Mike Lueger: Welcome to the Theatre History Podcast, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide.
Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Lueger. Dr. Megan Sanborn Jones' new book, Seeking After the Dead opens with an arresting image. In the middle of the Clarkston City Cemetery in Utah, there's a large amphitheater with enormous light towers that loom over row after row of Mormon graves. The Martin Harris Memorial Amphitheater is home to an annual Mormon pageant that draws thousands of spectators every year. It's an example of how theatre and performance form an important element of Mormon culture.
Remarkably, the pageants that occur there have also become examples of how present-day performance becomes history before our very eyes. On October 27, 2018, as we prepared to record this episode, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced that while local celebrations of culture and history may be appropriate to celebrate and spread the gospel message, larger productions such as pageants are discouraged.
We're very lucky to have Megan here with us today to talk about these pageants and how they relate to Mormon history. She's a full professor of theatre at Brigham Young University, and her book, Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama, won the Mormon History Association, Smith-Pettit Best First Book award. Megan, thank you so much for joining us.
Megan Sanborn Jones: I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Michael.
Mike: Before we talk about the pageants themselves, can you give us an overview of how theatre and performance have been an important part of Mormon culture throughout its history?
Megan: Absolutely. It's kind of an interesting anomaly in the nineteenth century where, for the most part, the rise of Protestantism—with the Great Awakenings and the Second Great Awakenings—had preachers over the pulpit using theatre as the bad example of how, when things go awry—Not just a waste of time, but also the spread of immoral ideas, of inappropriate people. A lot of the anti-theatrical sentiment that has always been attached to theatre, but it was particularly focused in the 19th century in America.
Unlike that, though, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, under particularly the leadership of Brigham Young, who was the second president of the church, his idea was that theatre could actually be instructive. And that by participating in theatre, and certainly by watching uplifting theatre, that morals could be taught. And so very early days, whenever the Saints who were moving slowly across the country from the founding of the church in 1830 in upstate New York, until they ended up in the Utah Valley in 1847, those seventeen years, every place they'd land, they'd build a cultural hall.
They called them cultural halls, where they would do culture: music, dancing, new compositions created by the Saints, the writing of hymns, and the productions of melodramas. That is what Brigham Young meant by uplifting things because there was always a clear moral dichotomy. The good won. The bad was punished. It was very conservative in its morals, particularly its sexual morality.
So by the time they get to Salt Lake City, the very first building they build is a theatre. The Salt Lake Theatre was the first large, public meeting house constructed in the Salt Lake Valley, well before the Salt Lake Temple was completed, and it ran a regular season of theatre— up to and including Brigham Young would go and actually talk to members of congregations and invite them to be on stage.
A notable production was called The Mountain Sylph, where he called all ten of his sixteen-year-old daughters, because he had sixteen—a they were called the big ten, there were ten of them that were all the same age at the same time from his different wives—and they were all called to be in the chorus of The Mountain Sylph. So they were all in the show together to model for the Saints that theatre could be appropriate. Theatre should be uplifting. And so it's always been a part of the cultural presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mike: And at the same time, I understand from your previous book, Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama, that Mormons also featured prominently at one point in other kinds of American theatre, albeit not in the best light. Could you also tell us a little bit more about that?
Megan: Yeah, absolutely. So in the nineteenth century, as much as the Mormons thought they were doing great—hanging out in Utah, living their truth, having their many wives, establishing welfare systems, and a government system, and an elaborate education system, and doing theatre at the Salt Lake Theatre Company—the rest of the country was sort of terrified by this growing group of people who, at that point, were outside the United States but very close in Mexico territory with lots of immigrants who were converting and moving in there… sort of the growth of this theocracy in the mountains where no one could reach them. And the fact that polygamy was considered one of the twin relics of barbarism—you had slavery and you had polygamy, sort of an equal platform against which the Republican party ran.
And so what becomes interesting, at least throughout the nineteenth century, is in a limited number of the American mountain melodramas, rather than having evil English landlords or the evil miners, the villains were Mormons. Who were kidnapping girls, largely kidnapping girls, but also practicing violence against honest settlers who wanted to travel through Utah to get to a better place. And so, the Mormons were featured as sort of violent, rapacious, bad guys.
