Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After the Dead

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Acknowledgments This book would not have been completed, because it would not have ever gotten started, without the sabbatical year that was granted to me through the College of Fine Arts and Communications at Brigham Young University. I thank Amy Jensen and Rodger Sorensen for making that possible. I am also grateful for the grants awarded me by the CFAC and the Department of Theatre and Media Arts. These provided generous funds to attend pageants, take research trips, hire assistants, and present versions of my research at conferences. It is a blessing to work at an institution that is fully supportive of my research agenda. At BYU, faculty and students alike have provided material and emotional assistance over the years that I have been working on this book. I’m grateful for Dean Duncan’s invitation to talk about my writing on his radio show. Our conversation helped me think through my topic and my process, and he helped me feel better about how the work was going. Lindsay Livingston, Julia Ashworth, and Amy Jensen were all excellent sounding boards for my ideas. Michael Kraczek helped pick up parts of my administrative load so that I could focus on research and writing. Wade Hollingshaus’s support as a colleague and as my chair was vital. I have learned much from him about how best to balance the resources of time and money. His support in these areas provided me the time I needed to write, and our conversations about my research improved that writing. Darl Larsen was especially willing to be a respondent, a reviewer, and a sympathetic supporter. The walk down the hall from my office to his office became more frequent as this project progressed. I’m in awe of his skills as a scholar and author. I am so grateful for the friendship of these most excellent colleagues. Also integral to my work were some outstanding research assistants—Chelsea Hickman, Chelsea Kauffman, Elizabeth Lowe, Rick Curtiss, and Page x →Andrew Smith. Their help made it possible for me to focus on writing, write more quickly, and write better. I am especially indebted to Kristin Perkins, who helped me put the final draft into shape with excellent research, careful editing, and endless good humor. She took care of details I didn’t even know were needed. I will be forever grateful for her help and look forward to great things from her in the future. I’m also deeply appreciative of all the BYU students I taught during the time I was writing this book. They have been patient with my single-minded focus on Mormons, pageants, and death. They have been understanding when I needed to shift some of their deadlines so I could meet my own. Their insights and enthusiasms helped shaped this book in ways they may not even understand. It is a privilege to work with such bright, inquisitive, and capable young scholars and artists. I appreciate the wonderful professional colleagues who read drafts of chapters and provided much-needed feedback to me—John Fletcher, Henry Bial, Lindsay Livingston, Wade Hollingshaus, Janiece Johnson, Allan Davis, Sue Sanborn, and especially Karen Jean Martinson, who helped me when I needed it the most. I’m grateful for the editorial vision of Spencer Fluhrman at Mormon Studies Review; an early version of my work on the Mesa Easter Pageant appeared in MSR Fall 2015. My oldest friend Danielle Ellis took the job to copyedit multiple drafts of the manuscript, a task she performed with incisiveness and cheerfulness. Other colleagues—Amy Hughes, Brian Herrera, Jill Stevenson, and Amy Harris—helped me navigate the publication process. LeAnn Fields at University of Michigan Press was a long-time champion and careful reader of my work. I am very thankful for her care and attention not only to the book, but to me as an author. Thanks also go to the able Jenny Geyer, Sarah Dougherty, Mary Hashman and the rest of the UMP team, and to the lovely Rachel Nishan of Twin Oaks Indexing, for taking my manuscript and making a book. The external reviewers of both the initial proposal and the full manuscript provided insights and revision suggestions that proved invaluable. They remain anonymous, and I remain in their debt.

I cannot individually thank all those associated directly with the Mormon pageants who shared their time, talents, access, archives, and testimonies with me. In the eight years I worked on this project, I had direct contact with nearly four hundred people who talked with me about their pageant experiences. I had the opportunity to meet with Church leaders in Salt Lake City, I spoke on the phone with missionaries serving at Church history sites Page xi →where pageants are staged, and I had strangers reach out to me via Facebook to tell their stories. There are a few notable people, however, who went above and beyond to support my research. I will never be able to repay them for their generosity. Rodger Sorensen, my beloved mentor and friend, introduced me to the world of pageants. Brent Hansen graciously invited me to participate on the directing team at the Hill Cumorah Pageant, made all the arrangements for my extended stay with the pageant, and facilitated my first experience into the world of Mormon pageantry. Gerald Argetsinger knows more and has collected more about the history of the Hill Cumorah Pageant than anyone else. He shared with me just a small part of what he knows, and was willing to xerox copy some of his archive so now I have it, too. Merilyn Jorgensen talked with me at length about her memories of the Manti Pageant, shared her personal research with me, and introduced me to key participants at the pageant. Artistic director Jenee Wright Prince provided me full access to the Mesa Easter pageant, and gave me her insights into Mormon art and directing shows with animals. Craig and Heidi Camp, the executive directors of Nauvoo Productions, invited me into their home for an extended interview to help me understand the complexities of performance in Nauvoo. They also welcomed me to their process of casting Young Performing Missionaries. Without Heidi in Nauvoo, I would have been lost. I am so grateful for her enthusiasm, thoughtfulness, and good humor. I am also thankful for the support I received from friends and neighbors who went out of their way to care for me and my family so I could have more time to write. Lara Beene, Lisa Hall Hagen, Nathan Jones, Gina Everett, Kelsey Navasard, Georgia Porras, Emily Campbell, Makena Everett, and especially Genevieve Clark have my deepest gratitude. My lovely parents-in-law, Judy and Irwin Jones, opened their home to me on a number of occasions so that I could retreat and write. My sister Ashley Bruggeman and her family provided fun cousin time, practical advice, and moral support throughout the long years of writing. The fact that I started writing a book in the first place and, more importantly, the fact that I finished it is due in large part to my parents, E. Sue and James Sanborn. They raised me to ask questions, to work hard to find answers, and to always finish what I start. They also raised me to believe, and for that, I will be eternally grateful. Most importantly, I want to recognize my family. I was still pregnant with Eden when I began researching pageants. She has never known life without me working on this book. Since I started this project, I have seen Page xii →her grow into a beautiful girl who is curious, loving, and fierce. In the same time, my son Cohen has grown taller than I am. He is a kind, creative young man with a crazy sense of humor. They have both been patient as we have driven all over the country to watch pageants. They have cooked meals for themselves and me so that I could work uninterrupted. They have asked profound questions about my work that have shaped what is written here. They have supported me unconditionally and selflessly. I love them more than I can put into words. Last, but dearest to me, is my husband, Glen I. Jones. We met over soup at a friend’s house; he courted me with continental philosophy and Middle Eastern cuisine; and he has kept our marriage alive with his unwavering support, immensely caring heart, and wicked wit. Throughout my career and the writing of this book, he has pushed me forward when I slacked, has lifted me up when I have fallen, and has run ahead of me to clear my way. He read every version of this manuscript and lent his critical insight to each draft. I have never met anyone with a more curious mind or more adventurous spirit. I am grateful to my Heavenly Parents for gifting me with such children and with such a man. For me, heaven is where they are.

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A Note on Sources Throughout this work, I use a number of primary sources published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I do not use the full citation for these sources, following standard guidelines for the citation of scriptures. However, as the LDS Church has multiple scriptures and official publications, I list them here as a reference guide. The Bible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publishes the Bible with the King James Version as text. It includes the Old and New Testaments, but not the Apocrypha. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Christ. A record of the ancient people of the Americas. It was translated by Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Doctrine and Covenants. A collection of revelations delivered by God to help organize the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most revelations were received by Joseph Smith, although subsequent prophets have added some additional revelations that have been canonized as scripture. The Pearl of Great Price. Joseph Smith’s translation of portions of the Old Testament. Includes Joseph Smith History, the official record of Smith’s foundational vision and subsequent call as a prophet, and the Articles of Faith. Ensign. The official English-language magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Twice annually, it includes the full transcriptionPage xiv → of General Conference, six different sessions of discourses from the prophet, apostles, and general authorities of the Church. These are considered to be inspired sermons and God’s revealed word to his people today.

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Chapter 1 The Past Is Never Dead Every single person in this pageant represents someone who actually lived 2000 years ago with Christ. Every single person. Maybe they are looking down upon us and seeing how we are delivering what they did when they walked this earth with ChristВ .В .В . Maybe, just maybe, they are watching us and praying for usВ .В .В . I want you to think about that. —A devotional speaker at the Mesa Easter Pageant, 2013 It is possible to trace the migration of Mormon pioneers by the graveyards of the dead they buried along the way. From upstate New York, where the Church was founded in 1830, all the way to Salt Lake City, where they made their home in 1847, Mormons laid their loved ones to rest in what one pioneer described as “a Spot Chosen out By our selves.”1 Sometimes this was a single grave under a tree or along the side of a trail. Other times, it was a family cemetery on privately owned land or even established cemeteries set aside by city planners. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church, is buried in Nauvoo, Illinois, near where he was assassinated before the Mormons made their exodus to the Salt Lake valley. Several Mormon pioneers are buried in the Garden Grove Burial Grounds in Iowa, where they settled to provide a stopover for the thousands of pioneers heading west. Hundreds are buried in the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery just north of Omaha, Nebraska. Martin’s Cove, Wyoming, is an infamous site where two handcart companies tried to find shelter from an early and harsh winter. While many of the pioneers in these ill-fated companies died along the way, journals kept by company members suggest that dozens of people died in the Cove where they finally stopped their travels to wait for help. Although no burial grounds have been found, the site is still revered as the final resting place of those who died during the tragedy. All but three of the Mormon prophets since Brigham Young Page 2 →are buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery, which was established within a month of the Mormons’ arrival in Utah and is still used today. The Clarkston City Cemetery in Cache Valley, Utah, is a small, open field with gravestones dating back to the founding of the town by Mormon settlers in 1864. It is located down a gravel road on the outskirts of town, behind a substantial stone gate, on a hill overlooking lush fields. If one stands in the middle of the cemetery, the valley becomes obvious. The Wasatch Mountain Range nearly rings the horizon and on the frequently clear days in this part of Northern Utah, the mountains provide an immense and majestic backdrop to the tiny graveyard. The cemetery is an eclectic mix of old and new. The older headstones follow patterns of engraving popular in the late nineteenth century, with deeply chiseled names and dates carved into marble with little or no ornamentation. The early twentieth century headstones are engraved with decorative edges or flowered ornamentation. One can tell the most recent headstones by their elaborate engravings of military insignia, wildlife scenes, inspirational quotes, tiny shoes, and multiple versions of Mormon temples. The centerpiece of the cemetery is an enormous granite memorial for Martin Harris, a well-known early member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a close companion of Joseph Smith. The largest structures in the Clarkston City Cemetery, however, are the enormous light towers that are permanently affixed in the grounds to service the Martin Harris Memorial Amphitheater. On this stage, every other year on odd years, over a hundred volunteers from Clarkston, Utah, and its surrounding areas put on a pageant entitled Martin Harris: The Man Who Knew. The thousands of audience members who attend the pageant must literally walk over the graves of Mormon pioneers to watch them come alive on the stage below. The image of a stage in a cemetery is, for me, a powerful visual metaphor of the relationship between theater and theology in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.2 For decades, the Church has produced four annual pageants: the Mesa Easter Pageant, Jesus the Christ, in Arizona; the Manti Pageant, The Mormon Miracle

Pageant, in central Utah; the Nauvoo Pageant, A Tribute to Joseph Smith, in Illinois; and the Church’s flagship production, the Hill Cumorah Pageant, America’s Witness for Christ, in Palmyra, New York.3 In 2013, the Church also introduced the British Pageant, Truth Will Prevail, which, after its premiere on the Preston England Temple Page 3 →grounds, moved to Nauvoo. Now it runs every other day in repertoire with the Nauvoo Pageant, making these two productions a singular event. Additionally, there are two officially sponsored biennial Utah pageants—the Castle Valley Pageant in Castle Dale, Utah, and the Clarkston Pageant. Each of these pageants is bound up in an intricate relationship with the dead. Pageants are performed on sites near the dead—at cemeteries, in living history villages, on hills where angels have walked, and by Mormon temples, where living Mormons go to perform proxy religious ordinances for their dead ancestors. Pageant participants perform the dead as they stage sacred scriptural narratives of the New Testament and the Book of Mormon, and embody the characters of these sacred pasts as well as the more recent past of Mormon history. Pageant audiences—participants and spectators alike—also perform with the dead as they welcome the influence of the Holy Ghost, and are influenced by the ghosts of those being brought to life on the stage. In Contemporary Mormon Pageantry, I examine the four annual Mormon American pageants—the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the Manti Pageant, the Nauvoo Pageant, and the Mesa Easter Pageant—to show how the performance spaces, the performers, and the spectators of Mormon pageantry engage the past in order to strengthen present belief and prepare for the future. I focus exclusively on the production and reception of Mormon pageantry by Mormons to explore how performance functions in a close community of believers who both make and partake of the message. I contend that the LDS theology of the redemption of the dead is key to understanding this unique theatrical process. In all of these pageants, characters on stage die and are dramatized as resurrected spirits, and honored figures from ancient and recent religious past are revived. The ghosts of the dead haunt and hallow Mormon pageantry, which in turn prepares the living who participate and partake of the pageant experience to move out of this world and into the next. In Mormon pageantry, the past is performed to strengthen the relationship between the living and the dead in literal ways that have real consequences for the future. I call this theological performance process resurrecting the past. And the purpose of resurrecting the past in Mormon pageantry is no less than attempting to bring about the eternal life of all humankind. In other words, I argue that Mormon pageantry is one way that Mormons work toward exaltation—an eternity in heaven with God, Jesus, and their families. Figure 1. Participants in the Martin Harris Pageant waiting offstage in the cemetery for the pageant to start. Photo by Delayne Locke. Page 4 →

Resurrecting the Past Using the term resurrection to describe how and why performance functions in Mormon pageantry builds directly on the Christian doctrine of resurrection.4 The Mormon prophet-founder Joseph Smith taught: “The fundamental principles of our religion are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.”5 Here, Smith lays out the three time periods associated with Christ’s resurrection: the past of his death, the present when he is resurrected back into mortal life—he lives today—and our eternal future with him in heaven. The same three time periods are on display in Mormon pageant performance. The past is built on the testimonies and sacrifices of those who have gone before and whose lives are memorialized in holy ground. The present is embodied in living Mormons who testify of the divinity of the resurrected Christ and the good news of his gospel. The future is imagined in Mormon pageantry by believing audiences who are invited to obey God’s commandments and endure to the end of mortal existence. The righteous will then be Page 5 →rewarded with exaltation, which is eternal life in the presence of God in loving family units and the highest reward of the faithful. However, past, present, and future are not engaged discreetly. While the religious life cycle may move temporally from preexistence to life to death and back to life again, the resurrected body holds all these times together in one,

as is suggested by the Smith quote above. The resurrection of Jesus Christ and his promise that all may one day be so resurrected is a fundamental principle in most Christian religions. In the New Testament, Paul explains: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”6 He later clarifies that this “change” is a bodily one where Jesus Christ will “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body.”7 In addition to the commonly held Christian understanding of resurrection, the Book of Mormon teaches the materiality of the resurrected body: The death of Christ shall loose the bands of this temporal death, that all shall be raised from this temporal death. The spirit and the body shall be reunited again in its perfect form; both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame, even as we now are at this time; .В .В .В Now, this restoration shall come to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous; and even there shall not so much as a hair of their heads be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame.8 In this way, resurrection is neither something old (past) nor new (present). It is a future joining of the past and present, a restoration of something that never existed: a “perfect and proper frame.” As with scriptural descriptions of resurrection, resurrecting the past as a theatrical process is to not just bring the past back to life, but to make it live again in a better way. In her excellent analysis of evangelical performance, Jill Stevenson suggests that “many evangelical media aim to collapse time and space in order to generate rerepresentational encounters that will allow users to get in (physical, material) touch with a past, present, and future simultaneously.”9 Mormon pageants similarly create encounters with past, present, and future simultaneously in order to imagine exaltation. Obviously, contemporary Mormon pageantry is not the only performancePage 6 → form that attempts to bring the past back to life. One could argue that any period piece does the same. However, there are a wide range of engagements in theatrically staging the past. Consider the different relationships between past and present in a production of Shakespeare set in the Renaissance, a full reconstruction of a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre in London, the living history activities at Shakespeare’s Birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon, the immersive experience of a Renaissance fair, or the Play On! Project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In the first case, the past is presented on stage to invoke a bygone era for narrative purposes, for pleasure, or perhaps to meet an audience’s expectations for a Shakespeare play. This is different than the reconstruction of the past in a production at the Globe Theatre in London, where every detail from staging to costuming is oftentimes planned with an eye toward authenticity. At the Globe, the carefully researched and designed performance of the past is a laboratory to try and understand more about the working conditions of the past as much as it is a conventional theatrical space for audiences in the present. A similar relationship between past and present is evidenced in living history activities like those at Shakespeare’s Birthplace, where the past is “brought to life.”10 The opposite use of the past functions in Renaissance fairs, where whimsy, playfulness, and anachronism are as valued as historical reconstruction. As Rachel Rudin argues in her study on Renaissance festivals and American counterculture, fairs function as a paradox, where “attempts at historical authenticity act as commentary not on the past but the present.”11 Her interviews with dozens of Renaissance fair participants reveals that authenticity and its complement, anachronism, are used as tools by performers to create an image of the past for pleasure and consumption in the present. The past is not resurrected in fairs, it is reanimated using pieces of the present to fill in the gaps where the past is missing. This tension between past and present is perhaps most visible in the Play On! Project at the Oregon Shakespeare

Festival, where contemporary playwrights are working with dramaturgs to create modern-language translations of thirty-nine plays attributed to Shakespeare. The project organizers hope that the newly translated plays, paired with the Shakespeare originals, will create “both performable and extremely useful reference texts for both classrooms and productions” and will prompt “a highly engaging national conversation about language.”12 In this case, the present is being used to literallyPage 7 → rewrite the past as a means of both making the past more accessible but also focusing critical attention on the relationship between past and present. Mormon Pageant experiences are carefully constructed and fully immersive events that remember, honor, and celebrate Mormon scripture and history. In this way, they are like many of these historical performances. However, pageant participants are not distancing themselves from the present to immerse themselves in that past world for the purpose of education, as in living history practices or historically reconstructed productions. Participants in Mormon pageantry are very much grounded in the present and are aware that they are putting on an elaborate show whose purpose is less authenticity and more emotional affect. Pageants are not telling the past through the lens of the present, as in the Play On! project; the epic historical pageant style of the early twentieth-century is consistent in all pageants. Nor are they playing with the tensions between the past and present as one might find at a Renaissance fair or in a Shakespeare play set in the past. Pageants are firmly set in the past in script and design. The only references to the present in contemporary Mormon pageantry are those times that the pageant narrator or a character in the pageant refers to the spectators. In Mormon pageantry, the past is brought back to life in the present, with an eye toward an eternal future as the living producers, performers, and spectators have encounters with the dead. Pageants are performed either at Mormon heritage sites, at Mormon temples, or both. The particular placement of pageants in these locations transforms them into memorials to the dead, an intersection of time and space that both preserves the past and makes it new again through performance. This memorialization, however, is overlaid with the present-day religious testimonies of the participants, who bear witness of their gospel beliefs as characters from ancient times and Mormon history. Participants are also simultaneously bearing witness of their own personal beliefs, a performance that infuses the past narrative with their present faith. Pageant participants directly encounter the dead they are portraying as they faithfully reenact them and are sometimes even literally inspired by the ghosts of the dead they are embodying. Finally, audiences commemorate the dead in an imagined community of celebrants that brings the past into literal being and imagines an eternal future with God the Father and Jesus Christ. Theologian Sarah Bachelard argues for the performative nature of resurrection: “The truth of the testimony concerning the resurrection, rememberingPage 8 → that testimony encompasses both what happened (narration) and its meaning (confession), is necessarily interdependent with whether the reality testified to is capable of being inhabited in such a way that life lived in its light is indeed вЂnew,’ is experienced as more вЂreal,’ more deeply, truthfully and creatively engaged with its meaning.”13 In other words, the truth of resurrection in the future is deeply entwined with the how a believer’s life is materially changed in the present, based on their enacted witness of the resurrection. If one believes in the resurrection, one’s life will change. As one’s life changes, resurrection becomes a promise for the future. Religious testimony, or a spiritual witness of belief, is a fundamental building block of resurrection and resurrecting the past. Resurrecting the past in Mormon pageantry requires the full engagement of the living and the dead: the participants in pageants, the literal dead they are representing and who haunt the performances, and the community of spectators whose reception brings the pageant to life. Pageantry is not a passive theatrical form, but one instead that provides participants and spectators alike with opportunities for exaltation as they embody, enact, perform, witness, and testify. As the Bible teaches, every human being that has ever lived will live once again; resurrection for all presumes universal life after death.14 This belief places an urgency to connect with ancestors of the past and to live life righteously in the present so that all are prepared for this glorious future. Mormon pageantry is one way that Mormons connect with their past and prepare for the future.

