The Tuacahn Arts Center is located approximately a thirty minute drive outside St. George Utah, at the mouth of a red rock canyon. To get there, I strongly suggest that you do what I do; ask the desk clerk at your motel. Once you get on the right road, the way is clearly marked. The day I saw the show, it was approximately 197 degrees in the city -- way too hot for this three hundred pound Viking -- and I was concerned about the temperature outdoors during the show. But in the evening, when the show started, it was fairly cool and pleasant.

The location is so breathtakingly beautiful that it's not possible to have a completely negative experience -- if the show doesn't grab your attention, you can still look at the scenery. And the theatre uses the space beautifully. During the overture, you can see all the Native American characters way the heck up the side of this mountain, creeping stealthily towards the audience; they make it down just in time for the opening number. And throughout the show, spectacle is used fairly effectively, with a cast around 150, horses and battles and dance numbers, a concluding flood (the entire stage is flooded at one point), and a final pop version of Come Come Ye Saints, sung by the entire cast, while all the Indians ride around upstage on horses waving American flags, accompanied by fireworks. It's that kind of theatre -- that degree of taste and restraint -- and if that's the kind of theatre you like, you'll like Utah! I greatly dislike that sort of spectacle, and found it not just unmoving but frequently depressing, which colors my reaction to the dramatic qualities of the piece.

I attended Utah! the Tuesday after the opening. During the final dress rehearsal, the leading actor had broken his leg, and so the understudy had to step in. I thought he did a fine job, and thought generally that the cast was a strong one.

Utah! tells the story of the settlement of southern Utah, specifically the building of Santa Clara fort and dam and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, all told from the perspective of the main character, Jacob Hamblin. First of all, Jacob Hamblin is a fascinating character from our history, and his story is an excellent one for dramatization. And Mountain Meadows is one of the central episodes from our history. So these are the strengths of the play -- the way in which it deals with a real and an important figure, and the way in which it does not duck any of the tough issues relating to Mormon history. It deals with Mountain Meadows; it deals with polygamy; it deals with Mormon/Native American tensions and issues. I don't care for the way it tackles these issues, but I do admire the fact that it attempts to tackle them at all, especially in an outdoor drama which huge costs that simply must appeal to a mass audience.

Robert Paxton was, I believe, originally commissioned to write Utah! Robert wrote the versions that were performed the last two years. This year, Robert was fired, and Reed McColm was brought in to do a revision of the script. Having read both Robert's original play, and having read and seen McColm's revision, I have to say I greatly prefer Robert's. My review is of the play I saw two weeks ago; the McColm revision.

The beginning of the play is really a mess; actually it seems to begin three times. First, we have a big song and dance number, Utah!, in which all the actors sing and dance about what a nifty state Utah is. It is visually and musically appealing, but it accomplishes absolutely nothing in terms of drawing us into the story and characters. We then have a sort of Brechtian opening, in which a Story-teller character introduces us to the all the other characters -- it's a "who's going to play Jacob Hamblin tonight?" kind of thing. The Story-teller appears throughout the piece, and plays a variety of characters, including Brigham Young, who he gives a Southern accent (oddly, since Brigham was from Vermont). This is then followed by a completely irrelevant reprise of the Utah! number. We are then introduced to Jacob Hamblin with a lovely ballad called "You Sent Me Here." Not a bad song, but misplaced. We then have another big production number called "This is the Place," which again introduces the story and characters, but in a rather irrelevant manner, leading us to conclude that we're going to see a play about Salt Lake City and Brigham Young, rather than a play about Santa Clara Fort and Jacob Hamblin. This song includes in the middle the first Native American number, an Eagle Dance, which was powerfully staged, and introduces us to Hamblin and his love of peace and the Indians -- redundantly, as it covers the same ground "You Sent Me Here" covered -- followed by the "This is the Place" reprise. I was thirty minutes into the show before it actually began to tell its story.

My suggestion would be to cut the Utah! number completely. I have a strong prejudice against numbers like this, in which there's lots of singing and dancing but nothing whatever happening of any importance or interest. And the jolly "boy, this is a great state" sentiments expressed in the song are inappropriate to the rest of the play, which does explore some real characters in real situations.

