Category: New Play Project

PART ONE: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

I’ve had an interesting and fruitful relationship with New Play Project over the past several years. They have helped me produce three of my plays (including two of my favorite pieces, The Fading Flower and Swallow the Sun), and were excellent collaborators, critics, visionaries, and artisans.  However, although I count many of their members as dear friends, I was never in the center of the organization, but rather an occasional partner, flirting with the group on the outskirts… an outsider who occasionally came in from the cold. This put me in an odd position, where I was able to watch their inner workings, while never really being a part of them. This allowed me to be both a cheerleader and a critic. A confidante and a stranger. A partner and a rival. We had similar visions, but different paths.

A good example of this divergence of paths can be gleaned from  the beautiful anthology of New Play Project’s best plays which this series of posts is going to review and reflect on… Out of the Mount: 19 from New Play Project. I was originally asked to contribute one of my full length plays produced with NPP, either The Fading Flower or Swallow the Sun as part of this volume. However, I chose to opt out, as I have been in talks with a publisher to possibly publish a selection of my plays. In deference to this possible volume of my plays, I decided against being included.  My individual project took precedence for me over this superb collective collection. Which is an interesting illustration of how NPP and I have found ourselves on different trajectories the last few years (hold on, I promise, this is not simply self conscious navel gazing, there’s a reason I’m inserting myself into this narrative).

NPP is a wonderful group effort, adapting and morphing as people enter in and out of the organization. That’s their strength and their weakness…it’s the vision, the movement that is the emphasis, not the individual artists. It’s very Zion-like that way. Its roster of leaders and foot soldiers have been in constant flux since their inception, while their vision of “values driven theatre” informed by a varied range, but ultimately collective, set of Mormon beliefs.   Meanwhile, my work has been centered on, well, frankly, my own vision of Mormon beliefs and values. It’s been very artist-centric, for better or worse.

Which brings up an interesting correlation. In this volume, one of NPP’s founders, as well as one of Mormonism’s best playwrights, James Goldberg writes about the Harlem Renaissance in his essay, “Towards a Mormon Renaissance.” I’ll touch even more on this more later, as the Harlem Renaissance has been a subject that has been dear to my heart for many years, ever since I took a class on it in my early college days. But a similar division, between the movement and the individual artist, arose in the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the African-American artists were intent on being part of this larger artistic movement that was occurring in Harlem at the time, while others saw the movement as stifling their individual voices and visions.  Pioneers like W.E.B. DuBois were trying to make the African-American artistic community a cohesive unit while other artisans chaffed at what they thought was a group who were more interested in their common heritage, rather than their individual voices.  Continue reading “Reflecting on a Mormon Renaissance: Reactions to _Out of the Mount: 19 from New Play Project_, Part One”