Religious Feelings

In the introduction to his collection of essays, Religion, Theatre, and Performance, Lance Gharavi makes the compelling argument that “religion is a public force, one that stimulates and complicates public actions; that is to say, religion is a crucial component in a wide range of performances. Although we may cite certain activities (worship, prayer, rituals, etc.) as specifically religious, we may also identify a far broader array of actions and practices as influenced or inflected by religion.”15 The recent work of Gharavi and other scholars—John Fletcher, Henry Bial, Jill Stevenson, Donnalee Dox, Claire Maria Chambers, Edmund Lingan, Simon W. Du Toit, Caroline Roarke, David Mason, Ann Pellegrini, and more—has focused on performances influencedPage 9 → by religion. These range from megachurches to sexual regulation to the Bible on the Broadway stage.16 My work in this book looks directly at the intersection between performance and religion by examining plays with overtly religious content staged by a religious group for a predominantly religious audience for a specific religious purpose. Mormon pageants are just one example of American performances like this. Sight and Sound Theatre, with state-of-the-art theaters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Branson, Missouri, has a mission to “present the Gospel of Jesus Christ and sow the Word of God into the lives of customers, guests and fellow workers by visualizing and dramatizing the scriptures, through inspirational productions, encouraging others and seeking always to be dedicated and wise stewards of our God-given talents and resources.”17 The American Passion Play in Bloomington, Illinois, and The Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas both stage annual pageants celebrating the life of Jesus Christ. Religious plays are frequently staged at religious universities, and in churches across America, plays are used to preach, inspire, and provide wholesome entertainment. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially produces seven pageants and one religious musical on a regular schedule in venues across the United States and in England. These performances alone qualify the Church as the largest producer of organized religious theater in America, and they don’t include the two to five cultural celebrations staged each year at Mormon Temple dedications, the less-frequent celebratory productions staged in the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City, new religious plays developed at any of the three Brigham Young University campuses, or the countless smaller skits, plays, and pageants produced by regional and local congregations. I will discuss the position of the performing arts in the Mormon Church in the next chapter, but suffice it to say that Mormon theater may be the most organized, elaborate, and extensive example of religious theater in the United States today. Religious theater may share techniques, authenticities, structures, and aesthetics from secular historical performance, but Mormon articulation of the past via sacred stories reenacted at sacred sites alters the performance in meaningful ways. Participation in these performances creates a unique theatrical community, expands the horizon of expectations for believing participants, and complicates what is understood as “acting” a role. For example, Mormon apostle M. Russell Ballard preached: “God’s purpose for the artist Page 10 →is to inspire, to give us visions of ourselves that we might not otherwise see, to make us better than we would have been. The world is better for the arts and righteous artists in it.”18 The efficacy of religious theater is not assessed empirically (how many attended, what was the critical reception, whether it won any awards) but viscerally (how the production made you feel). Religious theater resurrects the past to invoke a religious feeling that will carry the believer into the future; Mormons call this “feeling the Spirit.” This ineffable feeling is a phenomenon not restricted to religious theater. Theater scholar Robert K. SarlГіs made the compelling argument that period reconstructions, by the very nature of their performance, bring with them a sense of the past that engages audience members and historians in an extra-sensory way: “The unavoidably incomplete nature of performance reconstruction intensifies the imaginative stimuli, extending them into auditory, tactile, and olfactory realms, with a force and urgency beyond the reach of written language.”19 In her work Performing Remains, Rebecca Schneider describes the force of the past encroaching on the present as “something other”: That is, despite or perhaps because of the error-ridden mayhem of trying to touch the past, something other than the discrete “now” of everyday life can be said to occasionally occur—or recur. This something other is well known in practices linked to theatre, art, and ritual, if more alien to practices such as historiography that profess to privilege “hard” facts or material remains over “softer,” ephemeral traces such as the affective, bodily sensations or (re)action of those living

too far into the future for proper, evidentiary recall.20

Here, Schneider foregrounds the possibility of other ways of knowing the past that are not restricted to archival evidence and material remains. Her participation as a spectator to Civil War reenactments required her to value these “softer” traces of “bodily sensation” and emotional recall. Distinguished theater historian Marvin Carlson warmly details his experiences attending the theater in similar terms: as “moments of such intensity that they might be called epiphanies.” He suggests that “theatre is perhaps particularly well suited as an art to generate such moments because it constantly oscillates between the fleeting present and the stillness of infinity.”21 For Carlson, the temporal condition of theater moves beyond the past’s affective force on the future and into the endless future. This feeling Page 11 →that provides a hope for the future is the driving force of Jill Dolan’s manifesto, Utopia in Performance. Dolan deploys close readings of feminist autobiographical solo performances, politically engaged solo and documentary performances, and radical reworkings of classic texts to show how performance can “make palpable an affective vision of how the world might be better.”22 Dolan’s selection of performances that exemplify utopic performatives reveals the profoundly personal ways in which affect prompts action. She is clear that her work is “my own archive of spectatorship, documenting my own pleasure and desire, my hope and yearning, my experience of inter-subjectivity in rich exchange with flickering moments of theatrical performance.”23 In no way am I claiming that religious theater is utopia in performance; to appropriate Dolan’s terms to describe the deeply conservative content and mission of religious theater is radically divergent from her project. What I do suggest, however, is that her hope for “performance as a transformative experience useful in other realms of social life” is a nearly identical hope of the producers of religious theater and that the immense feeling that marks utopian performatives is present in religious theater as well.24 Other scholars who self-reflect on their experiences as spectators to religious theater confirm the relationship between performatives on both sides of the ideological divide. Scholar and activist John Fletcher and performance studies scholar Ann Pellegrini draw connections between evangelical performance and neo-liberal social activism (Fletcher) or queer theater (Pellegrini). In their independent work, they similarly argue that, while evangelical practice and liberal performance do not share worldviews, they employ similar strategies with similar affective outcomes. As Pellegrini articulates, “alongside my interest in religious feelings, and the subjects and worlds they make, I am also interested in вЂsecular feelings’ and the question, what does secularism feel like? As a first tentative answer let me pose the following: it feels a lot more like religion than we commonly suppose.”25 Jill Stevenson calls this affect “devotional force” in describing her encounters with contemporary evangelical performance. She admits to readers that despite her sometimes moral and aesthetic objections, she “was never entirely immune to the devotional force of these encounters.”26 In their commitment to historical accuracy, partnered with the goal to invoke a spiritual experience, Mormon pageants evidence the same ephemeral resonance. Indeed, the feelings provoked by religious theater are the primary intent of the production. In religious theater, transformative experiences are coded as conversion, feelings as a spiritual witness, and social action as salvation. Page 12 →My project here is not to concretely identify the phenomena of feeling the Spirit, but to explore the means by which it is created. For me, the primary means by which contemporary Mormon pageantry invokes necessary spiritual feelings is by building on a believer’s relationship to death, the dead, spirits, and the Spirit. When participants in pageants reenact the past, they are bringing back to life characters and events that they believe have already been literally brought back to life through resurrection or who may one day be so revived. They believe in the presence of the Holy Spirit who will help them achieve their performance goals and will testify of the truthfulness of the religious message of the production. They connect in very real ways to the presence of the past in the form of spirits from the other side who have agency and can intervene in human life. They feel responsible to those who came before, for their faithful lives and their sacrifices.

Participants, Spectators, Audiences The Mormon pageant experience is about Mormons, by Mormons, and for Mormons. From her experience as a non-Mormon in Nauvoo, Martha S. LoMonaco suggests: The pageants may, in fact, be gaining wider audiences beyond the Mormon community, particularly in the wake of the 2007–2008 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, which promoted an increasing national interest in Mormons and Mormonism. Audiences are still predominantly composed of Mormons, however, who attend and frequently perform in the pageants as family holiday experiences. Although potential converts are welcomed (cards are placed on every seat for audience members to request a free copy of The Book of Mormon, and smiling ushers offer additional information about the Church), the larger aim of the pageants is education, commemoration, and celebration.27 I observed that while pageants preach Mormon doctrine as overtly as any missionary discussion might, the proselytizing points were deeply embedded in oft-repeated Mormon stories and in phrases that have particular meaning to believers. As a result, whether Mormon or not, audiences must already have a high familiarity with Mormonism in order to fully appreciate the message and aesthetics of a pageant. Page 13 →It is no surprise that the vast majority of those who produce, perform, and volunteer at pageants are Mormon. This can be confirmed through cast lists, registrations, employment documentation, and other standard means for gathering demographic information. On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to determine specific demographics of those who come to see pageants. The pageants are free and open to the public. Anyone who wants to is welcome to attend. There are a variety of head-counting methods at the various pageants that result in internally circulated documents reporting attendance figures, but the Church publishes no official statistics as to the number of people attending or who they are. This gives rise to a wide range of self-reported estimates. Looking at statistics reported across news articles probably gives a relatively accurate sense of the audience trends and average reported audience sizes. But only leaks of official statistics and anecdotal evidence can give a clue to the religious affiliations of audience members. Pageants generally track the number of non-Mormon spectators by the number of cards that are filled out requesting more information about the Church. These cards, called “referrals,” are used to both assess nonMormon attendance and track efficacy of the pageant in its proselyting goals. What information there is, selfreported and estimated, suggests the vast majority of those who attend Mormon pageants are also Mormon. While certainly there are non-Mormons who act in pageants and there are always non-Mormon spectators, in this work, I’m exploring the production and reception of Mormon pageantry by Mormons. In bracketing out the nonMormon demographic, I am not ignoring the complexity of spectatorship. Instead, I’m adopting the same vision that pageants have toward those that participate and attend, the vision of a unified audience who are hoping to better live the gospel of Jesus Christ. In other words, I argue that Mormons consider their audiences not in terms of Mormon and non-Mormon, but in terms of Mormon and Mormon-in-progress. Mormon pageantry assumes that everyone, in some way, is part of a unified community of believers. In this book, I use the terms participant, spectator, and audience to refer to the overlapping schemas of Mormon participation in the pageant experience. Participants are anyone who has anything to do with putting the pageant on the stage. They include authors, producers, ecclesiastical leaders, directors, choreographers, battle masters, designers, technicians, artists, volunteers, cooks, nurses, animal wranglers, and actors. Spectators are anyone who watches the action of the pageant on the stage from a seat in the house. The audience is the combined group of both participants and spectators. Page 14 →Using the term participant, or one who takes part in something, helps me indicate how those who help to create pageants are simultaneously delivery mechanisms for the message and the primary receivers of that same message. Each member of the pageant team has a part to play in its creation. Each member also takes the message of the pageant and internalizes it as part of the process of creation. Participants know if they have been changed by the message of the pageant when they feel the power of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and in their minds. They

build their performances on this feeling, praying that spectators will have a similar affective experience. However, no effort of the participants to create a religious feeling, no matter how concerted or sincere, can guarantee that a spectator will feel the Spirit. It is up to the spectator to open themselves up to the performance in such a way that they are prepared spiritually, emotionally, and physically to receive the message. The willing performance of belief by the spectators is prerequisite to religious feeling. In contemporary Mormon pageantry, the relationship between spectator and participant is unified as the spectators largely share beliefs—in saving ordinances, resurrection, Christ’s atonement, temple rituals, the possibility of exaltation, and more—with the participants. This idea runs frankly contrary to more traditional notions that spectators encounter theater through a “willing suspension of disbelief,” an aphorism that Dennis Kennedy astutely observes is “a double negative that does not become a positive” when used to describe the theatrical event.28 In his analysis of spectators and spectacle, Kennedy proposes that: “The relationship between a willing, attentive audience and the performance is an agreement which approaches the quality of faith,” and this relationship can create belief through the absorption of the “embodied intensity of the fiction.”29 In other words, spectators, especially believing spectators, also participate in the creation of pageantry. In using the term audience to refer to both participants and spectators, I argue that in Mormon pageantry—a performance that formulates, articulates, and disseminates shared beliefs—participants and spectators coparticipate to a greater degree than is usual in theatrical events. Theater scholar Bruce McConachie suggests: “Theatrical engagement always works in two directions. That is, theater audiences must engage with actors (and indirectly with others behind the scenes), and the artists of the theater must engage with spectators before performative communication can occur with effectiveness.”30 In Mormon pageantry, the effectiveness of performativePage 15 → communication is reliant not only on the theatrical relationship that is formed between actor and spectator but also on a unified faith.

Belief and Spectacle Every Mormon theatrical performance takes for its clearly stated goal the intention of “bringing people closer to Christ,” the lofty undertaking of working toward exaltation that pageant participants seek with serious intent and great energy. This mission is not just for the spectators who attend but for all involved in the pageant experience. As one former pageant director explained to me, “If I was seeing anyone’s life come closer to Christ, and for them to be living the principles that He taught more deeply in their lives through this experience, whether that be myself, core cast members, family cast members, audiences who came who are LDSВ .В .В . and the guests who aren’t LDS, .В .В .В I was thrilled.”31 The notion of a faithful performance that leads to exaltation seems a better descriptor of religious rituals than it does a work of theater. However, a close look at the four annual Mormon pageants reveals fascinating theatrical practices that marry belief and spectacle. Mormon pageantry is a remarkable American theatrical tradition, even in secular terms. Mormon pageant experiences are carefully constructed, fully immersive events that remember, honor, and celebrate Mormon scripture and history. Pageants have been in production for decades—beginning variously in the 1920s through the 1960s and running annually until today (with a brief hiatus during WWII). Collectively, they engage thousands of participants and tens of thousands of spectators. Like the pageantry of early twentieth century America, Mormon pageantry is large in scale and ambition, replete with spectacular music and staging. The Clarkston and Castle Valley Pageants perform every other year in rotation; the Clarkston Pageant during oddnumbered years and the Castle Valley Pageant during even-numbered years. The Clarkston and Castle Valley Pageants are the smallest pageants but are still well-attended. The Clarkston Pageant only requires an eighty-fiveperson cast, 70 percent of whom return year-to-year, and it enlists the help of another 250 volunteers.32 The amphitheater at the cemetery seats about 3,000 and fills up nearly every night of its twelve-night run for a total attendance of around 30,000 guests.33 The Castle Valley Pageant, which performs on opposite years on a Page 16 →natural bluff in the heart of Utah, reports nearly identical audience numbers in terms of both participation and attendance.34

