I'm not sure if anyone wants my impressions on the play, but concern about whether anyone actually wants to hear what I say has never stopped me from saying it before, so why start now?

I saw the play Friday night, and I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. The story was complex and interesting, and explored issues of love, manipulation, family stress, debilitating illness, strength of spirit, forgiveness, personal discovery, and faith. It touches on the little cruelties we inflict on each other, and the enormous difficulties faced by the family of someone suffering debilitating sickness. And while the story ends with positive resolution, it does so fairly, after its characters have struggled and suffered and raged, so that the successful resolution is earned and feels right. These characters found resolution with effort and pain, contrition and faith and real desire, and that makes all the difference.

The story is reviewed in the BYU press release that Ben posted earlier, and I won't go into much more detail than that about specific plot details -- it's worth seeing this play unawares so that its resolution can have the powerful impact it deserves. But let me review some of the characters.

Merry is the woman with MS, and spends most of the play ensconsed in a wheel chair, except for a few flashbacks and other scenes. Benjamin is her husband, who has cared for her for over fifteen years as the MS has worsened -- the last ten years she has been totally wheelchair bound. Penny is their oldest daughter who has just separated from her husband for unspecified reasons. Elizabeth is their younger daughter who has never known her mother without MS. Cody is the nurse hired by Ben to care for Merry, and the center of strong emotions within the family. Joe is Penny's estranged husband and drama teacher at Elizabeth's high school where Elizabeth is involved in a production of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale."

The production was good, done with minimal props and simple staging. Because there was a lot of business going on onstage with prop people (identified as non-persons by their grey baseball caps) there were times where I found myself confused as to whether I should be paying attention to it or not. Particularly confusing for me were the instances where stage hands would transform Merry from her modern, wheelchair-bound self into a past, active version of herself. While I understood that the actress could not transform herself without breaking character, the presense of the stage hands interacting with an onstage character confused me for much of the play. I kept trying to read significance into the interaction between Merry and the "invisible" people, and at first thought they might be angels or other significant characters. Though I understood the device, it still interfered with the primary action for me, and led to moments of disorientation. Otherwise, the fluid staging and minimalist props worked well.

The pacing was a little slow for me, though. With a single intermission, the play went just short of three hours, and there were times when my attention waned. Some scenes went on well after the narrative goal of the scene was made, repeating information that was already quite clear. Scene by scene this was not a problem, but the cumulative effect was a bit fatiguing.

In fact, the entire first act, while it established the characters and the basic situation, showed very little movement and felt very long. The second act was actually longer than the first, but seemed much shorter because more significant events were taking place. In this sense, the play shows its origins as a novel; the story development showed the more liesurely pace generally associated with the novel form. But while the first act would have been just as interesting if read in manuscript form, the second act used the stage to strong effect, especially in the climactic scene. In any case, I would have liked the whole thing to run about a half-hour shorter.

For all of that, though, this was a very powerful play that was performed well. There was a little of the stiffness to be expected from college actors, but the characters mentioned above were all very well portrayed, and the total effect was quite enjoyable.

From the standpoint of Mormon literature, though, this play was exceptional in many ways.

I've commented before that one of the limitations of popular Mormon literature seems to be a tendency toward simple problems with simple resolutions. "Dear Stone" offers a complex problem, various attempts at resolution -- not all of which are successful -- and a final resolution that requires the characters to search within themselves and find out more about what they really believe and feel. It deals directly with the stress associated with caring for a loved one who can no longer care for herself, and makes no effort to candy-coat the very real difficulty. It shows how young love can be buried under years of tedious care so that those early years can seem only a distant dream, a faded memory. It graphically depicts the uncertainty, frustration, and doubt that can come to dominate your thoughts, the sense that your own life has been lost to caring for someone who can no longer experience the active life now denied to you.

The tendency of this kind of story is to make the confined person a hero and to villainize nearly everyone else for their apparently waning concern, and "Dear Stone" falls into that to some degree. Merry is the the rock upon which this family will succeed or fail, and she never wavers in that role. She is strong despite all that happens around her, despite her inability to directly interact and help her family, and it is her will that eventually leads to resolution.

And each of the other characters in this story exhibits the odd villainous behavior. They lose patience with Merry for being helpless (though they never do it onstage, only in reminiscences). They question each other's love and loyalty to Merry. The have moments of selfish desire for active companionship or freedom from this particular burden. They do not always focus on Merry and do not always do what will best serve her; they often speak in front of her as though she were not there, and do not always listen well when she tries to communicate.