It's not long after this that we meet the two main Indian characters, a bad guy warmonger named Agarapoots and a good guy peacemaker named Tutsegavits. (Both are historical, and Tutsegavits eventually joined the Church). All the Native American scenes had remarkable theatrical power. Pondering why this was so, I concluded that perhaps it's because all of our assumptions regarding Indians are essentially racist -- not that I'm accusing Robert or Reed of being racist, except in the sense that all white Americans unavoidably share certain racist assumptions about Native Americans, myself included. Let me explain.

The fact is, as whites living in America today, our perceptions of Native Americans are colored and influenced by pop and media culture images of Indians, which remain basically racist. We do still regard Indians as "primitives"; as "savages." We think of them as, to at least some degree, simple-minded, child-like. (Nowadays, they're supposed to be new-age gurus too, which is another way of marginalizing them). At least, we think of them as unsophisticated. As a result, we portray them as having extremely simple, straightforward objectives and goals, not as burdened with the kinds of modern complexities and ambiguities we whites have to deal with. But characters with strong straightforward objectives are interesting and dramatically powerful. As a result, paradoxically, our depictions of Indian characters tend to be both racist and very strongly, if simply drawn.

In some scenes involving Tutsegavist and Agarapoots -- I'm thinking specifically of a scene in which two braves fight over a young Indian maiden, eventually killing her -- the Indian-as-primitive-savage motif appears very clearly, and the result is a profoundly disturbing -- and racist -- scene. In other scenes involving the Dine chief Ketchenee, Tutsegavits and Agarapoots, they come across as more human and real. But they're always very striking and interesting.

I just wish the play had introduced a little more ambiguity into the Native American characters, a little more acknowledgement of their complexities. For example, a certain historical parallel might be of interest.

Winston Churchill was a man who recognized clearly that a bitter, unyieldingly racist enemy faced his people. He knew that his enemy thought himself racially and culturally superior to Churchill's people, and that his enemy was fighting a war of conquest and devastation, attempting to eradicate Churchill's people and culture completely. But Churchill was a warrior, and was prepared to fight Hitler to the last drop of blood in the last English man at his disposal. Neville Chamberlain, on the other hand, saw less evil in his enemy, and was willing to make any conciliation to placate his enemy and stave off war. Chamberlain was not a warrior, he was a diplomat and a peace-maker, and his endless conciliations bought enough time for his enemy that the enemy was able to build up an army of tremendous strength and numbers, until it was nearly too late for his people. Chamberlain's peace-making nearly cost his people their lives.

Here's my question: isn't Agarapoots quite a bit like Churchill? And Tutsegavits very similar to Chamberlain? And wouldn't it be interesting to explore that more fully? Agarapoots as warrior/patriot?

I'm not saying that Mormons are Nazis. I am saying that white culture destroyed most of Native American culture, and that whites in the Americas killed far more Indians than Hitler did Jews, though not systematically. I think that Agarapoots has a point, and that it's much harder for me to make a case for Tutsegavits. In other words, Agarapoots is vicious, but also, in a way, heroic; he's mostly right. Tutsegavits is a peacemaker, but his path for his people is every bit as much a path of cultural destruction as Agarapoots' path. I find him far more tragic than heroic, just as I found Agarapoots far more tragic than villainous. I wish the play showed more of these ambiguities.

The next major issue of the play has to do with Mountain Meadows.

I read a book review some years ago of a new edition of Anne Frank's diary. In this new edition, the Anne Frank Foundation had included exhaustive footnotes, essentially confirming the historical reality of absolutely every detail in the Diary. The reviewer asked if this was necessary. Was it necessary, for example, to include the name, rank, army career, shoe size, measurements and family history of every German soldier in the squad that arrested the Frank family? Because, said the reviewer, it did make for awfully tedious reading. And the answer given by the reviewer was: "yes." It was necessary to include every known historical detail and fact. That kind of editorial meticulousness was essential. Because there exist people in the world who would deny the reality of the Holocaust, deny the reality of the Frank family, deny the historicity of Anne Frank's Diary. They must not be allowed any opportunity at all to refute the book's truth. And we need it as well. We must know everything we can about the Holocaust. Because it's the worst thing people have ever done on this planet, and we need to understand why, and how, so that it never happens again.