The Manti Pageant, accessible via two-lane roads a 124-mile drive south of Salt Lake City, boasts a cast of 900, with nearly 600 of these being under the age of eighteen.35 It requires 300 volunteers to produce, but the entire town is involved in hosting the thousands of visitors that come to see it. While the town of Manti only has a population of a little over 3,000, between 70,000 and 100,000 people attend the pageant each summer.36 The Hill Cumorah Pageant is located about seventy-five miles southwest of Rochester, New York, in the village of Palmyra. It has similar community engagement to the Manti Pageant, with about 750 cast members, 250 crew members, and 30,000 visitors over its two-week run. The Mesa Easter Pageant, centrally located in the heart of Mesa, Arizona, and accessible via public transportation, has the largest audiences, with about 11,000 attending each night for a total of over 100,000 visitors. However, it is one of the smaller productions, with only 450 cast members and 100 supporting volunteers.37 The Nauvoo and British Pageants—“the Britvoo Pageant” to insiders—have the smallest cast of the annual pageants with only 170 participants who perform the two pageants in repertory with the aid of 100 volunteers. They also have the smallest nightly attendance with about 1,700 visitors each night. These lower numbers are largely because Nauvoo is so difficult to reach.38 The closest national airports are in Kansas City or St. Louis, where travelers must rent a car to drive the remaining two to four hours. Unlike all the other pageants, however, these pageants run in repertoire (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday for the Nauvoo Pageant, and Wednesday, Friday for the British pageant) for a full month each summer, with five different casts, so total participation in these pageants is on par with the others in terms of participation and attendance. For example, in 2013, the Nauvoo and British Pageants and Hill Cumorah Pageants each reported total cast participation over the summer of about 750, with total audience numbers of about 30,000.39 All seven of the Mormon pageants are historical—their stories are drawn from the Bible or the Book of Mormon (the Mesa and the Hill Cumorah Pageants), LDS Church history (the Nauvoo and British Pageants and the Martin Harris Pageant), or a combination of the two (the Manti and Castle Valley Pageants.) The Hill Cumorah Pageant is the story of the Book of Mormon, and the Mesa Easter Pageant’s script is drawn directly from the Bible. While the Manti and Castle Valley Pageants, along with the Page 17 →Clarkston, Nauvoo, and British Pageants, are largely stories of the founding of the LDS Church, scenes from the Book of Mormon are reenacted at length in both of them. Additionally, the Hill Cumorah Pageant’s last scene moves forward to the time of Joseph Smith, the translator of the Book of Mormon, first as a young boy and then as a grown man. The most recent event featured in any of the Mormon Pageants is the settlement of Castle Valley, Utah, in the 1880s. As one may deduce from even this most brief introduction, Mormon pageants are not just Mormon—religious theater intended for conversion of the participants, the attending audiences, or both. They are also decidedly pageants—large-scale historical vignettes with full community participation, localized production efforts, and civic celebration. They are epic in their narrative, episodic in their organization, and immense in their scope. Even the smaller, biennial pageants are behemoth. Costume designs include everything from period petticoats and wigs to Vegas-style feather headdresses. Sets are immense, frequently with built-in hydraulics, traps, or other mechanisms to support the expansive stories being told. Pageants feature extraordinary special effects: exploding volcanoes, heavenly messengers that hover in the air, earthquakes, herds of live sheep and a snow-white baby lamb, fire bombs, wagon trains, and, in multiple pageants, a resurrected Christ soaring above the audience. To maintain consistency from year to year and to allow audiences to hear the narration and dialogue, four of the seven pageants have all been entirely prerecorded in elaborate soundtracks that feature voice actors, sound effects, and sweeping scores. Actors lip sync the soundtracks, which in some measure dictate staging possibilities and acting choices. The exceptions are the Nauvoo, British, and Clarkston Pageants, in which the lead actors perform live and the ensemble sings to backing tracks. The sound design is made simultaneously necessary and possible by the fact that the pageants are performed in outdoor venues in natural and man-made amphitheaters. The scale of production is a mark of pageant performance, but it is not the only, or even most important, defining feature. Pageantry is not just massive spectacular retellings of foundational stories by amateur participants. What makes pageants such a rich site of inquiry is how they produce the past, build community, communicate belief, and create identity. I argue that in Mormon pageantry, the relationship between producing the past, building present community and identity, and looking forward to a heavenly future—the process of resurrecting the

past—must be read through Page 18 →the lens of the doctrine of the redemption of the dead. While this doctrine is not preached directly in any of the pageants, it is a belief that is communicated through the storytelling, casting, and costuming. More importantly, it is the belief in the possibility of the redemption of the dead that alters the production and reception of Mormon pageantry by believers. Contemporary Mormon pageantry provides a direct look at how Mormonism chooses to present itself in the twenty-first century. These pageants represent an official vision of Church history and doctrine. They are not just crafted for public consumption but are aggressively marketed for wide viewership. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wants as many people as possible to encounter the theatrical past on pageant stages so that the present beliefs of those participating and spectating Mormons will be strengthened. As testimonies of spiritual beliefs grow into spiritual knowledge, so too grows the possibility of a life of righteousness that will lead one down the path to a glorious, heavenly future. In order to better understand the deeply intertwined relationship of theology, praxis, and theatrical production in Mormon pageantry—belief and spectacle—I next present the origin of the doctrine of the redemption of the dead. I then explain how this theology emerges in Mormon belief and practice today. Finally, I conclude this introduction with an outline of the rest of this book, in which I read Mormon pageantry through the lens of the doctrine of the redemption of the dead and outline the theatrical process of resurrecting the past.

The Dead Who Will Repent Will Be Redeemed In 1823, when Joseph Smith Jr. was eighteen years old, his oldest brother Alvin died, either of appendicitis or of an overdose of calomel, a mercury-based medicine widely used in the nineteenth century as a cathartic or a purgative.40 At the time of Alvin’s death, Joseph had already received his prophetic call.41 In 1820, he had gone to a grove of trees behind his family’s homestead outside of Palmyra, New York, to pray about which local church he should join. He recorded that the first response to his prayer was a power of darkness that threatened to overwhelm him right before he saw a brilliant light and two personages.42 His heavenly visitors were God the Father and Jesus Christ. The recorded appearance of two distinct beings was one of the unique theologies Page 19 →introduced in the vision, establishing a godhead made up of three separate individuals—God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost—who are formed like men. In this first vision, Christ instructed Joseph not to join any church. Instead, he was told to prepare himself to restore the full gospel of Jesus Christ, which had been lost during a centuries-long apostasy that followed the deaths of Christ’s original twelve apostles. Joseph Smith shared this “first vision,” and other visions he received, with his family. Alvin, in particular, had been singled out by a heavenly messenger as a family member who would support him. When Joseph followed angelic instructions to find golden plates buried in a hill near his family’s farm, he found the plates but was met by the same angel, who told him that he was not yet ready to take them for translation. He was commanded to return the next year on the same day with his brother Alvin.43 This brotherly visit never occurred, however, as Alvin died before the year had passed. Alvin’s death was devastating to his family. By all reports, he was a responsible, kind, and generous eldest son who took the leading role in helping his family pay their debts and build a home. His passing was a loss in terms of the family’s unity and economic stability. Joseph, who self-admittedly idolized his older brother, was especially bereft. Years later, he recorded in his journal, “Alvin, my oldest brother, I remember well the pangs of sorrow that swelled my youthful bosom and almost burst my tender heart, when he died. He was the oldest, and the noblest of my father’s family. He was one of the noblest of the sons of men.”44 Alvin was an early and fervent believer of his younger brother’s prophetic call. Their mother, Lucy Mack Smith, recorded Alvin’s deathbed comments to Joseph, which underscored his belief, as he encouraged Joseph to pay heed to his visions and act as instructed: I am now going to die, the distress which I suffer, and the feelings that I have, tell me my time is very

short. I want you to be a good boy, and do everything that lies in your power to obtain the Record. Be faithful in receiving instruction, and in keeping every commandment that is given you. Your brother Alvin must leave you; but remember the example which he has set for you; and set the same example for the children that are younger than yourself, and always be kind to father and mother.45

Joseph kept the memory of Alvin close in his mind, referring to him frequently in writing and speaking. Page 20 →The impact of Alvin’s death on Joseph has been explored by a number of historians who see a connection between Alvin’s passing and the theology of death that Joseph later developed. For example, in his cultural analysis on the Mormon culture of salvation, Douglas Davies makes direct connections between the practices of baptism for the dead and vicarious temple work, and Joseph’s grief at his elder brother’s passing. This grief was compounded when Joseph’s first son, named after Alvin, died the same day he was born. Davies points out that “to give as much prominence to Alvin’s death as I do here is to invite serious criticism, but to ignore it is also unwise.”46 In his outstanding work, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death, Samuel Morris Brown argues that Joseph Smith’s preoccupation with death and dying must be additionally read through the social and cultural milieu of early nineteenth-century America, where death was an aspect of daily life in ways incomprehensible to modern imaginations. Brown calls the pervasive practice of premodern death in America, “holy dying,” which “featured a ritualized deathbed in which the decedent became resigned to death as an act of salvation, dramatic and conflicted bereavement, and a hope for heavenly reunions.”47 He then suggests that Smith’s dissatisfaction with the concept of holy dying is a primary context for the radical theologies he received through revelation and established in material practice in his new religion. While Alvin’s passing might have been a catalyst for Joseph’s development of the theologies of the redemption of the dead, it is certainly not the only cultural or spiritual impetus for the doctrine. Joseph followed Alvin’s deathbed council, eventually obtained the golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon, and sought after continued revelation toward the restoration of Christ’s church as it had been organized in Christ’s day. This included the translation of another ancient record into The Pearl of Great Price and the gathering of revelations by Joseph Smith into the Doctrine and Covenants. These three books, along with the Bible, form the four standard scriptural works of the LDS Church. The restoration revealed to Joseph Smith came about through a series of angelic visitations, a fluid movement between this life and the next that created additional context for his vision of the dead. John the Baptist restored the authority to baptize, and Peter, James, and John visited to restore other keys of the priesthood to Joseph Smith. The priesthood, or the power to act in God’s name, comes with the responsibility to preach the gospel to all the world, gather Israel, and bind children to Page 21 →parents. It is available to all worthy men in the LDS Church, and its power is used to lead congregations, perform necessary ordinances, and provide blessings of comfort and health.48 The priesthood and its keys were all restored by biblical or Book of Mormon prophets and apostles like Moses, Abraham, Gabriel, Nephi, and Moroni. During these visitations, Joseph Smith was also instructed on the basic organization of the Church, its officers, worship schedule and practice, guidelines for rituals like baptism or the sacrament (communion), and more. Joseph’s family provided the foundation for the young Church. His brother Hyrum served as a counselor to Joseph, an apostle, a patriarch (a high priesthood calling to confer special blessings to worthy members of the Church), and finally, the Assistant President of the Church. Joseph’s wife, Emma Hale Smith, was the First Lady of the Church and the first President of the Relief Society, the Church’s women’s organization that is dedicated to charity and education. Their father, Joseph Smith Sr., was the Church’s first patriarch, and his brother Samuel was one of eight additional witnesses to the golden plates, an active missionary, and a high councilor of the Church. Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith served as an unofficial historian of the early days of the Church, a proselytizer, and a support to her family in all their religious service. Other early members

of the Church were also drawn from family groups, with most of the leadership positions being held by fathers, wives, sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers of a few key families. Following years of preparation, Joseph Smith founded the Church of Christ (renamed eight years later as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) on April 6, 1830. In this first meeting, Joseph received a revelation that the new church was “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth with whom I, the Lord, am well pleased.”49 The young church grew, as Matthew Bowman points out, “along family lines, as many young religious movements do. But there was something deeply significant about this fact to Joseph Smith.В .В .В . Joseph’s church was in many ways a formalization and extension of the family bonds that his mother had invested with such spiritual significance.”50 However strong these family bonds, they were in jeopardy of dissolution by loss of members. Alvin was not the first Smith child to die; Lucy lost seven of her eleven children, and Joseph would later lose six of his eleven children (if one counts stillbirths and the death of adopted children). Indeed, the death rate in the Smith family was higher even than the already significant nineteenth-century average.51 The separation of families due to Page 22 →death was compounded by the commonly accepted views of the afterlife, which held that unbaptized individuals—newborns to adults—were unsaved and therefore consigned to hell. This position struck the Smith family forcefully after they asked a Presbyterian minister in Palmyra, New York, to officiate at Alvin’s funeral. As Alvin had not been a baptized member of the Presbyterian faith, the clergyman used the opportunity of his passing to sermonize about salvation. One of the youngest Smith brothers, William, recalled: “Reverend Stockton had preached my brother’s funeral sermon and intimated very strongly that he had gone to hell, for Alvin was not a church member, but he was a good boy, and my father did not like it.”52 Joseph Smith Jr. also resisted the notion that his brother was unsaved and unsavable. After reviewing his brother’s righteous qualities, Joseph recorded in his journal a rhetorical question: “Shall his name not be recorded in this Book? Yes, Alvin; let it be had here, and be handed down upon these sacred pages, forever and ever.”53 The LDS understanding of exaltation for living and dead came from ideas introduced by Joseph Smith predominantly in funeral speeches. The first introduction to a theology of the dead occurred in a funeral sermon for Colonel Seymour Brunson in August 1840. Reports of the sermon record that at its conclusion, Joseph singled out a widow in the congregation, Jane Neyman, whose son had died without being baptized. Joseph used her circumstances to introduce the biblical ordinance of baptism for the dead to the funeral attendees. Joseph is reported as having read a passage from 1 Corinthians 15:29: “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?” Answering this question, Joseph explained that the living could perform the saving ordinance of baptism for the dead and left it to his listeners if they would receive or reject that doctrine.54 Joseph Smith explained the ritual he envisioned in a letter he sent a short time later to the Twelve Apostles, then all serving missions in England: I first mentioned the doctrine in public when preaching the funeral sermon of Brother Seymour Brunson; and have since then given general instructions in the Church on the subject. The Saints have the privilege of being baptized for those of their relatives who are dead.В .В .В . Without enlarging on the subject, you will undoubtedly see its consistency and reasonableness; and it presents the Gospel of Christ in probably a more enlarged scale than some have imagined it.55 Page 23 → Several years later, Joseph Smith contextualized this practice in a larger doctrinal imperative at the funerals of Judge Elias Higbee and Patriarch James Adam. At Judge Higbee’s funeral, on August 13, 1843, Joseph preached the eternal chain of salvation that was possible through the redemption of the dead. He explained that God’s plan had been outlined before the foundation of the world, that man cannot comprehend the extent of eternity, and that the restoration of the Lord’s gospel provided the means by which mothers and fathers could

be saved with their children in an everlasting covenant.56 In this piece of theology, every human that has ever lived can be sealed together in family units—children to parents and spouses to each other—creating a vast network of relationships that links the entire family of humankind. A month later in October 1843, Joseph Smith preached the funeral of Patriarch Adams. At that time, he connected the plan of salvation to the necessity for ordinances for the living and the dead. He suggested that since all people know they must die, it is important to understand the purpose of life and the meaning of death. For Joseph, death is a “subject we ought to study more than any other.” He continued, however, that even if we could read everything that had ever been written on the subject, we still wouldn’t understand it. Instead, “knowledge of these things can only be obtained by experience through the ordinances of God set forth for this purpose.”57 These ordinances would eventually be established in LDS temple rituals enacted by the living for the dead. The most expansive aspects of the doctrine of the redemption of the dead were revealed in what is now known as the King Follett Discourse. It was delivered in April 1844 as part of a conference of the Church and in memory of King (his first name) Follett who had recently died in an accident while digging a well in Nauvoo, Illinois. It was in this sermon that Joseph outlined the relationship between the living and the dead in terms of salvation: “Hence, God has made a provision that the spirits of our friends and every spirit in that eternal world can be ferreted out and saved.В .В .В . You can save any man who has not committed the unpardonable sin. So you see how far you can be a savior.”58 The connection between fundamental Christian beliefs—God’s love for his children, the importance of Christ’s atonement, and treating others with kindness—and the redemption of the dead is not one of cause and effect. It is not just that Christian beliefs require the redemption of the dead. As Joseph Smith envisioned it, redemption of the dead sustains belief and puts it Page 24 →into practice by furthering God’s work on the earth through what Mormons call “family history work” and “temple work.” Professional genealogist and scholar Amy Harris makes this interrelationship clear: Engaging in family history research teaches us of the vastness and grand scope of God’s creation and underscores the individual and merciful reach of Christ’s atonement. The Lord has taught that though the inhabitants of earth are “innumerableВ .В .В . unto [humanity]В .В .В . all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them” (Moses 1:35, Pearl of Great Price). Family history work offers us an opportunity to join in Christ’s work of salvation; to be a savior with Him is not just about providing proxy ordinances, it is about learning how to love and be merciful to our families, our neighbors, to everyone we meet, for they are all our brothers and sisters.59 As Harris describes, the theology of redeeming the dead necessarily includes commandments for how to engage with the living, just as Joseph Smith preached in the King Follett Discourse. Mormon doctrine of the conquest of death culminated in a revelation received in October 1918 by Church president (and Joseph Smith’s nephew) Joseph F. Smith; it was later canonized as scripture.60 In the revelation, Smith records his vision of the righteous dead gathered in paradise, where they were ministered to by Christ after his crucifixion. Smith saw how spiritual messengers preached principles of faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost to the dead. He records seeing a host of biblical prophets from Adam to Elijah, Mother Eve, prophets of the Book of Mormon, and the early leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He observed that “the faithful elders of this dispensation, when they depart from mortal life, continue their labors in the preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption, through the sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son of God, among those who are in darkness and under the bondage of sin in the great world of the spirits of the dead.”61 Finally, Joseph F. Smith affirmed the power of the work of the redemption of the dead for the salvation of humankind. He put into clear terms the Mormon theology of the dead: “The dead who repent will be redeemed, through obedience to the ordinances of the house of God [temples], and after they have paid the penalty

of their transgressions, and are washed clean, shall receive a reward according to their works, for they are heirs of salvation. Page 25 →Thus was the vision of the redemption of the dead revealed to me, and I bear record, and I know that this record is true.”62 Between Joseph Smith’s meditations on the passing of his brother, the foundational interactions between religious leaders on earth and from beyond the grave, and the nineteenth-century specter of death that overshadowed daily life, it is not surprising that much of the early doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints wrestled with the nature of death. Mormon understanding of the fluid boundary between this life and the next takes into account traffic between the two worlds, an ease of passage that necessarily impacts the relationships between the living and the dead. Early Church leader Parley P. Pratt articulated this slippage between life and death when he encouraged the Saints to “leave death entirely out of consideration, and look at men and families just as we wouldВ .В .В . if there were not death.”63 Pratt expanded this thought elsewhere and suggested that if we were “to contemplate man in his true light, we must, as it were, forget that death is in his path; we must look upon him as an eternal, ever-living being.”64 The Mormon theology of the redemption of the dead is based on this principle of eternal beings; Mormonism teaches that every person who has ever lived or ever will live on earth is a unique individual who dwelt with God before coming to this earth and who will live eternally after death. It is the responsibility of living members of the Church to make sure that this eternal message is shared across the globe and that the saving ordinances necessary for exaltation are provided not only for the living but also for the dead.

