“Be Happy Be Mormon” delivers on the Mormonism, and that’s about it. Kimball Allen’s autobiographical one-man show “Be Happy Be Mormon” is an hour-long narrative about the struggles of being gay in a Mormon family. Being gay but not Mormon myself, I invited along a friend who is gay and was raised in the church of Latter Day Saints, so as to get her additional perspective afterwards.
The show opens with a Mormon Sunday school hymn and an irreverent description of the tenets of Mormonism in accessible and, according to my friend, accurate terms. While undeniably interesting, as most faith traditions are, this segment struck me as cobbled together in a high-school level fashion. Perhaps it was the use of Powerpoint projected on the wall. Or perhaps it was the many, many flubbed lines.
The directing (Emma Hassett) was fine. In an exciting directorial decision, the set for this show consists of 8 cardboard boxes, which contain the props for each scene and which Allen uses as furniture. He uses the space quite well, each scene taking place in its own distinct part of the stage. And for a charming touch, between scenes we the audience are treated to clips from Allen’s own childhood home videos.
Apart from the directing, this show is a technical disaster. The writing is aimless and seems primarily intent on evoking laughs or sympathy from the audience, rather than on conveying anything meaningful or interesting. There is no discernible rhythm to the scenes, and nothing in particular is established at the end of them. Allen was brave in his decision to portray many of the members of his family. Somehow, all of these other people were characterized by arched eyebrows, hands on jutting hips, and cruel sassiness. This contrived and sarcastic performance may have been due to the fact that Allen seems neither to have quite memorized his lines nor worked out the nuance of his own costume-changes and blocking. Or perhaps this was yet another instance of someone in the performing arts reasoning, “acting gay is always funny, right?” Whatever it was, I found it hard to watch.
And it was not until about halfway through that I realized exactly why I found it so difficult to watch a play that, tech problems aside, any gay person should be able to relate to. Scene after scene go by, and you realize that there is no distinction between the character and the writer. Without this separation, there is no safety in front of a scrutinizing audience, and so there is no room for vulnerability, and therefore no room for introspection. There is no self-questioning, as there must be in any narrative about youths fighting the battle between their nature and their beliefs. This play fails to reveal anything interesting about the internal experience of Allen’s childhood, and instead amounts to a condemnation of the family who reared him. We are not witness to any revelation other than the reality that some families are terribly unfair to their children. This is very sad, but does not, unfortunately, make for good theater.
I stepped out of the theater feeling much the same way as I imagine I’d feel leaving a dinner party at which I’d been seated next to a depressed uncle who had spent the meal describing at length his many ailments. Sad, full of sympathy, but ultimately resentful at having been robbed of an enjoyable evening.
“Be Happy Be Mormon,” written by Kimball B. Allen and directed by Emma Hassett, is going to New York City! It opens on 9/24 at 7:30pm at Theater Row (410 West 42nd Street, New York City) and is sold out. For more information, visit unitedsolo.org or call 212-239-6200