Last night I attended the premiere of Carol Lynn Pearson’s newest play, Facing East, presented by the Plan-B Theatre Company. It runs November 16 through November 26 at the Black Box at Rose Wagner Theatre in Salt Lake. If you have a chance, I encourage you to see it. If you have seen it, or read it, I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Briefly, the play is set in a cemetery in Utah. Alex and Ruth McCormick are lingering following the funeral of their 28-year-old son, Andrew, who had taken his own life after succumbing to the struggle between his LDS faith and his homosexuality.

His father’s turmoil is palpable, and Charles Lynn Frost as Alex McCormick effectively carries a desperate, seething, and longing pain throughout the course of the 75-minute play.

Jayne Luke as Ruth portrays a mother desperately trying to hold on to normalcy, desperately seeking solace, and clinging to the standard statements one might hear, or express, at an LDS funeral under such tragic circumstances. Her performance is at once both powerful and difficult to watch – she captures our resolute culture, yet displays our weaknesses in a painful and plain manner.

Midway through the production we meet Marcus, Andrew’s partner, played by Jay Perry. As the couple faces their first meeting with their son’s partner, emotions boil over and expose the raw struggles faced by so many families forced to navigate the difficult path between institutional teachings and family struggles.

Pearson intersperses some comic relief throughout the play, but overall this is a dramatic production that rushes headlong into the pain and confusion of many LDS families.

A few personal thoughts:

First, I found it disconcerting that the character of Ruth was written and portrayed as a resolute and dogmatic individual. There were moments of tenderness, but those were overshadowed by such elements as her relief that her son was gone and thus not able to continue in sin, or her concern more for appearance than personal healing. It was striking that the character most interested in facing the pain and in seeing the humanity of the son was the father, while the mother wished to push him away to a future celestial reunion.

On further reflection, portraying the father as the cold or dogmatic character would have been too easy. Pearson forces us to look at our beliefs in stark relief when she places them upon the shoulders of the mother. It would be too easy to dismiss a cold and unforgiving father as a “typical male”. By switching the expected roles, Pearson opens a festering sore and invites us to cleanse it.

Second, Jay Perry as Marcus (and, in a flashback, as Andrew) delivers a performance that swings wildly from deep anger and pain to tenderness, hope, and peace. Some of the most striking lines are written for his character, and his delivery of a comparison between loving the sinner and hating the sin with loving a tree but hating the blossoms exposes the trite nature of that line as it applies to homosexuality.

Finally, I found that not only is Pearson’s work something of an indictment of the worst of our culture, it also contains elements that celebrate the best of our culture. Elements such as the story of the bishop’s counselor and his wife or the longing of Andrew’s sister to navigate both worlds with her discrete actions to include him in the family demonstrate that our culture, while troubled with respect to this issue, is not monolithic, it is not beyond hope.

The performance of this play coincides with the publishing of Pearson’s latest book, “No More Goodbyes”, and comes 20 years after her seminal book, “Goodbye, I Love You.”

For more information on this play and her books, you may visit her site at http://www.clpearson.com. You may also be interested in listening to the mp3 of her session at this past Sunstone Symposium, where she reflects on the 20 years since publishing Goodbye, I Love You and reads selections from No More Goodbyes. The session ID is SL06326.