You Can Save Any Man The vision that Joseph F. Smith received in the early twentieth century established a concrete narrative of the theology of postmortal life, eternal progression, learning, and growth. It articulated the necessity of the redemption of the dead that Joseph Smith Jr. first questioned after the death of his brother Alvin. Joseph had earlier received his own vision of the afterlife. In 1836, he and other early leaders of the Church were meeting in the Kirtland Temple in Ohio to learn together and practice preparatory rituals. One of the rituals performed was an anointing of the heads of select leaders of the Church with holy oil.65 Joseph Smith Jr. began by anointing his father’s head and pronouncing blessings upon him. Then Joseph Smith Sr. took over to Page 26 →lay hands on the heads of the other men involved in the ritual to seal the blessings on them. When he blessed his son, the younger Joseph was caught up in a vision where the heavens opened and he saw the celestial kingdom of God—the highest degree of glory in the Mormon afterlife. Joseph recorded seeing God the Father and Jesus Christ in thrones of glory and streets paved as if by gold. He also saw “Father Adam and Abraham; and my father and my mother; my brother Alvin, that has long since slept.”66 The inclusion of Alvin in this vision was surprising to Joseph. He recorded that “he marveled” at how Alvin could be included in a heavenly vision when he had died unbaptized.67 His surprise was answered in the vision by the Lord, who told him: “All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God; also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom; for I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.”68 This key revelation, recorded first in a private journal, then published as part of Church history records, and finally accepted as scripture and canonized in Mormon holy writ, encapsulates the scope and purpose of the theology of redeeming the dead. Here, God is shown to be a loving Father in Heaven who provides equal opportunity for all his children to learn about and choose to accept (or reject) his gospel and its accompanying salvific ordinances. In this vision of the eternal life of the human soul, death is not an obstacle to progression, but merely a passage from one state to another; knowledge, intention, and good works are all preserved from this period of life to the next. The theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides a fully articulated cosmic narrative, generally called the “plan of salvation” (or “plan of happiness”), that explains why humans are on

earth, where they came from, and where they will go following this life. In sum, every human being who has ever lived, or ever will live, had a life before this one. We all lived together as spirit children of God. He created the plan of salvation for us to gain perfected bodies and to return and live with him forever. When we came to earth, we passed through a “veil” that caused us to forget our previous existence with God. Earthly existence is the probationary period where spirits receive bodies and are tested and tried to see if they will be perfectly obedient to God’s commandments. The commandments include necessary participation in Page 27 →rituals—baptism, confirmation, sealing (temple marriage)—that are requisite to returning to God’s presence. After death, we return to a spirit world where we continue to work and learn as we await the final judgment. At the end of the world, if we are righteous and participate in all the ordinances of salvation, we will be exalted. If not, we will receive a lesser reward. We all continue into the eternities as we ever have been, but this time with resurrected bodies and knowledge of God’s truth. Mormons use the term “veil” to describe the space of forgetting before we were born and also to describe the separation between this world and the next. The image of a veil—a translucent piece of fabric meant to hide and protect—is an integral part of Mormon rhetoric about the redemption of the dead. A sermon by Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer is an excellent example of this usage: “The more I have to do with genealogical work, the more difficulty I have with that word dead. I know of no adequate substitute. I suppose departed would suit me as well as any. I have had too many sacred experiences, of the kind of which we never speak lightly, to feel that the word dead describes those who have gone beyond the veil.”69 Though Mormons do not subscribe to original sin, the primary problem embedded in the plan is that it is impossible for anyone to be perfect and achieve exaltation, so God the Father also provided a savior in Jesus Christ. Christ’s atoning sacrifice makes a gift of resurrection to all humankind and makes salvation possible through repentance and enduring faithfulness. The importance of mortal life is fundamental to the Mormon plan of salvation, for the things learned here, the relationships created, the rituals enacted, and covenants made are carried by each individual into the postmortal life. Binding rituals enacted on earth are only efficacious when conducted by God’s approved authority of the priesthood, but everyone will retain their knowledge of this life and have opportunities to participate in authorized saving ordinances, whether in this life or the next. Jesus gave this priesthood to his apostles when he was on the earth; it was then lost through apostasy, only to be restored by the prophet Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even a cursory consideration of the implications of the need for proper priesthood authority reveals a second problem embedded in the plan of salvation. If the proper authority to act in the name of God has only been on the earth during limited periods, how will everyone be equally afforded the opportunity to enact the necessary rituals for exaltation? The answer was provided by Joseph Smith in his expansive vision for the redemption of the Page 28 →dead: every human being who has ever lived on earth will be provided the opportunity to know God’s gospel and to accept baptism and other saving ordinances. If a person doesn’t get this chance while living, members of God’s church will act in proxy for them after they have died. Faithful Mormons will perform saving rituals for and in behalf of someone who is dead, and that person will either accept or reject the ordinance in the afterlife, thus providing everyone the same opportunity for salvation. Proxy ordinances are built on the belief that Mormons can perform for dead ancestors, as if they were them, the rituals for exaltation. In addition to baptism and confirmation, Mormons believe that there are two other primary, necessary ordinances—an endowment, which includes a ritual washing and anointing ceremony, and a sealing, where heterosexual couples are joined in marriage for time and all eternity. Proxy rites for all these ordinances can only be performed in temples, which are sacred buildings dedicated for that purpose. These ordinances are considered requisite for exaltation, and therefore must be performed for everyone who has ever lived, so all have an opportunity to accept or reject the ordinance.70 The plan of salvation culminates in the final judgment of humankind following the second coming of Jesus Christ and his millennial reign upon the earth. Mormons believe that the millennium is a time when all of their efforts to spread the gospel to the living and the dead are performed with even greater speed and resolve. Due to their efforts

throughout time, Mormons believe that at the end of Christ’s millennial reign, everyone who ever lived will have been given the opportunity to come unto him. At the final judgment that follows, all of humanity will be assigned eternal rewards based on their willingness to accept Christ’s plan, their acceptance of the necessary ordinances, and their faithfulness to God’s commandments. In Mormon theology, there are three “degrees of glory,” or heavenly realms, to which most people will be assigned following judgment.71 The highest degree, or the celestial kingdom, is reserved for those who have made and kept all the covenants that God requires. It is only in this kingdom that families will be exalted and reunited to live with both God the Father and Jesus Christ forever. The other kingdoms will house those who have been saved but did not choose to accept and/or keep the sacred covenant necessary for exaltation. There is also a place set aside for those who have sinned so grievously they deserve no reward; Mormons generally refer to this hell as “outer darkness.” Page 29 →The Mormon conception of the three degrees of glory suggests a fairly positive view of eschatological afterlife that grows directly out of the belief and practice of redeeming the dead—all humankind must have the opportunity for these eternal rewards. Exaltation refers to the highest state of happiness and glory provided for those who have been most faithful to God’s commandments and who have performed the saving ordinances vital to enter his kingdom. Current Mormon prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, explains: To be saved—or to gain salvation—means to be saved from physical and spiritual death. Because of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, all people will be resurrected and saved from physical death. People may also be saved from individual spiritual death through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, by their faith in Him, by living in obedience to the laws and ordinances of His gospel, and by serving Him. To be exalted—or to gain exaltation—refers to the highest state of happiness and glory in the celestial realm. These blessings can come to us after we leave this frail and mortal existence. The time to prepare for our eventual salvation and exaltation is now.72 Alvin’s presence in Joseph Smith’s early vision of heaven was groundbreaking—simultaneously comforting and inspiring. If Alvin could achieve celestial glory, so could every righteous person who had ever lived or who ever would live, but only with the help of the living to perform the earthbound rituals. It is no surprise then that for Mormons, the salvation of the dead is inextricably linked to the salvation of the living. Howard W. Hunter, the fourteenth president and prophet of the Church, preached: “We must accomplish the priesthood temple ordinance work necessary for our own exaltation; then we must do the necessary work for those who did not have the opportunity to accept the gospel in life. Doing work for others is accomplished in two steps: first, by family history research to ascertain our progenitors, and second, by performing the temple ordinances to give them the same opportunities afforded to the living.”73 The intimate tie between the necessity to work toward one’s own salvation and the overlapping responsibility to work toward the salvation of the dead is echoed in apostolic discourses, in Sunday School curriculum, and in the constantly ongoing temple construction projects around the world. The doctrine of the redemption of the dead underpins nearly all of the purposes Page 30 →of the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and, I argue, inspires contemporary Mormon American practices, including Mormon pageantry. Mormons believe in priesthood powers that seal in heaven rituals enacted on earth. They preach the possibility of forever families, joined together in an eternal chain of belonging. They aggressively trace the past through extensive, global genealogical projects to extract, compile, document, and index names of the dead. They read the records of dead ancestors whose words are considered instructive today. In their temples, they perform salvific rituals, not only for themselves but for their kindred dead. Brown argues that the distinctive connection of families through endless sealing of families together creates “[a] heaven family, a sacerdotal genealogy extending backward past the Garden of Eden and forward to a glorious future.”74 Brown shows how Joseph Smith taught that “through this heaven family, all of humanity could be interconnected in indissoluble bonds—the broad kinship group was the actual structure of

heaven.”75 On pageant stages, Mormons bring to life ancestors of the past as a means of awakening and strengthening their own testimonies and helping both living and dead prepare for eternity. They reforge the chains of belonging as they enact the possibility of exaltation both for participants and spectators.

Speaking for Myself In the chapters that follow, I outline the various strategies by which contemporary Mormon pageantry resurrects the past on stage as participants and spectators seek after their dead. This is not a comprehensive look at religious theater generally, or even at all Mormon performance, but a focused examination of the four annual pageants to tease out how Mormon pageantry helps Mormons work toward their own exaltation. My research methodology was that of a participant-observer. As a member of the Church (and a faculty member at the Church’s flagship institution, Brigham Young University), I was not just welcomed as an audience member but also as a participant in the four annual pageants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I spent five years, from 2010–2015, immersed in pageant culture. I have contributed to casting sessions, worked as a director, spent time backstage with running crews, and even performed. I have observed auditions, rehearsals, dress rehearsals, and performances across subsequent Page 31 →summers. I have spoken with hundreds of pageant participants, from paid administrators in Salt Lake City to families who were going on stage for the first time in a pageant. I intend that this deep dive into Mormon pageantry will contribute something new to the growing field of religion and performance. My particular interest is on the efficacy of religious performance for those already converted to the gospel it preaches. I believe that religious performance is not just speech (preaching to the converted) but action (saving the converted). Mormon pageantry is a rich and complex site of engagement between theater, theology, and praxis that I believe will reveal the exalting power of performance. In chapter two, “Reanimating Mormon Pageantry,” I examine why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has chosen the form of American historical pageantry as its primary performance style. I use details from the history, narratives, and production processes of the four annual Mormon pageants produced in America to help answer that question. I suggest first that pageants appeal to the Mormon interest in the past, in traditions, and in traditional ways of seeing and knowing. Then I explore how pageantry is a didactic and aesthetically safe presentation style most appropriate for scriptural narratives and conservative family audiences. Finally, I introduce the official purposes of the Mormon Church and reveal how the staging requirements of pageants are particularly well suited to further these purposes. Throughout this chapter, I signal the unique characteristics of Mormon pageantry that set it apart from more traditional theater practices and also the ways that it mirrors and overlaps those practices. The chapters that follow examine how Mormon pageantry engages directly with the doctrine of the redemption of the dead. For examples and evidence, I exclusively analyze the four annual Mormon pageants—the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the Manti Pageant, the Nauvoo Pageant, and the Mesa Easter Pageant. In order to best present the theatrical process of the resurrection of the past in Mormon pageantry, I have heuristically divided my examination into three distinct ways that the dead and the living encounter one another in Mormon pageantry: the physical proximity between the pageant stages and sites of death; the complicated relationship between real people who have died and those who are bringing them back to life by playing them on stage; and the function of the Holy Ghost as the facilitator between pageant producers and spectators. To separate out these encounters is an artificial division—strands that make up the thread of the doctrine of the Page 32 →redemption of the dead that runs through Mormon pageantry. In separating them out, I hope to reveal details of each strand that might get lost were I to examine the system as a whole. In chapter three, “Performing Near the Dead,” I explore the relationship between pageant stages and holy ground. I first show how Mormon sacred space is produced at heritage sites, and I explore the placement of pageant stages on these cemeteries and memorials. Temples are considered by Mormons to be the most sacred locations on earth, in part because they are locations where the living and the dead can meet. I investigate the role of temples in geography, pageant performance, and Mormon theology to show how temple rituals influence pageants just as pageants impact the work of temples. Finally, I discuss how Mormon pageantry celebrates

America as a promised land, and how it contributes to fulfilling this promise. Located directly on the holy ground of heritage sites, temples, and America, Mormon pageants are spatially in close proximity to those who have died and are gone or who have died but continue to haunt the site. The focus of chapter four, “Performing the Dead,” is how participants work toward their own exaltation and the exaltation of the dead through pageant performance. First, I discuss how pageant participants perform acts of devotion. The pageant experience, a fully immersive religious retreat, is organized specifically to provide opportunities for service and worship. This is true for actors and the volunteers who help produce pageants. The result is that participants don’t have to act as if they are righteous on stage; they are righteous as they act on stage. I then show how pageant participants code this righteousness through acting choices that foreground not realistic acting or historical authenticity but sincerity. As a result, the performances are simultaneously earnest and inventive, as participants engage a range of acting choices, like talking through tears or direct address, to signify their seriousness of intent. Finally, I examine the ritualized blocking of crowd scenes in pageants as a strategy to engage the bodies of participants in the preservation of righteousness. The dead are performed as participants in Mormon pageantry partner with those on the other side of the veil to work toward their shared exaltation. In chapter five, “Performing with the Dead,” I investigate how Mormon pageantry engages both the Holy Ghost and holy ghosts. I argue that pageant performance invites the Holy Ghost through theatrical conventions employed to help participants and spectators to have emotional experiences. In particular, I look at the formation of spectator communities and the use Page 33 →of spectacle and music in the pageants. Next, I examine the role of literal ghosts who prompt pageant audiences toward reform. As audiences heed the messages of the dead, they do not passively receive the message of a pageant but are inspired to imagine heaven and work to reach it. At the end of this chapter, I expose how the live performance of Mormon pageantry encourages audiences to confront their own possible futures and the very real potential that they may not reach exaltation. When audiences act on the promptings of the Holy Ghost or heed the voices of holy ghosts, they are redeeming the dead. This allows them to look forward to a future where they and their ancestors will be together forever. I conclude Contemporary Mormon Pageantry in chapter six, “A Great Time to Be Alive,” by considering the urgency with which Mormons are currently working toward the redemption of the dead and their own exaltation. I briefly examine the biennial pageants I have not yet treated—the Clarkston Pageant and Castle Valley Pageant—as well as the international British Pageant, for their unique contributions to ways that Mormon pageantry help prepares Mormons for exaltation. A close look at how pageants are performed near the dead, how pageant participants perform the dead, and audiences perform with the dead reveals that contemporary Mormon pageantry is not just spectacular theater (although it is that). Nor is it just a faith-building activity for participants and audiences (although it is that, too.) Mormon pageantry is a vibrant and expansive performance by which members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints redeem the living and the dead. As an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a performance scholar and artist, I find myself in the unique position of self-identifying both as a believer and a critic, an engaged participant and an outside observer. Navigating these two identities enhances and complicates my work. Claudia Bushman notes in her work Contemporary Mormonism, “Latter-day Saints may be among the last groups in contemporary America not trusted to speak for themselves.”76 She argues that readers trust the “objectivity” of outside authorities writing about Mormons even when these writers admit to a difficulty in fully understanding them, while writers from inside the faith tradition are dismissed as biased or misleading. At the same time, she points out that “Mormons dismiss the outside appraisals for failing to describe a life that Mormons recognize.”77 I have a lifetime of insider knowledge into the doctrine and practice of the LDS Church, so I can easily describe these things in language Mormons Page 34 →recognize. My insight into Mormon proselyting, for example, comes from research, from interviews, and from the year and a half I spent as a full-time LDS missionary. My experiences as a missionary help me better understand witnessing as performance, since I have personally performed as a witness. I am not an apologist for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but my position as a woman of faith within that tradition clearly impacts my presentation of material—at times, I feel the impulse to advocate for the work I am discussing. However, I equally feel the urge not just to critique but to

criticize Mormon cultural practices I find morally or aesthetically troubling. As much as is possible, however, I have bracketed both these desires and tried to set them aside. When I cannot, I will admit my position in terms that hopefully both performance scholars and Mormons will understand. John Fletcher, in his work on evangelical performance, appropriates David Roman’s concept of “critical generosity” as a means of describing—not endorsing—religious practices accurately enough that practitioners would largely agree with the representation. Fletcher calls this a “good faith” rendering of a religious subject under inquiry.78 In bracketing and signposting my personal engagement with my subject, I am attempting a good faith portrayal of the practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This good faith representation of Mormonism is not to defend my own beliefs but to provide readers with a clearer access to Mormon pageantry. It is relatively easy for me to write about Mormonism for the theater, religion, performance, and American studies scholars who are the target audience of this book. What is harder to negotiate is writing for the many Mormon pageant participants who are the subjects of my inquiry. This work is not a celebration of pageants—although there is room to celebrate their remarkable contributions to American theater—but a formal, disciplined, and theoretical analysis of pageants. As a scholar, I look at Mormon performance in terms of the play of power between ecclesiastical, spiritual, and aesthetic authorities. I identify misalignments in intent and reception, and explore the role of institutional control. Just as my position as a member of the LDS Church allows me easy access to good faith portrayals of Mormonism, so too does my responsibility as a scholar require me to contextualize, confront, and contest that very portrayal. I am aware that some pageant participants may encounter this work, recognize my description of pageant performance as accurate, but largely disagree with my analysis. Even during my research, my position as a scholar Page 35 →led to resistance from those who feel that the pageant experience should not be subject to investigation. I was carefully invited to leave some rehearsals. At one pageant, I was even asked not to interview cast members for fear that I would contaminate their spiritual growth. As a participant at another pageant explained, “I would be totally willing to talk with you about the pageant, of course, as long as your book is positive and uplifting about the pageants. I would in no way ever want to be a part of something that shed a bad light on something so sacred to me.”79 I cannot guarantee that my work on Mormon pageant performance will be read as “positive and uplifting” by pageant participants. My project is to introduce important insights into the complex relationship between theology and theatrical production, not to create an inspirational narrative. I do, however, make concerted efforts to avoid shedding “a bad light” on the deeply committed efforts of those who participate. The vast majority of pageant participants welcomed the opportunity for dialogue about the practice of creating pageants, the position of live performance in Mormonism today, and the impact of pageants in their own lives and in Mormon culture broadly. They were generous with their time and enthusiastic with their opinions. While I have rendered this subject thoroughly and thoughtfully for a scholarly audience, I can’t erase my respect for the many participants who make Mormon pageants happen and the even more spectators who pilgrimage each year to see them. A note on terminology: the LDS Church utilizes a complicated and specific lexicon. Some language is entirely unique to the Church. Other terms are Christian theological concepts that have a meaning particular to Mormon doctrine. In my use of Mormon doctrine to interrogate performance practices, I will define terms and contextualize them according to traditional Christianity. In this work, I also follow the standards of religious scholarship that takes spiritual experiences at face value by reporting Mormon beliefs and participant experiences as they were related to me. I differentiate between the reporting on the beliefs of pageant participants and my own experiences with pageants with the use of the first person. Writing about supernatural encounters, faith that leads to action, and the ineffable in religion makes for tricky scholarship. Donnalee Dox suggests that, “the terms of spirit—ineffability, ephemerality, invisibility, sensation, insight, experience, the numinous—are not easy in any analytical paradigm invested in observing the

workings of the material, social world.”80 Matthew Bowman points out in his popular history The Mormon People, “I Page 36 →cannot footnote God.”81 I don’t expect readers to believe in divine inspiration, ghostly encounters, or spiritual awakenings, and I can’t prove they actually happen. However, I argue that the supernatural occurrences of religious theater, absolutely fundamental to Mormon pageantry, can expand the horizons of expectations about the efficacy of theatrical practice for those who believe—and possibly even for those who don’t. In a discourse he gave to the Saints in Nauvoo in 1844, Joseph Smith preached that: “The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our dead.В .В .В . Those saints, who neglect it in behalf of their deceased relatives, do it at the peril of their own salvation.82 Here, he draws direct lines between living and dead, and their shared salvation. His call is an imperative. We must “seek after our dead.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has provided a robust collection of activities that can help members seek after their dead. I maintain that one of these is Mormon pageants. Mormon pageantry reveals how, for Mormons, the past is not dead; it is not even past, and it is intimately connected to an eternal future that can be considered, represented, and performed.83 As believing participants and spectators seek after their dead in Mormon pageantry, they work toward an exaltation where they can live with their families for time and all eternity.