And so, the image of Mormonism outside of Utah was certainly not a positive one and continued to not be positive well into the twentieth century, when a sort of switch was made, and the church refigured itself publicly as sort of the most American of Americans, and the cleanest cut, and the most supportive. Rather than being the bane of the Republican party, they became its greatest supporter. And sort of there was this, in the mid twentieth century, there was a refiguration. And now Mormons hold, while still not necessarily an entirely mainstreamed part of American society, a different one than they did when they were like kidnapping people's daughters to sacrifice to their Mormon gods in strange temples.
Mike: So bringing us at least closer to the present day. Could you tell us what modern Mormon pageants are about and what it's like to witness one of them? Also, I'm curious, what are some major examples of these pageants?
Megan: Well, Mormons have always done sort of big productions that would bring a lot of people together to celebrate certain things—as many faith traditions do, as many communities do. The Mormon pageant tradition developed straight out of the American theatrical pageant tradition. Perhaps theatre historians would remember best the Masque of St. Louis in 1912, which was this elaborate community production with thousands and thousands of cast members and tens of thousands of people that came to see it.
And there was… every community in America it seems was doing these sort of historical, patriotic pageants, generally connected with holidays. That started to wane in the teens and the twenties, and people sort of mark that St. Louis pageant perhaps is the peak, the pinnacle of the pageant tradition. But by the early 1930s, a group of LDS congregants in upstate New York thought, well, if everyone is celebrating the Fourth of July, why don't we celebrate our founding and our heritage on the twenty-fourth of July? And began putting on a pageant straight out of what everybody else was doing.
So at the time it wasn't a remarkable thing. It wasn't a different thing. It was just a community-based pageant where the community got together, and they performed vignettes of the founding of the church and stories from the Book of Mormon, stories from the Bible. And they set it on a church history site, one of the founding places of the church. They said, “We'll actually do it on the site where all these things happened.” And that became the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which has been running without a stop, except for a couple of years in the middle of World War II, for eighty-one years and continues sort of this unbroken trajectory of those Mormon pageants.
And so, a Mormon pageant still looks a lot like the pageants of the early twentieth century: enormous casts; huge stages; communities that come together to tell their own story for, by, and about themselves; where everyone donates their time and their talents to put this thing on; episodic vignettes of large chunks of history that are conservative in their outlook, that are uplifting in their spirit. And the idea is that people come away sort of feeling better about the history of the Mormon church having seen a pageant.
The church—there's a number of small ones that happen all over the place—but the church formally sponsors seven. There are five annual pageant: the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which is the pageant that got canceled this last weekend and will be doing its last performance in the summer of 2020. And the Manti Pageant, which is in southern Utah, that will no longer have church financial or administrative support starting next summer in 2019. The other two annual pageants—one is in Mesa, Arizona, that they do an annual Easter pageant. It was already on hiatus because they were remodeling the temple and creating a brand-new permanent stage for the pageant when the church announced that they were no longer support pageants. So no one's quite sure what's going to happen with the Mesa Pageant. It was supposed to come back in 2020. And then the last pageant is the Nauvoo pageant, which happens in Nauvoo, Illinois. It is the one pageant that's been told it's going to continue to have full church support.
And so, what do these look like? They tell stories from scripture, the Hill Cumorah Pageant and the Manti Pageant from the Book of Mormon. They tell the story of the founding of the LDS Church, the Nauvoo pageants and the Manti pageant. Or they tell the story of Jesus, the New Testament story of Jesus, that's the Mesa Easter pageant. The other two pageants are biennial. They run every other year. They're tiny. They're here in Utah. They tell very narrow stories of a much smaller scope, and there's been no news yet about their ongoing presence.
So to see a pageant, it's like watching a Superbowl halftime show with thousands of people, and pyrotechnics, and loud, booming music, and amplified voices on outdoor amphitheaters that are enormous and spectacular, and thousands of people on stages. Yeah, so elaborate costumes and evocative music.
I think a large part of the pageants, if you go to see one, is the immense emotions that the music, and the spectacular effects, and the spiritual stories that they're trying to tell are. Because the hope is that people have a spiritual experience watching these. It's not just a celebration of community, but it's meant to be a means of enlivening and welcoming the Holy Spirit so that people will have a conversion— whether that's the people on the stage or people watching it—and be recommitted to following the gospel of Jesus Christ.
So there's also a very particular purpose to them that rides alongside of the Mormon pageants, in addition to it being a fascinating piece of American theatre history.
Mike: Yes, I'm really interested—you talked about sort of a little bit of the history behind these pageants. I'm curious why, both in the past and now, staging the past, sort of doing theatre about history, was so important for the performers and audiences. How does that tie in with the faith, and why is that staging of the past so important?
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