Sometime in the very near future, a very fine stake of Zion, located in a pleasant and beautiful state, will be presenting My Turn On Earth. I am the director of that production.

For some astonishing and unaccountable reason, the reaction of my friends and colleagues, when I've told them that I'm directing MTOE, has been to giggle. For some reason, the juxtapositioning of my name and that title strikes people as funny. But so it is. It's a stake assignment; I mostly do not turn down church callings; never have yet, though I could imagine a circumstance where I would. Opening night for this production is . . . quite soon. Location: a very nice stake center.

When I first took on this assignment, I read the script with great diligence, trying to find a central directoral concept that would illuminate the themes and ideas of the play in a telling and imaginative way. Hah. I'd forgotten. This is a stake play, a church assignment. The primary role of the director is to get people to attend rehearsals. After this experience, I realize that I would never, under any circumstances, direct a stake production of Saturday's Warrior, whereas My Turn on Earth is fine. This has nothing to do with the respective quality of the two scripts and everything to do with cast size. Warrior's cast is much larger, which gives rehearsal non-attenders all the more opportunity to do their damage. Whereas the cast size for MTOE is only five.

Anyway, I'm directing MTOE. My cast is five. They're wonderful people, and I love them dearly. Playing Gloria is a fourteen year old, sweet and innocent and with a lovely, very small voice. We hope we can mike her. Getting to do MTOE has essentially made her life, and she was completely memorized by our second rehearsal. Barbara is played by a sixteen year old. She's very pretty, has a terrific voice, and good stage presence when she remembers her lines, which isn't often because she also has a very active social life. Pam is played by a young married women; she's married to the actor who plays Charles. They have two very small children, and the stake has arranged babysitting for them for rehearsals, except for the rehearsals when someone forgot to. John is played by a young guy in my ward, who is the backbone of the cast, smart and funny and talented. We're able to rehearse twice a week, Thursdays and Saturdays. That's entirely inadequate, of course. It's also amazing. We have three wards sharing one building, and somehow, our stake was able to carve twice a week rehearsals into a fantastically crowded calender. We're not the highest priority, nor ought we to be. But they did it for us; our stake support has been phenomenal.

I've also got a choreographer, who has very cheerfully adjusted herself to the fact that her actors can't learn any but the simplest steps. And a pregnant assistant director, wife of one of the bishops in the stake, who has cheerfully made herself utterly and completely indispensable.

Okay, enough about me. What's the play like?

My Turn on Earth came out in about '77. Carol Lynn Pearson wrote it, and Lex de Azevedo did the music. It was another one of the big Mormon musicals. I hated Saturday's Warriors when it came out in '73, with that pureness of aesthetic certainty possessed only by college freshmen,and then I went on a mission and so when I came back, MTOE was hot, and my response to it was, literally, sophomoric. And now, nearly twenty five years later, I'm directing the thing.

Okay, so some of the music sounds like the Carpenters, and some of it sounds like it's underscoring a Charlie's Angels chase scene, and there's a lot of Bread in there, and for some reason there's a country song thrown in for Marie Osmond fans. Okay, it's soft rock, intended for a generation that grew up listening to David Gates and Dan Fogelberg and Gordon Lightfoot (assuming they didn't pay close heed to the lyrics). Me, I grew up on Wagner and the Who, and love Smashing Pumpkins. And yet some of it's absolutely lovely, especially Angel Lullaby, which is a very pretty tune. But the show really has something going for it. I'm consistently surprised by it.

It's about children. Really, it's a Theatre For Young Audiences piece. That's not a knock; there's great stuff written for children, and the best children's theatre (like the best children's literature) works great for adults. But the characters in MTOE are all children, and they offer a child's perspective on the plan of salvation. The show makes heavy use of children's games; they skip rope, they play jacks, they play red rover. But that obscures what it really is.

It's a morality play. It's in that great medieval tradition of Everyman and The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind and Magnificence. And the basic structure of a morality is this: emblematic characters go on a journey, which mirrors our journey through life. Everyman is told by God to prepare for Death, so he asks his friends -- Five Wits and Fellowship and so on -- to go with him. Barbara, in MTOE, is coming to earth, and told she has to hunt for 'treasure.' And she goes on a journey, through childhood and marriage and death, and learns that the 'treasure' is love. It's a morality play. (It becomes particularly obvious during the song I Have a Plan, in which Jesus and Satan sing about their competing plans for men's salvation.) I love the essentially metaphoric nature of the piece. In fact, I'm a little worried that folks will read into my racially mixed casting of the piece more than I intended.

Now, the morality tradition is, of necessity, didactic. That's not necessarily a flaw. But MTOE is actually sort of doctrinal. I have a friend who wants to write a play based on the Doctrine and Covenants. Not the history, the doctrines. Well, that's sort of what Carol Lynn has done.

So it's a morality play for children, with actors purporting to be children. But it's got some real wit and energy and a terrific sense of fun. And it's very sophisticated. Okay, it does kind of kick you in the teeth with a Message. But that's unavoidable in the morality tradition. And as a teaching tool for kids, I like it a lot.

I find myself wondering why nobody else tried anything like this. A Mormon play without characters, really, without a story, but which takes us on an emblematic journey, with the focus on doctrine. We're awfully wedded to realism; I'm delighted with a piece that tries for something more ambitious.

So, talk to your stake. Get your activities chair involved. Do MTOE. It's a great show for a stake production. I can't invite you to our production. Our cultural hall has a limited capacity, and our stake has requested that attendance be limited to stake members and to the immediate family of cast members. But I've very much enjoyed directing the thing. I'll let you know how it turned out.

Eric Samuelsen