On Friday, August 1, I made the drive to American Fork to see Trail of Dreams, the sesquicentennial musical by James Arrington, Marvin Payne, and AML-List contributor Steven Kapp Perry. I was late arriving, not by the clock but the calendar, as this was the second to last day of the run. I'm happy to report the play is a must-see. I heartily recommend it to all list members who are able to make the journey. That's not a vain recommendation -- Steve has announced here that there will be a special run next week (August 19-22) as part of BYU's Education Week, and another September 18 through November 22 at the Valentine Theater just northwest of the American Fork temple.

Trail of Dreams is written in a popular idiom. The songs carry less emotional weight than another medium might, but they make up for it with variety, and by the time you're done you've been through a good range of emotions. The show is 2 hours and 10 minutes, with the intermission after 90 minutes, but it doesn't seem overly long, and I think needs the length to arrive at a climax so strong. There is relatively little dialog in the show. The bulk of the action is carried by the songs, and these are consistently clever or moving as the moment demands. (Steve's the musician, and if I'm not mistaken the lyricist too.) One highlight is the song "Oxology," where trailmaster John Brown gathers the green converts to teach them to drive oxen. Sound problems kept me from hearing a good deal of what was going on, but what I heard was hilariously witty. Another highlight was "Oh Zion," a haunting pioneer hymn. (There are occasional slips, such as "The Ballad of Rocky Ridge's" rather banal refrain, "Those who crossed it can't forget it," but that's far from the norm.)

The choreography and general staging seemed solid to me, the set striking. The production appeared to use community people in minor and even major rolls, and they did an effective job. Two standouts among several from the ranks were a little girl (Britta Dayton?), highlighted a couple of times, who managed a smile that was strikingly radiant and utterly believable, and (I think) Shayne Hudson playing David Osborn, the camp grumbler. Hudson's exaggerated scowl and grating whine carried the performance, but I listen for dialog, and I'm convinced a different actor with very different mannerisms would have been as funny. Many of the characters speak in dialect, an effective reminder that we were -- and are -- forged as a people, not born. I had a bit of trouble with John Brown's accent at first -- apparently he came from the South. Another complaint, and again a small thing in the broader context of the play -- a Cockney character says "bloody" repeatedly, which in England is not slang but profanity, referring to the blood of Christ. There are no other examples of bad language in the play, and I'd just as soon they left out this one.

This play didn't touch every base, but the reason I recommend it so highly is the things that it got right. Jana Remy already commented on the play's sensitive and intelligent treatment of issues related to handicaps. I was impressed with how it dealt with a crippled man who refused to ride in a wagon and ended up literally walking himself to death (Chris Higbee playing Robert Pearce, if I'm not mistaken). This man has the conviction that if he walks to Zion, Brigham Young has the power to heal him. A more sentimental treatment (such as Charlie's Monument, if I remember right) would have glorified the effort, whereas this play gave voice to both sides, with different characters defending him as brave and noble or deriding him as a fool. But there is a third side too, as we come to see vividly what Pearce's gesture means to him. This is a person who has had to struggle all his life, who perhaps has only survived because he did, who has developed the almost ferocious determination that people sometimes do after fighting for long periods against long odds, until it's become second nature and they fight even when they don't have to fight, even when it's perhaps inappropriate to fight. We come to see him, not as someone to be pitied or admired, but as a person who is as brave and foolish as any of us before life's vagaries. Perhaps we have faith, but our faith is necessarily incomplete, and some of our choices, even in the face of faith, will be imperfect. We're drawn to him through fear and pity, because we've come to see he's more like us than we supposed. And when he dies, and in those first moments thinks he's entered Zion and been healed of his infirmity, we feel his intense joy and emotional release, made all the stronger by the simple, literal way this play treats death and the world of spirits and the promise of the resurrection. On the way home I thought of Carousel, Heaven Can Wait, A Hundred Years of Solitude, but whatever else this play's merits, I can't think of another literary work that gets that aspect quite that well.

"Oxology" is comical, but it's also true, and another thing the play gets right. That's how we do things. A trailmaster in a California company, if he happens to take a liking to you, might let you try your hand at driving, but he's as likely as not to give you contrary directions and curse and laugh while you lurch off course and tip your wagon in the ditch. That's one way to learn, but the Mormon way is to appoint a trailmaster to line up the greenhorns and give them a group lesson. John Brown notes they'll all be hopeless at first, but fairly competent by the time they arrive in Utah. John Brown is another thing the play gets just right. He is rough and seasoned, reviles the oxen, but tempers his gruffness towards the saints. He is like the work leader on an elder's quorum service project, where the average elder shows as much willingness, and as little competence, as the average drayman in the play. Marvin Payne has aged since the Saturday's Warrior video, and the added cragginess serves him here. But John Brown is a character of immensely greater range than Mr. Flinders, and Payne is completely credible. Cussing or no, I think I'd have liked to see John Brown snap at one or two of the more foolish Saints who endanger themselves or others, like the work leader does with the elders on rare occasions. But in general, his mix of gruffness, humor, kindness, and intense devotion to the cause was just like the real John Brown must have been.

I related particularly to that devotion, both as a father and a trailmaster myself. I'm the one who ends up marshaling the scouts or the cousins or the neighbor kids when we go into the mountains. I've hiked all my life, alone mostly, and have learned to keep an ear open and an eye on the trail and under rocks and in the shadows of logs. I come upon a rattlesnake pretty well every time I go. But when I started hiking with children, I found I had to concentrate twice as hard to keep them from stumbling or falling in the creek or getting separated or off the trail or brushing against the stinging nettle or poison ivy or throwing rocks or kicking stones or taking switchbacks or littering or getting spooked or having any of various bathroom accidents (the little ones) or eating or drinking not often enough or too often or, like me, stumbling onto rattlesnakes. It's pretty stressful really, but I love the mountains so well I find I'm willing to put up with quite a bit. I sing songs, I encourage them, I pass out licorice, I know the trail and I tell them how long it is and sweet talk them along. You've got to move them in a way they still like hiking when they're done -- just like John Brown has to, not so much bring the folks to Zion, as bring them to Deseret in a way that they bring Zion with them. This show is about death in large measure, focusing for much of its length on the Martin-Willie Handcart companies. John Brown argues with increasing ardor with Angela Hopewell, the kindly angel of death who welcomes the saints that he must leave along the way. He fights to the very end, because that's what it means to be trailmaster. Angela says the ones who died have realized their "dream." A word like "dream" is part of that popular idiom, and I'd probably be impatient with it except for this play's interpretation -- "dream" here means people's faith and aspirations for finding or building Zion here on earth. John Brown, just before the end, says to Angela, "So dreams come true?" She says yes, that dreams are what you ask for with the way you live your life. John pauses and says, "Did I ask well?" That is as true a moment as I've witnessed in the theater, because the trailmaster never rests, never stops worrying for the ones who stray even when he can do nothing, never lets down his guard even for those who appear to be safely gathered, until he returns to the one who sent him.

Benson Parkinson
<byparkinson@cc.weber.edu>
Ogden, Utah, USA