But what keeps these characters from turning into simple caricatures is their honest love for Merry. They sorrow for their errors, rage against the disease, and even question God for not giving them a miracle despite their immense patience and long service. But they love Merry, and that central thread binds them in ways that they do not understand, leads them to questions of need and desire and what is right, underpins the faith that helps them persevere.

Though the story is decidedly Mormon, "The Church" never appears as a functional character. But the characters are Mormon, are affected by that belief and the institutions associated with it, and are subject to certain behaviors because of it. A powerful subplot was how the bishop was a college friend of Benjamin, and how that familiarity interfered when the time came for the bishop to offer his counsel. The very real issue of a bishop's fitness to counsel others on issues about which he has no direct experience was offered without being critical of the church, and the resolution of the situation underscored that good counsel comes regardless of the experience of the giver.

As a metaphor of selfless service, it underscores the difficulty of giving your entire life to serve others, as Christ gave his entire life to us. We can all offer service when we see an end to it or when the service retains the shine of novelty or hardship borne well, but when there is no end in sight is our resolve tested beyond our ability to endure? Or can honest love and a desire to do right pull us through doubt and frustration to a clearer, simpler understanding? This play explores these and other issues without flinching, apologizing, or simple overstatement. A strong story told well.

I admit to being somewhat susceptible to this sort of story. My paternal grandmother died of MS after a long convalescence very similar to what was depicted here. I never knew her -- she died when I was seven months old -- but my father has talked about her and the difficulty of caring for her as the disease slowly took her life away from her. My mother died of complications of diabetes after a ten-year struggle that transformed their lifestyle around her needs and left my father so emotionally drained that her death was a liberation for him. While I understand the stresses he faced in caring for her, it has always been difficult for me to see his relief and newfound happiness and not feel that he has betrayed her somehow by being so happy now that she is gone. "Dear Stone" had the feeling of realism that touched directly on my own experience in true and powerful ways, and left me weeping at the end, both for my own experience and for the very real story I had just seen.

(I did not have the same reaction to "Steel Magnolias" when it came out. I saw it as a play in Chicago many years ago, then saw the film version when it came out. I was disappointed with both productions, though particularly with the film, because the story so drastically oversimplified the issues associated with diabetes that I found myself frustrated to the point of distraction. My own experience with the disease in my mother jaded me to a simple handling of it, though my mother loved it. "Dear Stone" felt far more realistic to me.)

Perhaps the final aspect of the play that made it particulary moving for me was an announcement made just before the play was performed, and a comment the author made to the cast after the play (I had gone backstage to meet the director, Eric Samuelsen, and was fortunate to be there when she came back to talk to them). Merry is based on a real person named Nancy who is Margaret Blair Young's sister in law. In the true story of Nancy, the story did not resolve as well as the play, and she was essentially forgotten by her family and left in a home. The novel and the play were written while she was still alive. Nancy died the same day I saw the play, attended not by her husband or children, but by her father and her siblings -- including the author. The emotion of that event charged the evening and made the play particularly powerful for both the cast and the audience. I missed the opening curtain and thus had not heard the announcement until after the play was over, so my positive reaction to the play was based not on the pathos of the moment, but on the very real quality of the script and the production.

Those of you who are in Utah and have opportunity to see "Dear Stone" should take advantage of it. This is a good play, and the production is a solid one. The focus is all on the characters, not the sets, and the medium of the stage is used to strong effect at various times throughout. Unfortunately, the play will run only until next Saturday, so you need to come soon. I promise it will be worth the time and effort.

Those of you who are not in Utah should take the opportunity to read the play when it is published in BYU Studies later this year. It won the 1996 BYU Studies Playwriting competition and will be published in the magazine. There are some aspects that gain for the stage production, but the play should be just as powerful in manuscript as it was on the stage. In some ways, reading it should actually improve the first act.

In either case, this play is a solid contribution to Mormon storytelling and is worth the time and effort necessary to either see it or read it. It is a real and compelling story that sets itself apart from the average in terms of story, complexity, and realism. If this is a representation of what Mormon authors are capable of, then Mormon literature has a bright and powerful future.

Scott Parkin
sparkin@itsnet.com