2007
AML Award:
Drama
Presented to:
Carol Lynn Pearson
For:
Facing East
Carol Lynn Pearson’s
Facing East could be have been just another salvo in an
on-going culture war over gay marriage, gay rights and family values. A gay LDS man
in his twenties has committed suicide. His parents find themselves unable to leave
the graveside, and are confronted by his equally distraught partner. The fireworks
that ensue could have led to nothing more than formal, argumentative set pieces; the
play that resulted could have deteriorated to polemics. But in Pearson’s skillful
hands, the only real agenda promoted is compassion. A talented, kind, loving man is
dead. Three people who loved him have to confront that loss, and their own failings
and weaknesses. A father learns to reassess his professional choices, and the damage
done by an inflexibly corporatized ideology. A mother learns, for the first time,
of the love and service her son and his partner received from a bishop who put
Christ-like friendship side by side with institutional imperatives. And a gay man
admits, finally, that much of what he loved in his dead friend was his devotion to
his Mormon faith.
Pearson knows her Mormonism, knows its language and its rites. We know that when
the play’s anguished trio finish their conversation, a meal awaits them, prepared by
the Relief Society. The policies of the Church are defended by characters we find
sympathetic, and questioned by characters we find equally compelling. We know these
people, and every Sunday, in our wards and stakes, we hear these voices.
And in the audience, watching the play in performance, we also saw the faces of our
brothers and sisters. In productions in Salt Lake City, in New York, in San Francisco
and elsewhere, audiences from the gay community and from the LDS community watched,
and wept together, united by a shared sense of loss and a shared commitment to
compassion. Ultimately, the play urges us, whenever gifted young men die, to set
aside our differences, and mourn. For its compassion, its even-handed wisdom and its
tragic power, the Association for Mormon Letters honors Carol Lynn Pearson’s Facing East.