Gideon Burton's Blog

Standing Ovation for "Standing Still Standing"

Standing Still Standing, a new play by Melissa Leilani Larson, is not your typical romantic comedy. The couple is already married, but being tested by Ben's Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), which keeps him dozing rather than doting over his lovely wife of three years (Grace, played by the spirited Heidi Hathaway). He has withdrawn from working, from life, really, and this naturally wears on their relationship. Grace bears with her husband, spurring him along to consider a new home, a job opportunity, but Ben (played by the affable Will McAllister) spends more time in the world of dreams than working toward realizing the customary dreams of the newly married.

Marriage can often seem surreal, a constant state of unity and disunity, change and constancy, acceptance and impatience, yin and yang, male and female. A woman in the audience during the talk-back session commented that she has been married three years and still wakes up wondering about the stranger lying next to her. My wife and I celebrate our 22nd anniversary this week, and I remain profoundly mystified at who she is and what we are. This play has a disease throwing a wrench into the relationship, but really that just accelerated or compressed the reality of most marriages: matrimony itself is a chronic fatigue syndrome--especially when the kids arrive, but certainly not just because they do. Unlike the disease, though, marriage is glamorized. We end up with the ironic counterpoint of profound intimacies and subtle joys being intermingled with routine and good, old-fashioned bone-headed idiocy.

A Brave and Reverent Mormon Play: Little Happy Secrets

Perhaps the least accurate way to describe Melissa Leilani Larson's new Mormon play, Little Happy Secrets, would be in terms of the primary issue with which it deals, same-sex attraction. Unfortunately, homosexuality has become its own red herring, distracting many an important conversation or the success of a work of art because it has become so politically and religiously charged. Homosexuality is an ISSUE, something requiring people to take stands and poise themselves to be offended or to offend.

Finding the right artistic or rhetorical approach is everything in these matters. How can one assure one's audience that they are not going to be subjected to propaganda or preaching, whether from the left or the right? You do what Larson and the director and cast of this play did--you focus on the core human issues. You make homosexuality not an ISSUE (with all its inevitable dangers) but a subject--a reason for authentic art, not a pretext for divisive politics.

Review: God for President (New Play Project)

Religious identity in America may be more deeply partisan than political identity. But as Robert Bellah has convincingly argued, America sustains a "civil religion." The idea, articulated by Rousseau in The Social Contract, is that a few general religious ideas--the existence of God, belief in morality, and especially the rejection of religious intolerance--are held sacred by the people. There is a reverence for religious pluralism in the United States, a kind of civic pride that one's neighbor can be Jewish, Muslim, or whatever flavor of Christian, and good for us.

Katherine Gee's new play, God for President (which premiered at the Provo Theatre Company last night), is a celebration of civil religion.

Fire and Rain: The New Play Project

Primal elements themed the latest installment of the New Play Project's series of short plays, adding to fire and rain the fundamental of faith. These were no morality tales, no Sunday school homilies. As good drama should, these amateur productions explored and experimented. Diverse in theme and approach, they once again proved the viability and growing maturity of amateur LDS theater. (See also my review of their last round of plays from July, 2008)

Review: Long Ago and Far Away (The New Play Project)

Though I have yet to see any of the New Play Project's religious plays (promising more Mormon-oriented content), last night's recent batch of short plays, a 90 minute series called "Long Ago and Far Away" was no disappointment. My $5 (well, $10 for my wife and me) bought a lot of entertainment. We walked away talking about other friends we'd like to take back to enjoy this amateur troupe's lively fare.