The greatest book ever written by a Mormon (not including scripture, of course) is Juanita Brooks' Mountain Meadows Massacre. It is the greatest because it is the most courageous, forcing us, as Mormons, to face an exceedingly ugly and unpalatable truth. And even now, 47 years after its publication, Brooks' objectivity, her meticulous scholarship remains untarnished. Our ancestors did a horrible, an inexcusable thing at Mountain Meadows. We lured 120-plus innocent people from a fortified position, where they were under attack by Indians. We promised them a safe haven. Once they were in the open and unarmed, we butchered them. We did this; our ancestors. We need to face that reality, and we need to understand why and how it happened.

If Utah! is going to continue to deal with Mountain Meadows, then it has to deal with it. It has to tell the truth, and explain the truth in such a way that the audience understands it. In my opinion, to do anything less is artistically and morally irresponsible. As it is, Utah! tells the story so poorly, it's never quite clear what's going on. And there's one scene that's just reprehensible. This is a scene where Hamblin and the main white bad guy, Isaac Wells (who I believe is fictional) meet the Fancher party in Beaver. One member of the Fancer party tells Hamblin that he was at Haun's Mill. He says he's haunted by what he did there, and begs Hamblin to kill him. Hamblin refuses, and the man laughs at him and leaves.

IMHO, this scene is immoral. It must be cut. Personally, I doubt it really happened, but that's immaterial; it must be deleted from the play. I can't say this strongly enough -- it is inexcusable to suggest that the Fancher party had it coming, and probably didn't mind dying anyway. It's like blaming the Jews for the Holocaust.

The Fancher party did claim to have been at Haun's Mill and at Joseph's assassination, although there's no evidence that any of them were -- they were obnoxious jerks, not murderers. (What really ticked people off about them was the fact that they named their oxen "Brigham" and "Heber," and that they'd use those names when cursing the oxen.) But out of the hundreds of wagon trains that passed through Utah without incident, the Fancher party was singled out because they were the worst possible wagon train coming at the worst possible time. And their reputation preceeded them -- among whites and Indians -- until all sorts of atrocities were attributed to them (none of which, probably, they actually committed).

But furthermore, Mountain Meadows must be explained in the context of the Utah War, in the context of George Albert Smith's inflammatory comments in Southern Utah about Johnston's Army, in the context of the killing of Parley P. Pratt in Arkansas. These events led to Mountain Meadows, created the atmosphere that made MM possible. None is mentioned in the play. Missouri and Haun's Mill and Illinois and Carthage were also part of the MM story, but although these are mentioned in Utah!, they are not adequately explained.

Without the proper historical context, Mountain Meadows becomes this story about some vague and nebulous fight where a wagon train was attacked, probably mostly by Indians

I know what the Tuacahn board is going to say: this is an entertainment, not a history lesson. People want a good, fun play, an escape, and history is dry and boring. They're wrong.

First of all, it's history that's interesting. Implausible melodrama and overwrought theatrics are boring -- we've all seen them a hundred times. History, properly presented, is the most fascinating thing in the world. A good history has ALWAYS held an audiences' attention and it always will.

Second of all, what they have now is confusing. The audience truly doesn't get it. They don't know what's going on or why, and it seriously damages their interest in the play. I know; I sat in the audience and watched them.

Third, the play already has the means to provide the proper historical context. The Story-teller character already serves that function. Then, right when he's needed most, he disappears. But that sort of Brechtian device is supposed to provide needed context and commentary.

The actual staging of the Massacre itself was remarkably effective. Downstage R, we see Hamblin at a Salt Lake ball, dancing with his second wife. Downstage L we see Santa Clara Fort, where they're having a square dance. Upstage, up on the Mountain, we see the Massacre. But the audience didn't get it. I sat in the middle of a crowd of about 30 people who came together. When the scene concluded, the woman next to me turned to her companion and said "that was a real nice square dance number. I really enjoyed that." And her companion's husband said "yeah, but what about all that shooting up the mountain?" "Oh," said the woman, "I didn't understand that at all. I didn't know what was going on there. So I just watched the dancing." And the whole group murmured their agreement.