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Chapter 2 Reanimating American New Pageantry What is this???!!! —Field notes of the author upon attending her first Mormon pageant, 2011 The use of performance to work toward exaltation is not new to Mormons. Brigham Young, the second prophet and president of the LDS Church, was a surprising advocate for theater. Contrary to most religious leaders of the mid-nineteenth century, Young argued that: “Upon the stage of a theater can be represented in character evil and its consequences, good and its happy results and reward; the weakness and the follies of man, the magnanimity of virtue and the greatness of truth. The stage can be made to aid the pulpit in impressing upon the minds of a community an enlightened sense of a virtuous life, also a proper horror of the enormity of sin and just dread of its consequences.”1 Matching action to words, Brigham Young commissioned a theater as the first prominent public building to be constructed and used in Salt Lake City. Inexpensive admission, strong marketing, and attractive productions established the Salt Lake Theater as the primary site of community recreation in the Salt Lake Valley well into the early twentieth century.2 Theater, music, dance, and other fine arts have been an integral part of Mormon recreation since the inception of the Church; the Church has always used carefully staged events to celebrate and cement its doctrine. One of the earliest recorded Mormon pageants was an 1849 “jubilee” that commemorated the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley just two years earlier. This elaborate celebration included the same large casts, creative costuming, symbolic actions, song, and dance that mark pageants today. As one witness to this early pageant recorded, there were: Page 38 → Twelve bishops, bearing banners of their wards. Twenty-four young ladies, dressed in white, with white scarves on their right shoulders, and a wreath of white roses on their heads, each carrying the Bible and the Book of Mormon; and one bearing a banner, “Hail to our Chieftain.” Twelve more bishops, carrying flags of their wards. Twenty-four silver greys [older men], each having a staff, painted red on the upper part, and a branch of white ribbons fastened at the top, one of them carrying the flag.3 After the procession, notable Utah figures participated in a round of addresses, poems, and toasts. This event was such a success that it became an annual tradition, celebrated today as Pioneer Day—a state holiday in Utah—when Mormons gather on July 24th to honor their pioneer past with elaborate parades that echo the jubilee of 1849. Performances like these have continued through the history of the LDS Church, with national plays and festivals as well as local theatrical endeavors like “roadshows.” Roadshows are original mini-musicals created in local congregations to showcase talents, hone theatrical skills, improve self-esteem, and develop a spirit of unity. They were a popular activity in Mormon American congregations throughout the twentieth century.4 Today, roadshows are rarely performed, but local congregations still stage a variety of performances that vary in scope

from annual live nativities to more elaborate productions that hope to someday be adopted as pageants with full official Church support.5 There are also performances that accompany the dedication of new temples around the world, generally called “temple cultural celebrations.” These are official Church productions but are developed at the local level and are performed almost exclusively by children and teenagers. They feature folk song and dance, stories of the founding of the Church, and representations of famous local historical figures.6 In Salt Lake City, the headquarters of the Church, the most notable Mormon productions are Christmas offerings: The Mormon Tabernacle Christmas Concert and a musical pageant, Savior of the World.7 Other official productions of the Church are created to commemorate important moments in Mormon history. These have included: the Sesquicentennial Spectacular, Faith in Every Footstep, a celebration of the 150th Page 39 →anniversary of the Mormon pioneer arrival in Salt Lake City (1997); Light of the World, a pageant staged for the 2002 Winter Olympics; A Generation of Promise: Remembering the Prophet Joseph Smith, a celebration of the 200th birthday of Joseph Smith (2005); and most recently, A Century of Honor, a commemorative pageant for the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America (2013). As I detailed in the previous chapter, the sheer output and scope of Mormon theatrical performance is unparalleled by any other religious group in America. The Church puts considerable resources of time, money, and institutional support into these epic productions that have far more in common with American historical pageants of the early twentieth century than with any other kind of theater being produced today. In his outstanding cultural history, American Historical Pageantry, David Glassberg marks the origins of the “new pageantry” of early 1900s America as a reaction against modernism. Based on a similar revival of pageantry in England, new pageantry was an effort to increase self-respect, reawaken civic pride and unity, and restore life to “innocence and gaiety” through the episodic telling of historical narratives.8 Civic leaders, progressive educators, social workers, and members of the newly theorized playground movement found pageants to be a compelling vehicle for their aims. Pageant performance style—publicized by pageant-masters like William Chauncy Langdon, Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, and Percy MacKaye, and administrated through the efforts of the American Pageant Association—was simultaneously a civic celebration and a pedagogical tool for community revitalization. Langdon persuasively argued that pageants provided citizens with “a clear comprehension of the history of their town as a whole, and therefore of the place of their new undertakings in the whole.”9 This process, as Glassberg points out, allowed communities to solve current problems by representing the past and acting out new roles and identities, and also to envision future progress.10 New pageantry in the twentieth century arguably peaked in 1914 with MacKaye’s famous production, The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis.11 Performed on a 90,000-square-foot stage floating in a lagoon and produced with an extravagant budget, it featured a cast of 7,000, and audiences reached nearly 100,000 people for each of its four performances. The epic five-hour history drew on Christian, Indian, and medieval symbolism to tell the story of the founding of St. Louis through song, puppetry, ethnic folk dance, and Page 40 →spectacle. By 1918, community historical pageantry had almost entirely given way to wartime pageantry. Glassberg reports a small resurgence of historical pageantry between the wars, but he marks the 1930s as the end of the genre. There are a number of related performances that draw inspiration from, or perhaps have developed directly out of, pageantry. In his work on public celebrations, John Bodnar traces a line from the signing of the Declaration of Independence through the pageants of the early twentieth century to the public opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the nation’s capital.12 Commemorative celebrations marking anniversaries, particularly of historical, patriotic, or religious importance, are related to pageants, as are historical reenactments such as those treated by performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider in her work on Civil War reenactments.13 However, rarely anymore do civic, cultural, historical, or religious groups produce expansive historical community pageants in the style and of the scope of those popular in American new pageantry. It is a form that died out nearly a hundred years ago, with this one exception: Mormons keep performing them. Not only does the

LDS Church still produce pageants today, but they are adding pageants to their repertoire. Some of these pageants look nearly identical to the ones produced in the 1910s. Others are more contemporary in their generic form but still maintain the purpose of pageantry and are called “pageants.” If the grand style of American new pageantry has been on the cusp of death for a century, it begs the question of why Mormons have kept it alive. What is it about this form that makes it so appealing? How do pageant producers contextualize outmoded production styles with the contemporary sensibilities of pageant participants and audiences? These are the questions I will address in this chapter. Understanding the reasons why Mormons stage pageants with such zeal provides a foundation upon which I will build my examination into how Mormon pageantry resurrects the past. While my research did not allow me access to the decision-making processes of Church pageant production and while there are any number of arbitrary reasons for the ongoing production of Mormon pageantry, three observations may help to explain why the Mormons have reanimated American new pageantry. First, the ongoing production of pageants reveals the power and importance of tradition to Mormon culture. Next, the form of pageants is an aesthetically safe, or “good,” live performance that resolves concerns for a religious group that is invested in theater but committed to avoiding the potential evils of representation that abound in popular culture Page 41 →today. Finally, the production requirements of pageants are particularly effective in furthering the purposes of the Church.

It’s Ingrained in What We Do In the mid-1920s, missionaries in the Eastern States Mission would gather at the recently purchased Smith Family Homestead in Palmyra, New York, to perform scenes from the Book of Mormon and Church history in celebration of Pioneer Day.14 These celebrations were called “Cumorah Conferences,” in honor of the nearby Hill Cumorah, a location sacred to Mormons as the final resting place of the golden plates that preserved the records of the Christians who lived anciently on the American continent. As part of the restoration of the Church, Joseph Smith was instructed by an angel to go to a certain spot on the Hill Cumorah and dig up the plates, which he translated into the Book of Mormon. The Church purchased the Hill in 1935 and the Cumorah Conferences moved there permanently. In 1937, Mission President Donald B. Colton announced plans to make a pageant a permanent part of the annual event, saying that he wanted it to be “America’s Oberammergau.”15 Drawing the connection between the longest running and most celebrated passion play, Oberammergau, and a Mormon pageant reveals some of the purposes behind the pageant’s production. According to Oberammergau Passion Play’s history, the villagers swore an oath in 1630 that if they were spared from the ravages of the Thirty Year’s War and the plague, they would perform the “Play of the Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ” every ten years. They kept their pledge for the first time at Pentecost in 1634, “on a stage they put up in the cemetery above the fresh graves of the plague victims,” and have continued performing until today.16 Ostensibly, President Colton wanted his pageant to be an offering of thanksgiving, a consistent reminder of foundational stories, a unifying force for the community, and a devotion for the dead. Much like Mormon pageantry today, the Oberammergau Passion Play emerged from a particular historical moment when pageantry was part of the cultural landscape—in this case, medieval passion plays rather than American new pageantry. At the first Oberammergau Passion Play in the early seventeenth century, performing a play as a devotional offering was both religiously and artistically relevant. The intervening years have shaped Page 42 →the Oberammergau Passion Play into a largely tourist enterprise that may no longer even be connected to the religious intention of the original. Religious performance scholar Jill Stevenson, for example, argues that “visiting Oberammergau during a Passionsspiele year may holdВ .В .В . affective, performative efficacy by cultivating an intimate script that resolves cultural longing. However, rather than piety, I contend that the affective force of these scripts is medievalism.”17 In much the same way, Mormon pageants have also continued to be performed long past the time when American

new pageantry was an important aspect of American artistic expression. If Oberammergau’s piety has been replaced by an active nostalgia for the Middle Ages, Mormon pageants have replaced new pageantry’s civic pedagogy with piety. In both of these cases, however, I argue that the tradition of the pageant has overwhelmed the fashion of its style. One answer to the question of why Mormons have reanimated American historical pageantry is that they are an important tradition to those who participate or watch them year after year, and they are a necessary tradition in the communities where they are held. I use the word tradition here in both its secular and religious meanings. Mormon pageantry is a custom or habit that has been passed down generation to generation, year to year. Families participate in pageants across multiple generations, blocking is handed down from director to director, and certain pageants become pilgrimage destinations for families that return annually to stay in the same hotels and eat the same meals before watching the pageant again. Mormon pageantry is also a tradition in the doctrinal sense of the word—a belief that comes not from scripture necessarily but from the oral teachings of Jesus and the apostles, which in the case of the Mormon Church includes modern-day prophets and apostles. The foundational stories of spirituality connected to pageants help to maintain their status as vital aspects of the Church’s mission. The longer a pageant has been performed, the more entrenched it is in a community, and the more permanent it becomes as a fixture on the geographic landscape and in the cultural imaginary of the community from which it emerges. A former director of the Oberammergau pageant reports how the Passion Play is inextricably woven into the fabric of the village: “No native in the village can think about his life without thinking about the play. The play is a part of us. It controls the rhythms of our life, like it or not.”18 His comment is echoed nearly identically by the current director of the Manti Pageant: “The thing that makes [this pageant] possible is that there’s still a large percentage of the cast that has been in it for years.В .В .В . It’s Page 43 →the only way it could happen.” He continued to reflect that the community has made a “total commitment” to the pageant: “After 50 years, it’s ingrained in what we do in the summers.”19 Some of the permanence of pageantry is literal—like the enormous lighting towers that have been constructed and driven deep into some pageant performance spaces. Other times, the permanence is more a function of a deeply entrenched sense of ownership over the pageant, its script, its style, and its religious importance that has grown up over years of annual performance. In Mormon pageantry, the American productions have been ongoing for decades. The newest pageant is the Clarkston Pageant, which premiered in 1983. Some of the other pageants have been part of an annual performance tradition that has been going on for closer to ninety years. One answer to the question of why Mormons perform pageants is because they are part of a tradition so deeply embedded in the fabric of the community that it is worth continuing to keep the community spirit and sometimes the community itself alive. Each of the pageants developed out of Mormon interest in celebrating something unique to their religious community, whether a location, an event, or belief. However, while there are clear differences to each pageant (they are located all across the country, they each tell stories distinct to their locations, some are performed live, some are prerecorded, to name a few), what is remarkable is the similarities between the pageants. Some of these similarities comes from the central administration of the pageants by the Missionary Department of the Church in Salt Lake City, which dictates certain protocols and practices. But I would suggest that many of the similarities between the pageants are core aspects of LDS theology and practice. These religious traditions run through all the pageants less due to administrative oversight and more because they are already ingrained in the lives of the participants. Pageants provide a space to annually focus on the centrality of the family, community pride, reverence for Church history, and bearing testimony of Christ—all powerful spiritual traditions in the lives of the communities who stage them and the families who participate in them.

Three Generations in the Pageant In 1958, Tracy Anderson Harris’ parents attended the Hill Cumorah Pageant as newlyweds. Moved by their experience watching this spectacular restaging of events from the Book of Mormon, they filled out a referral card Page 44 →provided by missionaries working at the pageant and requested a visit from missionaries to learn more

about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The next April, they were baptized as members of the Church. In 1975, when Tracy was 13 years old, her parents and six sisters returned to the pageant to perform as a family. They were cast members that year, the following year, and again in 1979. After she married, Tracy continued the family’s pageant tradition by performing with her husband and four children in 1999 and 2002. Since she grew up just twelve miles from the Hill Cumorah, Tracy, her sisters, and parents were able to stay at home during the grueling seventeen-day experience, commuting to rehearsals and performances. When she returned to participate as an adult with her own children, her family also stayed with her parents—extending the family event across generations. For Harris, the benefit of the pageant is how it serves as a faith-building event for families. She explained to me that the best part of the pageant experience was growing to love the Book of Mormon and growing a stronger testimony of its truthfulness. The single most important impact of the pageant for her was how her teenagers benefitted from the experience. In Harris’s view, the lasting benefits of the pageant were both internal and external. When her children made friends in the pageants and stood up for their beliefs, they were strengthening their own faith. In our conversation, she then drew a link between this inner belief to an external signifier of faith by sharing with me the fact that all three of her children of age had served full-time missions.20 In her comments, this mention of mission service might seem like a non sequitur. In terms of the spiritual process of personal conversion to missionary work, however, her children’s service is the obvious next step on the path of lifelong activity in the Church toward exaltation. In this progression, contemporary Mormon pageantry is a tradition where families come together and grow in faith as they participate across generations. The oldest and longest running Mormon pageant is the Hill Cumorah Pageant (1937–today). Mission President Colton achieved his dream of creating an annual pageant to tell the story of the Book of Mormon to celebrate Pioneer Day on a location holy to Mormons. In 1937, the Eastern States Mission premiered America’s Witness for Christ, written by H. Wayne Driggs, an English professor at New York University. It told major stories of the Book of Mormon in roughly chronological order, culminating with Christ’s visit to America as recorded in the Book of Mormon. This script Page 45 →was performed annually at the Hill from 1937 until 1987, with a short break during World War II. Different episodes from the Book of Mormon were added throughout the years, and the production became more professional with the addition of costume designers, cutting-edge sound equipment, and a fully orchestrated and recorded score. Overseeing this period of expansion was Harold Hansen, a missionary who had been in the first staging of America’s Witness for Christ pageant, had worked on the production team after his mission before the war, and who was appointed as the artistic director in 1946 when the pageant was revived after the war.21 Hansen left the pageant in 1977, and subsequent artistic directors altered little of his spectacular and expansive staging of America’s Witness for Christ. Following the fiftieth year anniversary of the Driggs’s America’s Witness for Christ in 1987, the Church commissioned a new script (of the same title) by award-winning science fiction author, Orson Scott Card. Card was charged with making the pageant “accessible to a modern audience, targeting the non-scripture-reading, non-Mormon young adult.”22 The new script utilizes modern English, has a shorter running time, and shifted the emphasis of the story from the conversion of the Lamanites to the story of the Nephites and Christ. A recording of the new script, with professional actors, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Salt Lake Children’s Choir, and the Utah Symphony Orchestra was created to support the new production.23 An elaborate new set was built, and even the landscape of the Hill itself was reworked to fit the vision of the new production. It is this production that still plays today.24 Card organized the pageant around ten discrete episodes, each of which features a chronological narrative, some special effects or spectacular staging, and a specific gospel message. The episodes are tied together loosely by a thread of the importance of record-keeping—the trope of records being handed from one prophet to another is repeated throughout. Elaborate narration fills in the gaps of the story to make sure that the audience understands that they are being presented only with select stories from the entire Book of Mormon. The narrative opening of the pageant echoes the narrative opening of the Book of Mormon by introducing Lehi and his family in Jerusalem. Lehi is called by God to preach repentance to the people in Jerusalem, but his message is rejected and he is told to

