'Facing East' will be reborn in New York, San Francisco
"Facing East," Carol Lynn Pearson's play about a Mormon couple grieving by the gravesite of their gay son, which premiered at Salt Lake's Plan-B Theatre Company last month, will be resurrected on New York and San Francisco stages next spring. Utah political activist and arts patron Bruce Bastian donated 50,000 to develop the play, and will fund productions by Plan B in rented Chelsea (New York) and Mission District (San Francisco) theaters, with a budget estimated at 150,000. "I'd say, yes, this is a pretty significant event in Salt Lake theater history," says playwright Russ Lee, who is newly returned to Utah after living in Boston, New York and Los Angeles but isn't involved in this production.
Lee's play "Nixon's Nixon" was produced at Salt Lake Acting Company in 1996, and has received several New York productions, including an off-Broadway revival this fall. "It's pretty rare because it's so expensive to mount something in New York." Bastian's hopes for the play about the aftermath of a gay man's suicide are simple - and grandiose.
"When I saw the play in Salt Lake, I wanted to figure out a way to get it out to a larger audience," says the philanthropist and board member of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay and lesbian lobbying group. "If the play saves a few lives, how much is that worth? It sure as hell is worth a lot more than contributing a bunch of money to politicians.
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Plan-B is negotiating with the actor's and director's unions to transport the Salt Lake cast and crew with the play, rather than holding New York or San Francisco auditions. "There's a power in it being a fully Utah production," says director Jerry Rapier, who claims Salt Lake audiences turned the work into a "gay-son-and-mother-date" play. "Given the particular subject matter of the play, there's an energy in that.
" Pearson, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is a poet and playwright who received national attention with the 1986 publication of "Goodbye, I Love You," a memoir about her ex-husband's death from AIDS. The writer claims she feels "a calling to help hurting human beings" dealing with conflicts between faith and sexuality. "Of course, some kind of run in New York does give a play a certain legitimacy, theatrically," Pearson said in a phone interview from her Northern California home.
"I hope that will give us that new kind of fuel to take the play to wherever it might find a home. I still hope for a tour of Utah." Stories written by Utah writers already have been produced in New York City and elsewhere.
Utah writer Julie Jensen's "Two-Headed," which premiered at the Salt Lake Acting Company, was produced in 2000 by an off-Broadway theater company, while the work of other local writers, including Tim Slover, Charles Morey and David Kranes, have been staged by regional theaters. "Pirated," a musical by Weber State University professor Jim Christian, which received premier productions at Weber and Pioneer Theatre Company, has been optioned for a Broadway production. But what's unusual about the next runs of "Facing East" is that the entire Utah production will be transported lock, stock-and-graveyard to New York City and San Francisco, providing the cast schedules accommodate that.
In fact, Pearson's play is thought to be just the second show incubated before local audiences in recent years to be transported to Manhattan. Coincidentally, the other play, "Confessions of a Mormon Boy," also concerns gay themes, and was written and performed by Steven Fales, Pearson's former son-in-law. Fales' one-man show received a staged reading at the 2001 Sunstone Symposium, and later played at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival.
Plan-B is negotiating final rental contracts for a one-month run in May-June 2007 on the second stage of Chelsea's Atlantic Theatre Company, and three weeks in August at San Francisco's Theatre Rhinoceros, which describes itself as the world's oldest company "continuously producing professional queer theater." Plan-B will produce, market and sell tickets for the runs in the 99-seat New York theater and the 117-seat California house. "New York is the center of the theater world," says Rapier, Plan-B's producing director.
"And there's no one who's involved in the theater that I know who hasn't had the dream of being able to work, just once, in that arena. The New York run will serve as something of a homecoming for longtime Utah actor and choreographer Jayne Luke, who created the role of Ruth, a grieving Mormon mother, in "Facing East." As a young 20-something actor, freshly graduated from Brigham Young University - as she describes herself then "a young chubby ingenue" - Luke lived and auditioned for five years in New York City.
Now 56, she's thrilled at the prospect of returning to work on a Manhattan stage. "I can't believe this is happening to me," she says. "I like to say that New York is the heart of the theater world, and the rest of us are the arteries.
I think it's so courageous, as it takes a huge amount of energy to do this. Bruce Bastian is going to fund it, and Jerry's going to do all the work.
Keywords: Salt Lake, Plan b, San Francisco, Facing East, Theatre Company, Salt Lake Acting, Acting Company, Lake Acting Company, Lake Acting, Bruce Bastian
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