Enough on Mountain Meadows. Now to polygamy. In the play, Hamblin is called by George Albert Smith to take a second wife. It's a real trial for both him and Rachel, his first wife, but both come to accept it, especially after GAS sings a song called "The Principle," about how the Lord sometimes requires sacrifices.

To most of our audience, polygamy is always going to be salacious -- nasty minded old men finding any excuse to fool around with sweet young girls. The fact that it was nothing of the kind still does not register. Following the song "The Principle" (which absolutely has to be cut -- dreadful song) two older men sitting in front of me turned to each other. "You notice he didn't fight that one very hard," said the one man, and they both chuckled, elbows digging in each others' sides. That's how it came across. Tough break, Hamblin. That's a real sacrifice you're making there, buddy, having to take a pretty seventeen year old home with you. My heart bleeds, pal. Hardy har har har.

The fact is that women living on the frontier had an average life span of something like 38 years. (I read all this in a book about frontier women, but can't cite the source, sorry. These figures are approximate). Women living in cities, back east, had an average life span of something like 61 years. Life on the frontier was literally lethal to women. The work load, for women weakened by near constant pregnancy, killed way too many women way too young. The average lifespan for polygamous wives? Longer than women in the city.

Polygamy was a way in which a lifestyle and workload that was literally deadly for one woman could be shared by several women. And, again, the play has the means to explain that. The play includes two characters, women in a plural marriage, named Mary Dud and Thirza. Why not let them explain it to Jacob and Rachel? Why not let women involved in The Principle tell Rachel "no one woman can do everything expected of us. Share the work with another woman, and it's barely possible."

Let women explain The Principle. Don't have George Albert sing about it to Jacob. That just invites a 'hardy har har' response.

A few other scattered reactions:

a) In the play, a character named Maria Haskell (a newlywed), is killed when Agarapoots leads a raid on the fort. First of all, I doubt that raid really happened -- Indians weren't stupid, and very rarely attacked fortfied positions. But in the program, Maria Haskell's real death is described, and it's far more probable and interesting than the silly shoot-out that gets staged. I don't understand having the program show the historical fact and the show invent something, especially when the invention is so much less interesting.

b) Serious and fixable anachronisms abounded: "expecting" (devout Mormon women back then would no more say they were 'expecting' than devout Mormon women today would use testimony meeting to describe in detail their menstrual cycle), "terrific" meaning "nifty" (this was a bad thing in the nineteenth century; ugly, frightening), "teeter totter" (I'm not sure about this one, but it felt wrong), "having a baby" (see 'expecting')

c) I read the script before I saw the show, and believe it or not, it had yet another idiotic Mormon love triangle, between Jacob, Rachel and Isaac Wells (the bad guy). What is it with Mormon drama and love triangles? I've concluded that love triangles are a dramatic devise to artificially inject conflict into otherwise uninteresting relationships. Fortunately, the director of Utah!, Rodger Sorenson, really downplayed it.

d) I think it was the last scene of the first act, Agarapoots has a song with a very odd rhyme scheme, which it took me a minute to figure out. Then I got it; he was singing in limericks! Probably no one else got it, but I got a kick out of it; an Irish Indian.

My overall reaction to the piece is not quite as negative as I was afraid that it would be. Some moments and characters worked well. I liked the staging for the most part, and some of the songs are lovely. Jacob Hamblin is a wonderful character from our history and a most appropriate subject for a musical. Mountain Meadows was an important event in our history, and could work well dramatically, although it doesn't now. I applaud the work of a talented director and ensemble, and have, with reservations, recommended the show to my friends. But I think it has the potential to become something quite extraordinary. And until it does, the audience is going to become increasingly disappointing. Right now, I see a show that is fairly ordinary. Worse, it looks like a show that nobody really cares passionately about. It's mildly entertaining, if you like a lot of singing and dancing. But it lacks the obsessive commitment and fervor of real art. (That's why it was such a mistake to fire Robert, who really did care about it). It's just a nice little musical about some stuff that happened in Southern Utah. And in five years, when Tuacahn's gone broke, we'll all do papers at AML about the sadness of this missed opportunity. It's just too bad.

Eric R. Samuelsen
<ersamuel@byugate.byu.edu>