gather his family to be led away to a promised land. The travels of Lehi’s family in the wilderness make up the first of the ten episodes drawn from the Book of Mormon and the Bible. The second Page 46 →episode, entitled “Visions of Christ,” dramatizes Lehi’s prophecies of Christ ministering in Jerusalem. The visions are staged behind a curtain of water, a lovely effect that softens the action and marks them as supernatural. The vignettes include Christ being baptized, calling the twelve apostles to their ministry, performing miracles of healing, and the crucifixion. The third and fourth episodes continue the story of Lehi’s family across the ocean to the shores of the “Promised Land,” which the narrator identifies as North and South America. On the new continent, the narrator explains that the people are prospering and Nephi is commanded to keep a record, which will become the Book of Mormon. This narration establishes the thread of record-keeping that weaves the pageant episodes together. This episode ends with an elaborate battle, told largely and spectacularly through evocatively lit dance sequences. The battles divide the people into two factions—the righteous Nephites and the wicked Lamanites. The story then jumps ahead several centuries to the downfall of the Nephite nation due to pride, greed, and unrighteousness, a cycle that features several prophets who unsuccessfully preach repentance and who foretell Christ’s eventual birth, death, and resurrection. These prophecies come true, as do other prophecies that let the Nephites and Lamanites know that Christ has been crucified. The destruction scene that serves as the sign of Christ’s death includes earthquakes, falling rocks, fireballs, and floods. The body count for this scene is high, with participants being theatrically drowned, crushed, and blown up. Most of these special effects are created with water cannons, or via structures that are rigged to fall apart at the right moment to squash a fleeing destruction victim. The noisy chaos is followed by the only moment of silence in the entire pageant. In the silence, and out of the darkness, Christ appears suspended well above the stage and descends gloriously out of heaven to choirs of angels. He establishes his gospel in the New World, and the stage is flooded with the over seven hundred-person cast of the pageant. The narrator describes the 200 years of peace following Christ’s visit, when all the people in the Americas lived in a Zion community before once again slipping into sin and war. The final episode of the pageant shows a young Joseph Smith being directed to the Hill Cumorah by the Angel Moroni. The actor literally digs into the Hill to retrieve prop golden plates. Then Smith presents the audience with the published Book of Mormon. The production’s final lines are Smith’s testimony of Jesus Christ. Smith is joined on stage by the entire cast who sing their testimony of Jesus, who is once again shown floating above Page 47 →the stage. This final image hints of the Second Coming, when Christ will usher in a millennial reign. The intersection of the actual Hill Cumorah and the stories of the Book of Mormon is a unique contribution of this pageant to Mormon performance in terms of storytelling, scripture, and sacred historical sites. It is the only pageant to focus exclusively on the Book of Mormon. However, the longevity of the pageant has created a secondary contribution of the Hill Cumorah Pageant to those who perform in it. Participation in this pageant and all the pageants is a family affair, with participants returning for years at a time, and families choosing to participate across generations, like the Anderson family. Similar traditions of family participation exist in most pageants. The Nauvoo Pageant’s production model is entirely dependent on its core cast’s commitment to make the pageant a tradition in their professional lives. As participants return each year as core cast members, they bring with them a memory, not only of the blocking that they will teach to their family cast ensemble but also of a traditional reading of the spiritual importance of pageant performance. In the Mesa Easter Pageant, performers also return year after year, frequently playing the same part again and again. The relationship between the pageant form and those who have made pageant participation a tradition is a symbiotic one. Pageant coordinators depend on the return of cast and crew members in order to get the pageant staged quickly and accurately. One pageant director shared with me that they aim to have at least 50 percent of the cast be returning; it simply takes too much time to introduce new participants to pageant culture and processes.

For example, in Manti, participants start as children, move into larger roles, then leadership positions. It is no coincidence that the current pageant presidency shares last names with cast members from the premiere performance and other earlier pageant leaders. For example, the current pageant president, Mike Jorgensen, has been participating in the pageant since he was a young child in the early 1970s. His mother, Merilyn Jorgensen, was in the choir of the first production and currently serves as the pageant historian. Jorgensen’s first counselor, Doug Dyreng, is the son of the first pageant president R. Morgan Dyreng and the first pageant director and original co-adapter (with her husband) of the pageant, Helen Dyreng; his second counselor, Ted Olsen, was also in the cast of the very first production. The intergenerational casting helps balance the fact that over half of the nine hundred-person cast is teenagers under the age of eighteen. Page 48 →At the same time, participants rely on the pageants to provide a consistent tradition for a special religious activity. The pageant form is particularly well suited to this development—participants return again and again because they know exactly what to expect and can repeat (sometimes identically) that which they have done before. One participant in the Manti Pageant explained how deeply the pageant is embedded in her family’s culture: “The Mormon Miracle Pageant is a way for me to share my testimony of my Savior Jesus Christ with others and let them know what I believe. I love serving in the pageant, whether in the cast or as part of the crew. We now have three generations in the pageant each year!”25 This participation creates an incredibly strong community that lasts beyond the summer’s participation both temporally and spatially. New participants enter into an experience that values decades-long traditions and is rife with institutional knowledge of how the pageant functions. Additionally, as families participate across generations, they take their memories of the pageant back home with them where the experience is replayed throughout the year as both a past and future event.

Something Beautiful That Is Ours As with the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the Manti Pageant (1967–today) developed out of local interest in staging a pageant to enhance Utah’s Pioneer Day celebrations. In 1947, Grace Johnson—playwright, author, and lecturer—wrote a presentation celebrating the history of the LDS Church entitled The Mormon Miracle. She toured Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs in the eastern United States with her performance, published the presentation in 1950, and continued to tour. By 1967, Johnson’s success was widespread. Her presentation had been performed all over the country as a one-woman show, as a narrated presentation for Mormon congregations and university commencements, and as a fully staged reading performance at Brigham Young University, with a cast, choir, and narrators.26 Official Church approbation for The Mormon Miracle, along with its long and successful production history, prompted Church leaders in Manti to secure the rights for a dramatic adaption of it for their 1967 Pioneer Day celebrations. That first year, it was performed at the local fairgrounds near the temple, with a few especially religious scenes occurring behind the fairground stage on a hill leading up to the Manti Temple. Trees between the Page 49 →fairground and the temple were trimmed for better visibility. Set and lighting designer Doug Barton erected steel posts topped with 100-watt light bulbs in gallon cans to light the hill.27 The very next year, The Mormon Miracle moved permanently to Temple Hill—the large, sloped south side of the Manti Temple grounds. It has performed there every summer since 1968. The Manti Pageant is the only annual pageant that has not undergone significant rewrites or staging changes over the years. Efforts to move, improve, or update the pageant over the years have met with great resistance from Manti locals who cherish the traditional pageant. According to the official Manti Pageant history, there were rumors in 1972 that the pageant was to be turned into a “professional production.” Mabel Anderson, wife of the Manti Pageant executive committee chairman, responded to these rumors with a long and detailed letter to a Mormon general authority, Mark E. Petersen. For three pages, Anderson laid out a vision for the future of the pageant and concluded with the plea, “Don’t take that dream away from us. Don’t take away the best thing our stake has tried to do, all working in unselfish devotion and dedication to The Miracle, getting involved in something beautiful that is OURS.”28 As Anderson’s passionate plea suggests, the relationship between Manti and the pageant is inextricable. The tradition of Mormon pageants is deeply important to those who created

and now maintain them. Part of that is the specificity of the script, which dramatizes the conversion of a fictional couple, Robert and Mary Henshaw, from their introduction to the Mormon Church in New York through their journey with the Saints first to Salt Lake City and then to Manti. Unlike the other three annual pageants, which take their scripts directly from scripture and documented history and are told in chronological order, the Manti Pageant is a sweeping fictional epic, loosely based on historical events.29 Its adventure starts in the present, flashes back to the founding of the Mormon Church, including further flashbacks to Book of Mormon history, then jumps forward to the stories of Mormon pioneers before ending in a heavenly future. The whole pageant is extensively narrated, a convention left over from its inception as a lecture presentation. The pageant narrative begins with the Henshaws looking for the right church to attend at the same time and place that young Joseph Smith is also looking for a church. Robert and Mary do not find answers to their theological questions and fade from the narrative, which then focuses on how Joseph Smith prayed to know which church he would join. The pageant then Page 50 →follows Joseph Smith’s story from his first visions through the translation of the Book of Mormon. The translation sequence leads to the dramatization of spectacular moments from the Book of Mormon: battles, corrupted civilizations, prophetic visions, and the resurrected Christ visiting the people of the Americas. At the end of the Book of Mormon sequences, the story returns chronologically to the story of Joseph Smith. The Henshaws return to the narrative as new converts to the LDS faith. The pageant dramatizes Smith’s life until his assassination, then introduces Brigham Young as the next prophet leader. Robert, a now-pregnant Mary, and other pioneers follow Young west to Salt Lake City. The Henshaws are in a handcart company that is interrupted by the formation of the Mormon Battalion, which was marshaled to march from Iowa to California during the Mexican-American War. After a patriotic scene showing the formation of the Battalion, the handcart company moves along into Wyoming but is caught in winter weather. Mary dies and is buried with her baby in Wyoming. As soon as the decimated group of pioneers arrives in Salt Lake City, they are welcomed by Brigham Young and sent on to Sanpete Country to settle the land there.30 Robert travels on with the pioneers to what will eventually be Manti, Utah. Before reaching the end of the journey, Robert is killed in an Indian attack. He is reunited with Mary in heaven and they climb the exterior stairs of the Manti Temple while a choir of heavenly angels concludes the pageant. Of all the pageants, the Manti Pageant is most deeply embedded in the community. The entire town of Manti and many from the surrounding area, Mormon and non-Mormons alike, contribute to producing, staging, performing, and hosting the pageant each summer. However, all of the summer pageants—Manti, Hill Cumorah, and Nauvoo—are primary tourist activities in very small towns and have an immense economic impact on the area. These small communities rely on the annual staging of the pageants in very material ways to keep their towns thriving. At the same time, the pageants rely on their relationship with the local communities for support, participation, and pride. For example, in Manti, the town swells from 3,500 to 20,000 each night of the pageant. The influx of spectators provides a welcome boost to area lodging, restaurants, and stores. It is an event central enough to the town that it merits its own tab on the Manti City webpage, along with “City Government,” “Public Works,” and the “Library.”31 During the week of the pageant, the city of Manti hosts a “Sanpete BBQ Turkey Dinner” each night at Page 51 →the National Guard Armory, sets up a Vendor Plaza with food and crafts, and relaxes the city ordinances that ban overnight camping in the city park so that visitors can pay to stay the night. Manti is not the only pageant with a city-sponsored meal; Castle Dale puts on an annual “Lamb Fry” in the city park to feed Castle Valley Pageant visitors, and Clarkston, a town of one square mile, hosts a roast beef dinner each night before the pageant in a nearby LDS Church. Similarly, the influx of visitors to Palmyra for the Hill Cumorah Pageant is an integral part of the town’s economy. The Hill Cumorah Pageant has long worked to integrate itself into the surrounding community. Pageant leadership is made up of local businessmen, and the pageant provides two dozen “work crews” who

connect with local not-for-profits and provide physical labor wherever they are invited to volunteer. Past partnerships include Palmyra-Macedon schools, the Wayne County Fair, 4-H Camp Bristol Hills, the Town of Walworth, and the Pioneer Library System.32 Additionally, concessions for the pageant are run by four service clubs from western New York. Susan Johnson, of the Lions Club, reports that 100 percent of their financing for the year comes from this single fund-raising event.33 One business owner in Palmyra estimates that her business doubles during the pageant month.34 Religious tourism is a surprisingly stable industry, even in times of recession. Tourism strictly for pleasure is seen as a luxury that can be cut during lean years, but religious scholar Bill Swatos argues that religious pilgrimages are sustained in ways that purely touristic travel is not.35 The tourism dollars that come from attendance at the annual pageants sustains these small-town venues over the summer and sometimes throughout the year. The tradition of pageants is one worth keeping if only for the public relationships between the towns and the Church. The relationship between community and pageant is more complicated at the Nauvoo Pageant (1977–today). First, the Nauvoo and British Pageants are not the only performances on offer in Nauvoo. Historic Nauvoo is a living history village managed by the LDS Church, immediately adjacent to the Joseph Smith Historic Site, which is preserved by the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.36 All together, the Historical District of Nauvoo features over forty restored houses and businesses, as well as three visitors’ centers, two cemeteries, and various memorial gardens. It is also home to the LDS Nauvoo Temple, which was constructed after years of negotiating to repurchase land lost when the Mormons abandoned Nauvoo in the late nineteenth century. Page 52 →It is a near replica of the temple that stood in the same location when Nauvoo was at its peak. Finally, Historic Nauvoo hosts four proscenium stages: a large indoor stage for more traditional musical-theater productions in the visitors’ center, a reproduction of the tiny stage of the historic Cultural Hall, and two outdoor stages. In addition to the pageant participants who come into Nauvoo for the four-week run of the pageant, Nauvoo also hosts year-round senior missionaries: retired married couples and retired single women who are volunteering as full-time missionaries in the Illinois Nauvoo mission. In the summer, their numbers are enhanced by a group of thirty-six single adults who have been called to serve special full-time “performing arts missions” in Nauvoo.37 These Young Performing Missionaries (YPMs) and members of the Nauvoo Brass Band are overseen by an initiative of the Missionary Department called Nauvoo Theatrical Productions, which runs a number of additional performances. Altogether, there are four musical theater plays that run all summer long with two smaller “vignettes,” site-specific short plays that restage events of old Nauvoo on location.38 During the month of the pageant, visitors can attend these Nauvoo Theatrical Productions offerings, the pageant, and four additional vignettes staged by pageant cast members.39 With all this activity, the town certainly benefits from the pageant specifically but does not support it formally as in all other small-town pageant locations, nor does the pageant do outreach into the town in any organized way, other than a “Nauvoo Pageant Appreciation Dinner” to which the whole town is invited. Indeed, the Nauvoo Pageant presidency seems to be pulling back even further from integration into the community with a decision to build their own independent rehearsal space rather than continue a relationship with the NauvooColusa School District they had been renting from for years. While the change was prompted by some school consolidations, District Superintendent Kent Young reflected how the move will sever community engagement: “I’m sure we would have had a continued relationship, but since doing construction forced them off the property to find someplace else, most likely they wouldn’t come back even if we could have them back.”40 This detachment of the pageant from Nauvoo reflects its beginnings; it was not a locally conceived event but instead a labor of love of Utah Mormons who wanted to host a pageant at a most beloved Church history site. Contemporary Mormon pageantry is both a strong tradition among the Church members who participate and an important tradition to the towns that host them. The annual pageants are an integral part of the life Page 53 →of the community. The decades of pageant performance in each of these towns is now so deeply entwined in the identity of the hosting communities, and in their economic expectations, that discontinuing the pageants would

have significant repercussions beyond the loss of a spiritual experience for Mormons.

They Are My Spiritual Ancestry In some ways, the city of Nauvoo is local to all Mormons due to its revered place in Mormon history. As Dieter F. Uchtdorf, a member of the first presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and only Mormon apostle not born and raised in America, explained: None of my family lines come through Nauvoo. I cannot trace my lineage to the pioneers. But like the majority of Church members around the world, I can deeply connect with all my heart to the Saints of NauvooВ and their journey to Zion. The continuing effort of blazing my own religious trail to a Zion of вЂthe pure in heart’ makes me feel close to the 19th-century pioneers. They are my spiritual ancestry, as they are for each and every member of the Church, regardless of nationality, language, or culture. They have established not only a safe place in the West but also the spiritual foundation for the building of the kingdom in all the nations of the world.41 Uchtdorf’s connection to the “spiritual ancestry” of Nauvoo contextualizes the power of Nauvoo as a memorial site available to all members.42 Additionally, while most Nauvoo locals do not perform in the Nauvoo Pageant, there is a tight-knit community of performers from Utah and England who return to Nauvoo year after year. The intertwined (and sometimes multigenerational) relationships between authors, directors, and performers and the completely immersive participation that is required in the pageant has created a community that functions in a nearly identical way to pageants that actually do have a history of local performance. In other ways, the entirely imported production of the Nauvoo and British Pageants keeps the pageant from being fully embedded in its location. What the Nauvoo Pageant brings to light is the commitment of pageants to remembering, recreating, and celebrating Mormon Church history. Page 54 →The annual traditions associated with Church history are a significant part of Mormon culture; Pioneer Day celebrations (even outside Utah where Pioneer Day is a major state holiday), handcart trek reenactments, and even Sunday school curriculum are focused on consistent and recurring celebrations of Church history. The production history of pageants in Nauvoo points to ways that the Church is working to even more clearly focus on the history of the Church in public performance. Contemporary Mormon pageantry’s performance of the past is one of the attractions of participants and spectators to the pageants. The ability of participants to relive that past makes it an appealing tradition worth recreating annually. The Nauvoo Pageant, A Tribute to Joseph Smith, is the second pageant to play in Nauvoo. Mormon businessman R. Donald Oscarson first pitched the idea of using a theater in Nauvoo as a means of sharing the city’s story in a more visceral way in 1961. He wrote a pageant called City of Joseph and aggressively marketed it to Church authorities in Nauvoo and Salt Lake City. In 1973, he was granted permission to stage it in Nauvoo, where it opened in 1976. At first, the City of Joseph pageant was cast locally, as cast members had to live close enough to Nauvoo to rehearse evenings and weekends for an extended rehearsal period. As the production grew, the pageant shifted to the two-week full-time commitment and national participation that is standard at the Hill Cumorah, the other destination pageant. The City of Joseph was a prerecorded pageant in the model of the Manti Pageant, and it played for nearly thirty years with growing participation and spectatorship counterbalanced by increasingly dated production values. In 2004, a letter was sent out to Church area leaders from Chicago to St. Louis announcing the retirement of the City of Joseph. The letter stated in part that: With the creation of the Illinois Nauvoo Mission, the reconstruction of the Nauvoo Temple, and the establishment of the BYU-Semester in Nauvoo program, it is obvious the city “no longer sleeps” as a line the pageant describes.В .В .В . A decision has not yet been made as to whether a new outdoor pageant will be written, produced, and included in future schedules of summer entertainment.43

