Author: Melissa Leilani Larson
Title: Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love
BCC Press, 2018. 140 pages. Two play scripts.
Reviewed by Theric Jepson, January 8, 2018
I’ve long since first read “Little Happy Secrets” which I published lo these many years ago. “Pilot Program” I knew about but had never read. “Little Happy Secrets” didn’t feel quite as revolutionary as it did all those years ago, but it is still excellent. “Pilot Program” kept pushing deeper and deeper, but in unexpected (read: plain and realistic) ways. The plays make what feels like a necessary pairing, each directing its energy toward LDS sexual mores though at quite different angles.
Other notes:
Each play relies on a minimum of characters and setting.
Each play uses a single narrator welcoming us into her inner life.
Even with that onrunning soliloquy gluing the scenes together, the moments we see into characters most deeply are in the liminal, silent moments of conversation. Each play includes, as part of its production notes, this: “Sometimes silence is everything.”
Each play ends on an unfinished, unsettled note that emphasizes the lived reality of these characters’ lives.
I haven’t seen either produced, but the intimacy of every moment of each play demands skilled actors, to be sure. Although, perhaps in contradiction, I also feel these plays would work quite well as impromptu readers theater among friends.
My favorite aspect of both plays is how, by the end, the characters’ pain is my own, and I feel they are friends of mine and that I must be there for them. This sort of empathy may be what art is for. I pray we take it with us back into our relationships with the living.