Mormons in American Theatre and Drama

Unlike other Christian sects, the Mormons embraced and encouraged theatre almost from their very beginnings. Even during their precarious sojourn in Illinois, their leader, Joseph Smith, promoted a “Fun House” at the Nauvoo settlement. Mormon missionaries frequently accepted work as actors, ignoring the disdain in which performers were held by many clerics. When they established a permanent home in Salt Lake City, they quickly erected a Bowery that served both for religious services and as a playhouse. The first play, The Triumph of Innocence, was given in 1848. Brigham Young, who had succeeded Smith as head of the church and who had led the great trek from Illinois to Utah, was himself a lover of theatre and continually urged his followers to perform in and even write plays. Young's children were among the regular performers. He oversaw the erection of several later playhouses, including the Salt Lake Theatre in 1862, a theatre long considered the finest between the Mississippi and California. Curiously, though these playhouses offered a wide‐ranging dramatic fare, including religious works, Young is said to have been a special advocate of clean, homespun comedy, a genre designed to divert members from their frequently hard, harassed lives. Yet the Mormons' affection and respect for theatre counted for little among non‐Mormon playwrights, actors, and producers, who either shared or pandered to the contempt in which the sect was held by most Americans of the time. In 1858 both Burton and Wallack offered plays centering on the group: The Mormons; or, Life in Salt Lake City and Deseret Deserted; or, The Last Days of Brigham Young. Although both plays were comedies or farces, they both clearly displayed an underlying distrust or dislike. The best‐known work about the Mormons was The Danites; or, The Heart of the Sierras (1877) by Alexander Fitzgerald. The Times review described the sect as “an organized body [who] combine religion, murder, and rapine in their every‐day life”—a view obviously held by many playgoers. When one of the earliest American comic operas, Deseret; or, The Saint's Difficulties (1880), took a tongue‐in‐cheek look at the group, the Times wailed that Mormon polygamy was deserving only of scorn and not of laughter. Typical of later works was The Mormon Wife (1901), which portrayed the downfall of a Mormon convert. Mormons continued to be portrayed as the blackest villains for many years; and when this characterization disappeared, they long continued as disreputable, if comic figures or at least as the butt of essentially derogatory jokes. For example, the comic villain in The Girl from Utah (1914) was a Mormon who pursued the heroine, determined to add her to his flock of wives. Poking fun at Mormons remained a not‐uncommon practice in comedies and musicals into the 1930s. By the end of World War II, the presence of Mormons on stage had all but disappeared. A later example that did consider the subject was Angels in America (1993) in which a major character is a fallen away Mormon and his mother a comic paradox: a grumpy Mormon. As for the sect itself, the Church of the Latter Day Saints continues to present theatrics with their annual Hill Cumorah Pageant, a giant outdoor spectacle produced near Palmyra, New York, each summer.