Pageant producers were given no warning that the pageant was to be canceled. The loss of a pageant in Nauvoo, and specifically the City of Joseph with its recorded soundtrack and decades of familiar staging, was heartbreaking to those who had made it a tradition. Page 55 →Cast members report feelings of shock and dismay at the closing of what many felt was a primary spiritual experience in their lives.44 Beth and Michael Fetterman, who traveled from England to participate in the pageant, reflected, “We are going to miss coming each year to perform as a family. Our children have grown up spending each summer anticipating seeing their old friends, rehearsing and performing and sharing with others the captivating story of the Prophet Joseph Smith and the founding of Nauvoo. It is part of our family tradition.”45 However, one week after the retirement of City of Joseph, the Music and Cultural Arts Division of the Priesthood Department of the Church was asked by Church general authorities to create a new pageant to open in Nauvoo in 2005 for Joseph Smith’s bicentennial birthday celebration. The new pageant was created by a writing team and seven musicians, all Church members with professional experience.46 Following the model of other Music and Cultural Arts productions, the Nauvoo Pageant was developed in a process that is described as playwriting “by a council ofВ .В .В . Church members who consecrateВ .В .В . their time and talents under the direction of the Church’s presiding leaders.”47 This team and its script answered directly to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the General Relief Society Presidency (the Church’s women’s organization), and thenPresident Gordon B. Hinckley, who commissioned the work.48 The driving force behind this new model of pageant creation was David Warner, at the time the director of the Music and Cultural Arts Division of the Church. He oversaw script development, established a casting process, and directed the pageant for its first years. With his promotion to the managing director of the Priesthood Department in 2010, he delegated the day-to-day operations of the pageant to others that he selected from a small group of artists who had been involved with the pageant from the beginning. He continued to coordinate with the directors, choreographers, and music directors, and worked directly with pageant casts, throughout his time of Church employment, which ended in 2016. The new Nauvoo Pageant, A Tribute to Joseph Smith, is perhaps most accurately described as a musical drama. The script runs roughly chronologically to tell the story of the founding of Nauvoo through to the death of the prophet Joseph Smith. It is enhanced by a series of hymns carefully selected to emotionally underscore spiritual moments. The stage on which it plays is small enough to see the facial expressions of the performers. Most notably, it is performed live by a cast of paid professional actors, the “core cast.” The Page 56 →Nauvoo Pageant still retains some elements of pageantry: the outdoor theater, expansive casts, large song and dance numbers, episodic structure, and a message of the past meant to teach of the present and hope for the future. Like the Manti Pageant, the Nauvoo Pageant, A Tribute to Joseph Smith, dramatizes a conversion story, this time of a fictional Scottish couple, Robert and Becky Laird. The audience is introduced to Nauvoo as they have encountered it during the day via the core cast ensemble who reference the distance between past and present. The narrator, Parley P. Pratt, and the other characters drawn from Church history—Heber and Vilate Kimball, Brigham and Maryanne Young, Eliza R. Snow, and Jane Manning—speak directly to the audiences about how they should feel concerning the history of Nauvoo. This meta-theatrical convention is partnered with fully developed period costuming, sincere acting, and emotionally charged dialogue that invites audiences to see the characters as realistic representations of the early Mormon heroes they are portraying. After the prologue, the stage shifts to a vibrant scene of early 1840s Nauvoo. Joseph and Emma Smith mingle with crowds of busy Saints and welcome the immigrants who have just landed in town. In this group of new arrivals are the Lairds. Becky is a convert to Mormonism and Robert is her long-suffering husband who has followed her across the ocean. He relates to Joseph Smith how they lost their son on the journey, which has done nothing to endear Smith or Mormonism to him. The plot then flashes back to the beginnings of Nauvoo and the challenges faced in founding, organizing, and building the town. The staging of these events relies largely on the creative use of fabric, which is manipulated to suggest streets, is symbolically employed to tie the community together, and serves as the material for all the backdrops and buildings in the town.

The central events dramatized—from Joseph Smith’s miraculous healing of a dying man to the expansive missionary efforts in England during the early years of the settlement—are all drawn directly from Church history. Each of these historical vignettes is intercut with more details about the Lairds’ story—Becky’s conversion by early apostle missionaries, Robert’s volunteer work carving ornamentation on the Nauvoo Temple, and the new baby that is born into their family. With the narrator Pratt as a guide, the audience is cued not only about when and where the events are taking place but also about their spiritual importance. At one point, Robert Laird even interrupts the narration to ask Pratt questions about the Book of Mormon, apologizing to the spectators Page 57 →for inserting himself in the story of Nauvoo several years before he will actually arrive. The moment is key for Pratt’s opportunity to preach about how the Book of Mormon works with the Bible to testify of Christ. Eventually, through experiences like this one, Robert joins the Church. The Lairds’ happiness in their new faith is immediately tested by a series of persecutions and sorrows: mobs form to destroy the town; Joseph Smith goes into hiding for his life; a beloved citizen of Nauvoo, King Follett, dies in a horrible accident; and then Joseph Smith is assassinated. The deaths of Joseph and his brother Hyrum at the hands of a mob is handled very theatrically, with the two actors portraying the Smith brothers standing close together while the rest of the core cast narrates the details of their deaths. Finally, the climax of the show comes with the completion of the temple, which allows the entire cast, again featuring the Lairds, to be sealed as eternal families. The show concludes by reuniting all the stage characters with those who have died throughout the narrative. Everyone returns to the stage dressed in light colors, and the fabric temple constructed as part of the pageant is replaced as lights come up on the actual Nauvoo Temple, which looms over the Pageant Stage. The final image of the pageant is historical figures, reunited with the dead, standing hand-in-hand beneath a Mormon temple and singing a hymn of praise. The Nauvoo Pageant, with its unique creation process, is intentionally focused on accurate history. David Warner explained in an interview with Martha S. LoMonaco that there were three objectives he had in guiding the creation of the new script. First, he wanted to tell the story of Nauvoo using primary source documents from those who actually lived there. Second, he wanted to support the narrative with period hymns, folk songs, and dance styles. Finally, he hoped to “ground all aspects of the production, from scenography to the style of writing, in the mid-nineteenth century.”49 Other pageants are as much a product of the time periods in which they were written as they are the time periods in which they are set. However, all of the pageants hew closely to the narratives they are based on, whether LDS Church history or scripture. Mormons use contemporary pageantry to cement this history through the traditions of pageant performance. While this is particularly true in the pageants that feature Mormon history, like the Nauvoo and Manti Pageants as well as the final scene of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, it is also true even in the Mesa Easter Pageant. As pageants restage the past annually, they recreatePage 58 → the past in an identifiable way that can be absorbed by those participating and spectating. David Warner explained, “When we remember, in terms of recollect, we also remember ourselves into this community to connect directly to our history.В .В .В . We feel that we cannot move forward if you don’t gather up the past and bring it with you in some way.”50 The annual retelling of Church history is a tradition that moves Mormons from the past into the future.

I Know He Lives! The Mesa Pageant (1977–today) is the most recently conceived annual Mormon pageant and the only one held in a large metropolitan area rather than in a small town or village.51 It is performed for as wide of a local audience as possible, rather than being a pilgrimage event for largely Mormon audiences. As a result, it is the most ecumenical audience of all the pageants; it even performs a few nights each week in Spanish in order to reach as many audience members as possible. The importance of the Mesa Easter Pageant’s position in the community is underscored in the FAQ section of its website. To the question: “Is this a вЂMormon’ production?” the response is: “The Pageant is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the text is taken from the King James version of the Holy Bible. It is written and presented for all faiths, cultures, religions,

and ages.”52 Bearing witness of the divinity of Jesus Christ is a central aspect of all the pageants, most of which feature a representation of Jesus Christ as the climactic, spiritual moment of the production. In the Mesa Easter and Hill Cumorah Pageants, the pageant concludes with the image of Jesus Christ rising above the pageant set in a hopeful vision of his eventual return to earth. Both the Hill Cumorah and the Manti Pageants present a scene from the Book of Mormon where Christ appears to the people of the Americas after his death and resurrection. This moment is considered one of the most powerful scriptural events recounted in the Book of Mormon, and in the pageants, it is one of the largest, with every possible cast member in the production provided an opportunity to be in the crowds that greet Christ. The Nauvoo Pageant doesn’t represent Jesus Christ as a character in the pageant, but the characters in the pageant overtly bear witness of him, testify of his divinity, and preach the centrality of Christ as the heart of the LDS religion. To publically witness, or bear testimony, of Jesus Christ is one of the Page 59 →strongest spiritual traditions in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is considered a responsibility of anyone who chooses to be baptized. A scripture in the Book of Mormon explains that to join the Church is to “stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death.”53 The Church provides opportunities for bearing witness once a month in special Church services dedicated to bearing testimonies. Mormon apostles are considered to be “special witnesses” of Jesus Christ. Missionaries spend years preaching their witness of Christ to anyone who will listen to them. Pageants are part of this engrained spiritual tradition of bearing testimony of Christ. The Mesa Pageant is an Easter pageant in the most traditional sense—telling the story of Jesus from Old Testament prophecies of his advent to his birth, life, death, and resurrection. As an Easter pageant, it is tied to that annual religious holiday rather than being performed in the summer months. As the only Mormon pageant based on the Bible and the story of Jesus’s life, the Mesa Easter Pageant provides an unparalleled opportunity to witness of Christ. The Mesa Pageant started in Tempe, Arizona, in 1928 as a simple choral sunrise service to commemorate Easter.54 Ten years later, the service was moved to Mesa, where it was performed on the steps of the Mesa Arizona Temple and the service was expanded to tell the story of the Passion Week. This early production was timed so that Jesus Christ’s resurrection occurred with the sunrise; spectators needed to arrive by 5:00 a.m. to secure good seats. The program, which included choral music linked with the narrative of the Easter story, was even sometimes broadcast live on local television stations. The annual service was interrupted during WWII, but other than this brief hiatus, it ran each Easter at dawn until 1966. That year, Irwin Phelps, the director of the service, created dialogue for the production. The service was moved to the north lawn of the temple, and actors were cast to create a series of still tableaux to illustrate the Bible story. They stood on top of two cotton trailers to be seen over the heads of the audience. The tableaux alternated with the more familiar choral numbers. In 1977, Phelps replaced the still tableaux with a dramatic acting script and moved the increasingly popular production from Easter morning to Friday and Saturday evening performances before Easter to accommodate more audience members. This pageant played in Mesa for nearly thirty years. In 2005, Mark J. Lusvardi, director of public programs of the Church’s Missionary Department, oversaw a script revision to “simplify some of the Page 60 →language to make it more understandable for anyone coming to see the pageant, regardless of their gospel background or age.”55 Lusvardi also felt the changes correlated better with the Church’s newly minted Preach My Gospel missionary curriculum, a handbook to teach missionaries how to share the gospel. The thrust of the changes was to personalize the pageant to show “how the Savior can bless the lives of each of us.”56 Since then, the pageant has been further updated with more contemporary music—including original songs from local composers—more historically accurate costumes, live animals, and a new stage patterned after the one used for the Oberammergau Passion Play.57 The story of the Mesa Easter Pageant, Jesus the Christ, is told from the perspective of the Roman Centurion, who

the Bible records testified at the crucifixion that “truly this was the Son of God.”58 The pageant begins in earnest with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, complete with live animals and a plethora of foliage, real and artificial. Following this creation segment, a section of Isaiah is read to the music of Handel’s Messiah to prophesy of Christ’s arrival. The next episode is the birth of Christ, which is depicted as a traditional nativity with shepherds and sheep, wise men, and angels. A newborn baby plays Jesus and a chorus of young women represents the angels on high. Mary, the wise men, and the shepherds dance to celebrate Christ’s birth. The pageant continues to follow the life of Christ by showing him teaching in the temple as a young boy and by staging his baptism. A baptism by immersion is shown on-stage in one of the more successful stage effects in the pageant—Jesus enters the water and comes up again dripping wet, only to appear immediately, dry and composed, for the next scene. Performing this mode of baptism is a good example of the ways that Mormon theology lightly impacts the telling of the Bible story, as a fundamental doctrine of Mormonism is the necessity of baptism by immersion. Jesus then cleanses the temple by making a whip and using it to drive out the moneychangers, calls his apostles, and begins his ministry in earnest. A song ties together a montage of miracles before the parable of the ten virgins is interpreted by ten contemporary dancers. One of the outstanding aspects of this pageant is the complicated choreography, which is expertly performed. Dance is used interpretively in the pageant to signal great joy or as a lyrical way of telling a story. The women cast in roles that require dancing—Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the ten virgins—are all professionally trained ballet and modernPage 61 → dancers. The production also uses songs to further the narrative, much like in classic musical theater. Sometimes these go together, as in “Mary’s Lullaby,” an audience favorite where Mary sings and dances to baby Jesus right after he is born. Other times, the singing is independent of the action. Following the parable of the ten virgins, there is another brief montage illustrating Christ’s ministry, with emphasis on his relationship to children. Christ then concludes his ministry by prophesying of his death and resurrection to his apostles, a segue into the Holy Week. The end of the pageant follows the main highlights of Christ’s last days: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, and Judas’s betrayal. Christ and the apostles travel to Gethsemane where his agony in the garden is recreated through lighting effects, acting, and composition replicating an iconic Mormon painting of the subject. Peter is shown denying Jesus three times. Pilate then washes his hands and sends Christ to be crucified. The pageant fully stages the moments leading up to the crucifixion. The crucifixion scene focuses on Christ making sure his mother is taken care of, and then lighting cues illustrate his death. The staging of the resurrection is the unsurprising climax of the pageant with dancing and singing that lead to a final song, “I Know He Lives,” that preaches the living Christ. This finale—“I Know He Lives”—is for Mormon audiences a phrase familiar from the tradition of public testimonies about the resurrection and divinity of Jesus Christ. Along with other declarations like “I know the Church is true,” “I know the Book of Mormon is the word of God,” or “I know we are led by a prophet today,” the phrase “I know he lives” cues for participants and spectators the religious point of pageant performance. In each of the four annual pageants, the scripts were created to tell a foundational story that would share with audiences the history and beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The narratives have a clear trope that runs through them: a witness of the divinity of Jesus Christ, whether through staging his entire life, scenes from his life, or simply testifying directly to the audience that he lives. Some celebrate the founding of their communities; others tell the story of events that happened there. All are deeply connected to the communities that produce them and the towns that partner with them to host the annual events. Families make both participation and attendance at annual pageants part of their own family traditions and the Mormon focus on families is an integral part of the experience. The inciting event for the Mormon pageants has generally been local Page 62 →Mormon Pioneer Day festivities. However, the tradition of the Mesa Easter pageant is entirely connected to a centuries-long tradition of performing the passion during Passion Week. In her excellent work on medieval drama in America, Ritual Imports, Claire Sponsler explores how the performance of passion plays in America has functioned for the groups that produce them. She argues that passion plays are ritual performances that preserve a particular record of the past. Like

Mormon pageantry, they are also “distinguished by their repeatability; they depend on regular—usually annual—repetition for their meaning, and those meanings are public, not private.”59 The long-established ways that pageants are an integral religious, cultural, and financial part of local communities serve as an impetus to continue the tradition of annual Mormon pageantry.

