly ending--a violent and only dimly remembered sexual assault. “It was like I had to start covering something up,” he says, working his nylon-encased legs as if an itch wouldn’t stop.

At 13, the glowering bishop (York does this role too) questions him suspiciously about his sex life to determine his worthiness for special church work. A terrible feeling of “airlessness” had begun to descend again, York says, whereupon he sheds his top, revealing a black bustier, and segues into a graceful blue boa-waving number called “Goddess’s Rage.”

Daniels, transformed into the Trailer Park woman via a wig, metallic red fingernails and rubber breasts, has a dulcet-toned telephone chat with a girlfriend interrupted by an interminable call from her daughter, who has run away and gotten into all kinds of trouble. Daniels has this woman down pat, including the hair-adjusting gestures and the S-curved body. But she’s such a cliche (“They told me all I had to do was take Home Ec!” she cries) that one soon wearies of her.

The heart of the evening is the place where the Mormon religion and homosexuality meet--the intersection of childhood wholesomeness and terror, of being a missionary who is supposed to deliver the word of God and being a performer compelled to deliver the truth about himself. Although it’s fun to see York as the skipping, wand-waving Pink Goddess--and tolerable to indulge Daniels as a singing Dinah Shore--we often seem far afield from the deeper issues these guys have introduced.