Friends! How go things with you?
Life has, of late, not left a whole lot of brain power for
writing, so posts have been necessarily sporadic. But last week my good friend
Artemis (she of the Thor/Loki/Fandom conversation) asked me to come along with
her to see Book of Mormon, and after we’d discussed it a long while on the way
back to the train station, she said, “So, you do realize you have to write a
blog post on this now, don’t you?”
Well, she did pay for my ticket, so yes, I do have to write
a blog post on it now.
Let me preface this by saying that Book of Mormon is not a
musical I would have elected to go see by myself. I’m not a fan of South Park
or the particular brand of humor on that show, and I’m not really crazy about
Mormons, and I’m really, really
not a fan of making fun of anyone’s religion. Pretty much I was going because I
had the next day off and my friend had a ticket. So I went.
And, surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed myself. For those of you who, like myself, have not
been bothered with Book of Mormon, let me give you a summary.
The musical opens with a class full of eager young Mormons
who are finishing up their missionary formation and going to do their required
two years of missionary service. (As an aside, this is pretty much the only
song in the show I absolutely loved. Here, let’s listen.)
We meet Elder Price, who’s kind of the ‘spit shined shoes,
gets everything right, teacher’s pet’ type, and Elder Cunningham, who’s kind
of…not that type. Elder Price is really hoping he gets assigned to his dream
post, Orlando, Florida, and Elder Cunningham is just excited that he gets to go
somewhere and maybe make a friend. As you’ve probably guessed, for the
requisite comic element, these two characters get paired together to do their
missionary service in Uganda, which Elder Price is less than thrilled about.
The audience sees the families of these two young men saying goodbye at the
airport, giving some sense of how they turned out the way they did, and then,
after some clever scene changes and less than memorable songs, they arrive in
Uganda.
There’s a very famous piece of writing often taught in Post
Colonial Literature classes called “How
to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina, in which Wainaina points out
all of the accepted tropes or stereotypes western authors use to talk about
Africa. (One of those tropes being that you can always just talk about Africa
as a big mass, because, as all men of learning know, Africa has no internal
distinctions, cultural boundaries, or ‘difference’ to distinguish one part of the continent from
another. ) (Please pardon my sarcasm.) If you’ve never read it, it’s a really
great piece of writing, and very relevant here because that’s what Uganda is in
this play. The scene opens and it’s all there – the dung huts, the sad people
milling about in the streets, the requisite warlord who’s terrorizing the villagers
and stealing the luggage of well meaning white missionaries. It’s a bit of dead
horse – which is a little funny, because in a bit of clever visual punnery,
there actually is someone dragging a dead horse across the stage.
I’m not sure if this is okay, but when the curtain came up
on this scene, I frowned. The villagers started singing and making jokes about
how they have maggots in places I don’t want to think about, and I felt like I
was watching some kind of post-colonial train wreck. Which I expressed to
Artemis during the intermission. “What if,” she said, “the way that the set is
done is supposed to convey how Price and Cunningham see and perceive Africa?”
We agreed that both men set themselves up to think that the place they’ll be
going will terrible – and lo and behold, it is. I think that’s pretty fair. We
find what we expect to find. (Does that mean I expected to find stereotyped
Africa in the play? Food for thought.)
After arriving in the village, Price and Cunningham learn
that (as we might predict) the mission has been unsuccessful thus far. It’s
hard to sell religion to people who can’t get their basic needs met every day. Price,
being the goody-two-shoes that he is, decides to take matters into his own
hands – and gets nowhere, until he and Cunningham meet up with the village leader’s
daughter, Nabalungi. (It’s a reoccurring joke that Cunningham, who thinks she’s
really cute, also can’t remember her name.) Nabalungi, unlike the rest of the
villagers, is really sold on what Cunningham and Price are talking about when
they talk about paradise.
But somewhere their wires have crossed. Price is talking about the heavenly paradise
after death – Nabalungi is convinced that if they convert to Mormonism, they’ll
be granted access to Salt Lake City, which sounds like a paradise to her. “My
mother once told me of a place/ … I always thought she'd made it up/To comfort
me in times of pain/But now I know that place is real/Now I know it's name/Sal
Tlay Ka Siti/Not just a story Momma told/But a village in Utah/Where the roofs
are thatched with gold.”
Ah, gold roofs. A staple in the dreams of every immigration
narrative. And it gets better!
“They have vitamin injections by the case” “The warlords
there are friendly/They help you cross the street/And there's a Red Cross on
every corner/With all the flour you can eat.”
With a paradise like that, it’s not difficult to see why the
missionaries aren’t getting anywhere. These are folks who are really down on
their luck. (Wainaina would probably have something to say about that, too, but
we won’t go into that now.)
