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Borderlands

Presented by Plan-B Theatre Company at Post Theatre Fort Douglas

September 20, 2009

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From the playwright: 'In Mormon culture, we feel tremendous social pressure to conform. We all want to appear as though everything's just fine, all the time. Our kids are all active in the Church, moving without difficulty down the Eagle Scout, Young Women's Medallion, mission, temple marriage path. Our own marriages are happy and mutually sustaining, we have callings in the Church that we fulfill without crisis or incident. Everything's fine. And it's embarrassing when we have to admit that something isn't fine. But those conversations are the really interesting ones, the ones we have with friends in the Church or with family members when everything isn't fine. The ones we avoid as long as we can. My oldest son didn't go on a mission, and although we knew he wasn't going to go, it took my wife and I a long time to admit it to anyone. We'd stall; we'd make excuses. 'He's still saving up money,' we'd say. Our second child, our oldest daughter, married someone who wasn't Mormon. Again, it was embarrassing, and we had to steel ourselves to tell family members. My wife has a sister whose family is perfect, and we worried about how to tell her about our daughter. We went to see her, and she greeted us with a bombshell. Her oldest son had come out. He was gay. A much bigger crisis for active Mormons. So I wrote a play about coming out. Not just coming out in the usual sense?in fact, in BORDERLANDS, the one gay character is already out. It's a play about all the other ways we come out as Mormons, about admitting that we don't necessarily believe what we're supposed to believe, or that we don't always find it possible to live the way we're expected to live. It's a play about moments of unanticipated honesty, and the revelations that result. And it's a play about the hard work of carving out a social space for those for whom none exists in Mormon culture. So the characters in this play sit in an honesty car, and tell the truth about what liars they are. Because they're Mormons, they're much harsher in their self-judgments than they really need to be. And that pressure to conform blinds them to people who really are genuinely suffering. Finally, one young man finds a way to actually be what the other characters profess to be. A Christian, in the profoundest sense of the word. That he's also the one gay character is not, I promise, accidental.'