Special Theater Issue of El Pregonero de Deseret

El Pregonero de Deseret (a Spanish-language, Mormon-letters publication) has new been around for four full years, and its latest issue is a thematic one. The topic: theater. We had done thematic issues before (short story, poetry), but we wanted to do one on theater because this genre is so important culturally to Latter-day Saints.

One can find something sacred about theatrical performance in our tradition. While all ordinances include some measure of performance, our most sacred rituals are very much a type of interactive theater. And even as a form of entertainment, theater has been with us from very early on. We know that Joseph Smith himself organized a theater company in Nauvoo, where a young talent called Brigham Young performed. It took the Saints about three years after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley to begin organizing community theater companies. And within our meetinghouses, wards and stakes put on plays. This seems to be why our churches all over the world are designed with stages in them. Auxiliary organizations for a long time encouraged artistic creation, including the performance of theater. Collective acceptance of theater as a cultural manifestation of LDS life and faith was such that the Church sponsored several well-known pageants.

Outside the United States, meetinghouse theater was commonplace in the 20^th century. Growing up in Paysandú, Uruguay, I remember as a child our stake putting on elaborate plays to commemorate things like Christmas and even the arrival of the pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley. Theater of that type was encouraged by the Church institutionally, as evidenced by the publication of a theater manual that was translated into languages other than English for international distribution. I still have copy of this long-discontinued Manual de Teatro at home.

In the last few decades, however, this institutional support for meetinghouse theater has waned. While the Church institutionally continues to put on different form of theatrical performance, many of those efforts have logically turned to audiovisual production. (Think of the New Testament and Book of Mormon videos we have all watched and enjoyed.) Because there is a reduced emphasis on theater, the number of ward and stake plays seems to have diminished across the Spanish-speaking LDS world.

But theater is not quite dead in our meetinghouses. Plays continue to be put on from time to time, and that old stage still has uses beyond musical performance. Because we feel this is a worthwhile tradition, we at the Cofradía de Letras Mormonas decided to help keep the tradition alive by publishing a special issue. In it, we published three plays that were written specifically to be performed at church. We have one that was performed by a Primary, one that was peformed by the youth, and (of course) a Christmas one. We also published some excerpts from the Manual de Teatro.

We just wanted to remind our readers that theater is part of our shared culture. And, who knows, perhaps it will inspire some new productions…