Now, this is where the story gets interesting. Price gives
up, but Cunningham, who wants really, really badly for his friend to stay and
not get reassigned to Orlando, decides to give the missionary work another go.
He starts reading from the Book of Mormon to the villagers – and when they stop
paying attention, Cunningham starts adding a heavy gilt of pop culture
references, action, and drama. That seems to work – but they still don’t
understand how this ‘book about America a long long time ago’ can help them
here in Uganda. So Cunningham does what any stressed-out teenager does – he
lies. He starts adding elements into the story that make the Book into a
document that applies to the villagers’ lives. Of COURSE there’s something in
the Book of Mormon about struggling with AIDS and dysentery and warlords and
your daughters being raped!
But it works – people start converting. The lying and pop
culture references, of course, get Cunningham in a ton of trouble when the
Mission Elders want to come and see how the mission is doing and get treated to
a dramatic interpretation of Cunningham’s new and improved Book of Mormon.
(Which I was also kind of not okay with for lots of reasons, but I’m weird, so
we’ll ignore that and move on.)
Having found out that everything she’s been told about god
and paradise is a lie, and that converting to Mormonism doesn’t mean she gets
to go to Salt Lake City, Nabalungi tries to run away. The villagers, however,
try to talk her back into a good relationship with God. She tries to explain
that everything Cunningham’s told them is made up, that it never happened, and
that subsequently, it doesn’t mean anything.
“Of course -- it’s a metaphor!” the villagers exclaim.
“Prophets always speak in metaphors. You don’t actually think Joseph Smith
fucked a frog, do you?” Duh! What do you think we are, ignorant or something?
(Frog fucking was one of those elements Cunningham added in
for cultural relevancy, as a helpful alternative to fucking virgins to cure
AIDS, and it gets brought up a lot. I guess I just don’t like humor that relies
on sex jokes.)
I think what saves
this from being a total post-colonial train wreck is the fact that there are
some points in the play where the villagers really take a stick to the eye of the missionaries and
point out that their missionary work (which is pretty much limited to ‘Here,
let us give you this book, accept Jesus as your
lord and savior’) is really useless, especially when you have to worry
about things like your daughter getting raped by the militia or where your next
meal is coming from or whether the nearby river will flood your house and take
away all your possessions and arable farmland.
And the moment described above, for me, saved the whole musical.
The smartest line in the whole production is spoken by one of the villagers,
the villagers whom everyone has assumed know nothing about the world and the
way the world works. They’re not dumb – they know a great deal. They just don’t
have the resources or agency to do anything with that knowledge. Until
Cunningham wakes up some of that agency with his storytelling. If the people he
talks about in his version can stand up against their evil warlords or live with
dysentery, why can’t you? What Cunningham has done with his reimagined Book of
Mormon is what many great preachers do every Sunday – he made it relevant to
his audience. (His methods might be a little questionable, but he did it with
good intentions.)
And that brings me to the real point of this blog post, the
‘take’ that Artemis wanted from me. I’m one of the only really religious people
Artemis knows. (I'm more culturally Catholic than what I can in good conscience label authentic Catholic, but the point still stands.) She and I were watching the same show with two different
agendas, and she wanted to know how my religious agenda had taken in and interpreted all of this.
One of the things that struck me throughout the play was the
missionary work itself. As the play points out, just talking to people about
Jesus isn’t very helpful. (Duh.) However, a doctrine of works, as some theologians
have termed it, is much closer to what Jesus advocates for in the new
testament. (This
Sunday’s gospel reading from Luke was the story of the Good Samaritan –a doctrine
of works reading if ever there was one.) Now, we could talk A LOT about how ‘good
works’ can go really, really wrong in lots of ways, but essentially, the idea
of doing good works comes down to religion being practical and supporting the
practical, day-to-day needs of the community. Cunningham did this by addressing
his ‘scriptures’ to the problems the community faced everyday, giving them
hopeful stories that would support them as they went about their work.
The other thing that struck me was the play’s message about
the authenticity of religion and religious practice. We’re given two
characters: Elder Price, who does everything by the book and would be a perfect
religious example except that he’s only doing these things in the hope of an
earthly reward, and Elder Cunningham, who hasn’t even read the book, is unaware
of basic dogma, and yet genuinely wants to help people by sharing the feeling
of solace he gets from his God. Both of these religious practices are wrong, to
a certain degree, and both could stand to have a little more of what the other
has. Blind, unquestioned faith is just as harmful as no faith at all, and the
Christian God also says that you should live and work for the betterment of others, not just for
yourself.
So, to summarize, the Book of Mormon wasn’t a waste of time,
but some of the humor was probably wasted on me. I can, however, appreciate a
story that promotes a little bit of dialogue, which this show did on a variety of different subjects, and for
that, I can say that if you're going, you'll at least have something to talk about afterwards.
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