Mormons in ‘America’: A Believer’s View

Never have Mormon characters been more prominent on a mainstream American stage than they are right now at the Mark Taper Forum in Tony Kushner’s acclaimed epic “Angels in America.”

Three of the principal characters are Mormons, several phrases right out of Mormon doctrine are uttered, and one memorable scene takes place at the Mormon Visitors’ Center in New York.

Kushner, however, is not a Mormon. Nor is anyone else associated with the production, as far as a theater spokesman knew. So how does a real Mormon feel about the fictional ones in “Angels”?

“They’re people on the eccentric fringe who are being used to represent the center,” said Norm Barlow, who saw “Angels” in order to write a report for the church’s Southern California Public Affairs Council.

“All of the Mormon characters are dysfunctional,” he added. The two main Mormons in the play are so unhappily married that she’s addicted to Valium and he leaves her for a man.

Not that Barlow, who directs the church institute adjacent to Cal State Northridge, denies such Mormons exist; he has counseled some of them, he said. But “they’re not representative of mainstream Mormons.”

He acknowledged that the play’s third main Mormon, the mother of the gay husband, becomes more sympathetic as the play progresses, just as her son becomes less so. And she gets to rebuke one of the other characters for stereotyping her without knowing her--Kushner’s “effort to be fair,” noted Barlow. “But a 15-second scene isn’t much in a seven-hour play.”

Barlow fears that “Angels” might “foster an atmosphere where seeds of mutual distrust grow”--and that this could lead to some form of Mormon-bashing. Still, “I don’t think (Kushner) was endeavoring to attack the church. He was endeavoring to use the church as a sort of foil to get out his real message.”

Kushner might not disagree with that. In a separate conversation, he identified Mormonism as only one of several crumbling “belief systems” in his play and said that all such systems can more or less “stand in for one another.”

Gay Mormons have written to Kushner, he said, praising his play as a vindication of their own anger at the church’s strictures regarding homosexuality. But “it was not my intention to trash the theology.” He sees links between Mormon doctrine and his own Judaism.

He noted that Mormons “aren’t very specific about hell and damnation” and he’s “attracted to any religion that doesn’t operate on a carrot-and-stick principle. They have a wonderfully fluid sense of the afterlife.” Furthermore, he views Mormon history as “one of the great American stories.”

Kushner was introduced to Mormons via a gifted young student he taught in summer school in Louisiana a dozen years ago. He met the girl’s family, and she gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon as a going-away gift.

Since then, he hasn’t known many Mormons, but he has done his homework, and Barlow acknowledged it, citing Mormon phrases in the script that most non-Mormons wouldn’t have heard. Kushner said he initially believed he had thought up some of those phrases, only to realize later that he had picked them up in his research.

Not everything in “Angels” reflects that research, though. Take the angels themselves. “We don’t believe that those angels who are messengers from God are female,” Barlow said, “or that they have wings” (or, it goes without saying, that one of them might make lesbian overtures to a Mormon mom). Judging from “Angels,” Kushner believes otherwise.

WHERE TV STATIONS FEAR TO TREAD: Speaking of “Angels in America,” the dearth of coverage of theater by local television stations has never been so obvious. Though the Taper production has been reviewed (and largely hailed) by a number of New York and national publications, by papers in San Francisco and Salt Lake City and Washington and London, not one of the local television stations has reviewed it. Nor did they review “The Kentucky Cycle,” the two-part epic that played the Taper earlier this year and then won the Pulitzer Prize.

ANGELENOS IN N.Y.C.: A contingent of L.A. artists will open the New York Shakespeare Festival’s “Mo’ Madness,” the group’s second annual “Festival of New Voices,” at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York this week.

Roger Guenveur Smith is scheduled to perform his “Christopher Columbus 1992” on Tuesday and Saturday on a double bill with a piece by George Emilio Sanchez, a native Angeleno now living in New York. On Wednesday and Friday, Shishir Kurup will perform “Assimilation” and Rose Portillo will perform Theresa Chavez’s “L.A. Real.” Next week, Han Ong will do two performances of “Corner Store Grocery.”

Curated by George C. Wolfe, the festival last year spotlighted two pieces that went on to become greater hits: Anna Deavere Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror” and John Leguizamo’s “Spic-o-Rama.” But the Smith, Kurup and Chavez pieces need no introduction to the L.A. audiences who saw them at the Taper’s “Out in Front” festival last month.