A Prevalent Standard of Goodness A second answer to the question of why the LDS Church has reanimated American new pageantry rather than any other theatrical form is that pageantry is a conservative, traditional, morally uncomplicated, and easily standardized theatrical form. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a long tradition of supporting the fine arts, promoting engagement with the arts, and actually creating art, these generative efforts have always been kept in check by equally powerful warnings against the dangers of immoral entertainment. For all of his approbation of theater, Brigham Young still had a particular type of theater in mind—one that preached morals and revealed the evils of the world. As he explained in a later discourse, “I would not permit evil in my theater. If I were to learn of any unbecoming conduct there, in looks, words or actions, those guilty of it would have to leave that stage. I would not allow them to remain there.”60 It is this same fear of unbecoming conduct that led the first presidency of the Church in 1916 to call women of the Church to take action against trends in popular dance styles that were beginning to dominate Mormon youth culture: “Many of our youth of both sexes are fast approaching a state of depravity in dancing and in their feverish pursuit of frivolous and dissipating pleasures.”61 This call, widely disseminated, urged women leaders to school young people of the Church especially in “the matter of dress and in their social customs and practices.”62 The call led to reforms that standardizedPage 63 → dress codes, music genres, and even particular dance moves at Mormon socials—codes that are still functioning today. In the mid-twentieth century, when Mormon pageants were being developed across the country, Church council regarding leisure time, entertainment, and media continued to warn against its dangers. For the Strength of Youth is a resource manual for Mormon teenagers, first published in 1965, that outlines basic standards of daily living that will help them keep commandments and stay righteous. It has become ubiquitous in Church discourse and is often regarded as standards not just for youth but for adult Mormons as well. In the training manuals on the use of For the Strength of Youth, explanations for high standards are given in a quote by Mormon president Thomas S. Monson: “We have the capacity and the responsibility to stand as a bulwark between all we hold dear and the fatal contamination ofВ .В .В . sin.В .В .В . Let us shun those things which will drag us down. Let our hearts be pure. Let our lives be clean.”63 Monson’s council here suggests a clear cause and effect between consumption and moral correctness—shun those things which will drag us down so that our hearts will be pure and our lives will be clean. Some of the most explicit guidelines offered in For the Strength of Youth are those dictating engagement with “entertainment and media,” of which live theater is certainly a part: Do not attend, view, or participate in anything that is vulgar, immoral, violent, or pornographic in any way. Do not participate in anything that presents immorality or violence as acceptable. Have the courage to walk out of a movie, change your music, or turn off a computer, television, or mobile device if what you see or hear drives away the Spirit.64 This guideline is drawn from decades of warnings from Mormon leaders about the dangers of immoral entertainment.65 The result, as elegantly argued by philosopher Travis Anderson, is that for Mormons, “the lack of objectionable content, in and of itself” is now the “prevalent standard of goodness.”66 Mormon pageantry’s use of scripture and Church history as the source material for its narratives is the righteous building block on which these uplifting entertainments are based. All seven Mormon pageants tell one of three foundational stories: the story of Jesus from the New Testament, the story of the Book of Mormon, or the story of the founding of the Church Page 64 →of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church history is recorded in

primary source documents and the Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations received by modern-day prophets and accepted by Mormons as scripture. Several of the pageants tell stories from a combination of these sources. The Mesa Easter Pageant follows the story of Jesus Christ as told in the New Testament, with some flashbacks to foundational stories from the Old Testament. The Hill Cumorah Pageant is focused on the Book of Mormon, although its final scene flashes forward to the founding of the Church by Joseph Smith. The British Pageant and the Nauvoo Pageant tell the story of the early history of the Church from 1840 to 1844. The Manti Pageant is by far the most sweeping, covering the foundation of the Church from Joseph Smith’s first vision at age fourteen to the settlement of central Utah in 1849. Additionally, about a third of the narrative is made up of dramatized stories from the Book of Mormon. Examining the plots and presentation styles of the four annual pageants illustrates how they reanimate American pageantry by telling powerful and powerfully good stories. Even the use of contemporary anachronism or the staging of violence and excess can be explained as an integral part of presenting uplifting stories, appropriate for all ages and free of the stain of vulgarity or sin. As a Mormon scripture explains: “For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God.”67 This scripture plainly outlines a method of critical engagement: if something invites good, then it is of God. But the corollary holds true as well; if something is of God, it must invite the good. For Mormons, pageantry is unequivocally “of God.” The entire pageant experience, from casting to script to costumes to choreography, is a sanctioned product of the Church. Therefore, audiences can be assured that it is therefore good. The audiences of Mormon pageantry are intimately familiar with stories of the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and Church history that make up the primary source material for pageants. This means they are not encountering the dramatized events for the first time; audiences are not anxious to know what happens next. Instead, the focus on production and reception is on how these stories witness of Jesus Christ. This explains why Mormon audiences read pageant performance as uplifting, despite the representation of gluttony, lust, slavery, and extreme violence on stage. When Mormon audiencesPage 65 → encounter these coarse and violent episodes through the contextual lens of redemption or parable, the staging moves from vulgar to instructive: a necessary evil to counterpose the redemptive message of the pageant. Mormons are very comfortable performing in pageants; they trust that the experience will be uplifting and free from worldly vulgarity and immorality. Language will be clean; costumes will be modest. The Church can rely on the pageants promoting a gospel message without the least hint of misinterpretation. The form is safe, and may, despite being out of fashion, be the best form for such a didactic message. There is no subtext and few alternate meanings to lines like: “[This] is the story of all God’s children who seek His will, and hear His voice in the words of His living prophets. For the gospel of Jesus Christ is restored. God’s priesthood is again upon the earth. His prophets live today, speak His words, and build His holy temples.”68

Clear Lines of Authority The ability to guarantee that the message of Mormon pageantry is clear is yet another reason for their continued use. Initially, all of the current Mormon pageants were conceived as local productions (if one considers City of Joseph to be the original Nauvoo Pageant), and they were created in the communities where the pageant is held. Today, they are all managed by the Missionary Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This centralized oversight provides financial, marketing, and ecclesiastic support, but it also dictates artistic and staffing decisions of the pageants. It is key in maintaining control over the process to confirm that pageants are uplifting, preaching the right message, and being performed in a style appropriate for public consumption. The pageants have comparable public relations management, must all meet certain production considerations, and are organized the same way. The content, experiences, themes, and production methods of pageants are all therefore viewed as approved by the Church and, by extension, God. The organizational hierarchy of centralized control assures that pageants will be uplifting for participants and spectators alike.

Pageants are administered locally by a pageant presidency—three men who are given this volunteer responsibility directly from Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. Participating in a pageant presidency is considered a priesthood calling.69 Members of pageant presidencies are set apart, or given priesthood authorization, to function in a particular role, for this position by Page 66 →a general authority of the Church. Pageant presidencies report back directly to this general authority, although their work is also overseen by Church administrators employed in the Missionary Department. Gerald Argetsinger, a member of the first pageant presidency for the Hill Cumorah Pageant, remembers the introduction of pageant presidencies to the administration of the pageant: “Instead of a theatre organization reporting to a bureaucratic system of church committees, the priesthood organization provided clear lines of authority for all aspects of the production.”70 The pageant presidencies are assisted in their duties by scores of other volunteers who work as administrative assistants, facilities managers, public relations managers, and more. They are responsible for the smooth running of pageant logistics, from confirming the membership records and ecclesiastic worthiness of cast members to coordinating with local police for traffic control. Except in Nauvoo, where the pageant president is imported, pageant presidencies are made up of local LDS leaders. They keep the pageants grounded in their local roots, effect outreach to the surrounding communities, and represent the interests of local congregants and community leaders to Church headquarters. The pageant presidencies coordinate closely with the director of the pageant, another volunteer who is asked to participate by Church authorities in Salt Lake City. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the presidency considers the pageant director to be the “fourth member of the presidency,” while in Mesa and Manti, the pageant presidents simply coordinate with directors when their responsibilities overlap.71 The careful vetting of these volunteers and the use of the ecclesiastic lines of authority to issue religious “callings” for them to participate is an additional layer of control that helps keep the pageants up to prevalent standards of goodness. While the financial and technical support of the Church is welcomed, the careful oversight of artistic and practical choices dictated by managers from the Missionary Department is necessarily intrusive. In each pageant, however, loyalty to priesthood authority trumps personal vision; pageant creators and administration follow the instructions they receive from authorities in Salt Lake City. Any directives, artistic observations, or procedural issues that are relayed to local pageants—from either ecclesiastic authorities or from managers of the Missionary Department—are implemented directly and, generally, with goodwill. In Nauvoo, due to the unique relationship the pageant has with the Priesthood Department, there is no tension between local/central artistic visions because there is no local artisticPage 67 → leadership. At other pageants, there is a keen awareness of the involvement of Church headquarters and sometimes even polite resistance before compliance to directives. No matter their grassroots beginnings or the ongoing local artistic visions, all official LDS pageants are now carefully controlled products that reflect approved histories and theologies. For example, when the new script of the Hill Cumorah Pageant was commissioned of Orson Scott Card, it was also reviewed closely by Church officials. A memo dated December 1, 1987, from Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, illustrates the level to which administrative oversight authorizes official pageant discourse. After congratulating the script as being a “tremendous improvement over the last one,” Oaks suggested some minor areas for “fine tuning.” One of these areas was a close reading of a single sentence of script: “Noah’s reference to raising taxes should be omitted. It is too evocative of current political controversies. Mosiah 11 has at least two references to the fact that Noah taxed the people to support his excesses. It would sufficient [sic] for this reference to refer to taxation, without raising taxes.”72 Oaks’s attention to detail here is a perfect example of the control over pageant discourse that is an integral part of the hierarchy of pageant organization, and a necessary oversight for productions officially sponsored by the Church to maintain a unified, appropriate, and appropriately sanitized performance. His awareness of the political landscape in late 1987 (just months before George H. W. Bush’s now infamous “read my lips: no new taxes” promise) intersects with his interpretation of scripture. Oaks—lawyer, educator, and former Utah Supreme Court Justice—seems to see the stories of the past as having a direct relationship to the public image of Mormons in the present. He suggests adjustments that would bring the script into alignment with ancient scripture and into his vision of political Mormonism in the Reagan Era. Unsurprisingly, the memo response from the

missionary department back to pageant administration was clear: “Better make the corrections.”73 When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints speaks officially, the message is as much for members of the Church as it is for public relations to the world. A deeply hierarchical organization, the Church teaches members that they are led by prophets, seers, and revelators who reveal the word of God in the modern world. When any of these fifteen men (the prophet, his two counselors, and the twelve apostles) speak, Mormons generally take their word as divinely inspired, if not the literal word of God. Page 68 →Proclamations, official statements on current events, general conference discourses, press interviews, books published through Church-owned media, articles in Church magazines, etc., all provide direction to Church members of things they should believe and ways they should behave. Church pageants clearly do not fall under the umbrella of prophetic pronouncements, but as officially sponsored public events, they are taken by members and non-Mormons alike as representing the Church’s position on any number of issues. As a result, the careful attention to script detail in the Hill Cumorah Pageant from an apostle of the Church and a myriad of other decisions that come from the Missionary Department to the local pageants are measures not just of control but of clarity and consistency. Pageants, no matter what the specific narrative, are meant to tell the single story of the plan of salvation as interpreted by Church leaders. The institutional control that can be asserted over the pageant process sheds light on why American new pageantry remains the primary form of official Mormon performance—goodness is guaranteed.

You Come to Know the Words The institutional control over the pageant genre to guarantee goodness is literally fixed in place by the approved soundtracks on which most of the pageants are built. One of the biggest innovations that Macksene Rux brought to the Manti Pageant as a director was recording the voices of the original live narrators of the pageant—herself and Francis L. Urry, a prominent radio, stage, and film actor. The recording included all the dialogue of the pageant as well as an orchestral score and elaborate sound effects. Created in the early 1970s, this same recording is still used at the pageant today. As a result, the structure of the pageant, the declamatory narration, the orchestrations, the pacing, and the acting choices dictated by the voice recording have, of necessity, been maintained. This is true, as well, of the Hill Cumorah and Mesa Easter Pageants, which are also performed exclusively to a prerecorded soundtrack. There can be no changes to the script because (with the exception of the Nauvoo Pageant) all of the approved pageants stay literally exactly as they were originally conceived. The reasons for these soundtracks are mainly practical. Having professional actors play all the roles as if in a radio play for a soundtrack assures the quality of the “acting” each time it is played. A prerecorded track has a Page 69 →fixed running time and exact consistency from performance to performance, year to year. The ability to amplify one track throughout the large venues is infinitely easier and less expensive than live mixing a show with dozens of head microphones, backing tracks, and sound cues. The consistency of the recording also shortcuts staging, as the soundtrack dictates what can be done in each scene, and then that scene can be easily replicated from year to year. While these practical reasons explain the use of soundtracks, the use of soundtracks is also a means to confirm that Mormon pageantry is doing what it should be doing, in the way it should be done. For the practical reasons listed above, pageants, as a form, are well-suited for prerecorded soundtracks. Soundtracks, in turn, guarantee a unified message that is morally safe for participants and audiences alike. The result is a ritualization of the pageant that remains familiar to pageant participants and audiences across generations. Participants and spectators familiar with the soundtrack can repeat certain key lines along with the recording, and they do. As one teenage Manti resident shared with me, after hearing the script amplified throughout Manti for two weeks, every year, for their whole lives, most residents have the entire pageant memorized by the time they graduate from high school.74 She then proceeded to perform, with accurate intonation and dynamics, the beginning of the pageant for me and laughed. Her memorization was a particularly impressive feat considering the length and verbosity of the script. The Manti Pageant is the oldest recording currently in use in Mormon pageantry. The play itself was adapted from

source material written in the 1940s. The recording of the production that is still used today was made in the early 1970s. Indeed, there have been surprisingly few innovations to the pageant since its inception. The script itself therefore serves as an archived glimpse into how the past of the mid-twentieth century interpreted the more distant past of the nineteenth century (and beyond). The result is a production that sounds terribly dated, because it is. The music is composed of sweeping orchestrations popular in the golden age of Hollywood. The dialogue is over-enunciated and overwrought, with pauses for emotion at inopportune times and background noise that sounds like teenagers mumbling angrily. The recording has become slightly scratchy and the overall sense in listening to it is almost as if producers wanted to cue all the signs of “old-timey,” so they exaggerated dated features. For all this, the pageant is beloved as a traditional expression of the community’s devotion to God. Page 70 →Mormon pageant soundtracks directly impact not only the sound of the pageants but also their look. The staging of the plays becomes embedded in Manti cultural memory—blocking and choreography are not written down but are passed down orally from those who have performed it before. For example, Merilyn Jorgensen, the original dance director of the pageant, still recognizes much of the choreography she created in the 1970s. Some of her dance sequences are still intact over forty years later. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the restrictions of the recording are compounded by the decision of the first director of the Orson Scott Card script, Charles Metten, to underscore the entire pageant with what the composer, Crawford Gates, describes as “wall-to-wall music.”75 To create the soundtrack for the new script, Metten and Gates worked together on an elaborate score that runs without pause through the entire seventy-eight-minute production, with the notable exception of forty seconds of silence immediately following the destruction scene that signals the crucifixion of Christ. The fluidity of the score from scene to scene makes it nearly impossible to edit, move, reduce, or expand the recording. Instead, any changes to the pageant have to happen within the time allotted by the soundtrack and can only occur through costuming, casting, and composition. To manage this, most of the directors on the pageant simply replicate blocking, choreography, and stage pictures from previous years. Archived recordings of previous pageants are kept and are reviewed by the directing staff to remind them of how to fit current blocking into the fixed soundtrack. This isn’t to say there are no changes, but that the soundtrack helps establish and maintain approved production values from year to year. The year I worked as a directing intern on the pageant, I helped to restage one of the largest scenes—that of wicked King Noah and the prophet Abinadi. With the primary director, we created some new entrances and I rechoreographed the actions of the torch bearers and the slave girls. However, these were small changes to the overall shape of the scene, which still requires particular actions and reactions due to the constraints of the recording. Even new choreography is bound by the prerecorded script and score, which makes it possible for aesthetic changes but not interpretive ones. The Mesa Easter Pageant is also prerecorded and performers lip sync—in both English and Spanish.76 It is also by far the most recently reconsidered and updated pageant. The script consists almost exclusively of scriptures drawn directly from the King James Version of the New Testament and brief narrative interpretations of the Bible from the perspective of MormonPage 71 → theology. As such, there aren’t significant changes that can be made to it; the Bible story and its focus on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ do not change. However, the director explained to me that she consistently reevaluates ways to better tell the ancient story for the audiences of today. In 2013, for example, she realized that the pageant was missing a star in Bethlehem in the scene of Jesus’ birth. It took her two days working with the lighting designers to coordinate a new special effect that enhances the scene without reshaping the narrative.77 The Mesa Easter Pageant also received a new recording in 2010, and new arrangements of some of the songs have been recorded and inserted since then. Figure 2. Abinadi preaches to King Noah and his wicked priests in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, 2015. One of my contributions to this scene in 2010 was to direct the soldiers to stand with their hands fisted over their chests to help differentiate them from the priests, whose body movements are more fluid. This choreography has been passed along and is still in evidence here five years later. Photo by M. Christine Gibson.

The musical choices on these soundtracks are made in conversation between creative teams, Church officials from the division of Music and Cultural Arts, and the Missionary Department that oversees pageants. Once established, the scores are recorded and largely fixed. Changes to the score may be suggested by the creative team but must be approved by MissionaryPage 72 → Department. The effort associated with making new recordings and the difficulty of navigating artistic decisions through the bureaucracy of the Church means that very few changes are ever made to the music once the score has been initially approved. The new recording of the Mesa Easter Pageant avoids the declamatory style of earlier recorded pageants like the soundtracks for the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants. Stephanie Foster Breinholt is the voice of the narrator in the new Mesa Pageant recording that was made in 2010. She explains that she didn’t even know that her narration would be lip synced. Instead, she concentrated on “telling Christ’s story so you come to know the words. I knew the words before I was assigned. I was familiar with it and with Him.В .В .В . There is a warmth that comes with that. A familiarity. You’re not performing really. I didn’t feel like I was performing; there was no need for acting or inflection or tactics.”78 Breinholt’s reflection on her acting experience reveals the power of prerecorded pageant soundtracks—they allow the audience to know the words. It assures the audience, who also knows the words to this story, that they are receiving a faithful version of Christ’s life drawn directly from the Bible. None of this analysis holds entirely true for the Nauvoo Pageant, where the core cast of actors performs live on a more intimate stage. However, just because the performance is live doesn’t mean there is not a similar measure of artistic control over the process and a nearly identical replication of the script and acting from year to year. The current Nauvoo Pageant was scripted, staffed, and cast out of Church headquarters in Salt Lake City before being exported to Nauvoo. The pageant continues to have strong creative ties directly to the Priesthood Department, which houses the Division of Music and Cultural Arts, in addition to the administrative oversight of the Missionary Department. The creative process and the unique connections of the pageant to the Church provide for consistency and approved goodness at nearly the same levels as other pageants, even without a prerecorded soundtrack. Core cast members frequently reaudition to participate, so the production history of the first ten years of the pageant looks almost like a repertoire company performing an annual event where roles are repeated. This helps the staging process run more smoothly. Nauvoo Pageant participants are a very insular community in which fulltime employees of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are writers, writers are directors and chorographers, children of writers and directors are invited into core cast positions, Page 73 →husbands and wives play husbands and wives, and most directors are core cast members for years before being selected to move to the production side of the pageant. The close relationship between script, production team, and performers, as well as ongoing Church administrative oversight, has helped to maintain the original vision and quality of the pageant. The result is that all four of the annual Mormon pageants are tightly controlled, easily replicable performances that cannot stray far from their approved message. Not only do they lack any hint of vulgarity or immorality, they promote an overtly spiritual message. The message is clear, so there is no room even for an interpretation of the material as anything other than what it purports to be: a religious history that celebrates Jesus Christ, teaches his gospel, and invites audiences to believe. For example, at the end of the Nauvoo Pageant, all of the main characters fill the stage and talk directly to the audience. One of the characters, Mary Ann Pratt, tells the audience, “You are more than friends. You know us and we know you.”79 The character John Taylor then says, “You know what it means to embark on the journey of life.”80 In turn, each of the other principal characters tells the audience what they know and even what they feel, explaining directly to the spectators: “You feel, you know there’s something more to life than what we see.”81 However, just because characters on a stage tell an audience what they allegedly know and feel doesn’t mean that it is, in fact, what the audience knows or feels. This kind of presentational dialogue, where characters don’t just speak to the audience, but use the imperative to dictate thoughts and feelings for the audience instead, makes it very clear what the message of the play is.

At times, the use of contemporary flavor throughout the production runs the risk of interrupting the scriptural narratives being told. The costumes are in a period-specific style, but sometimes with vibrant colors, intricate embroidery, metallic sheens, or, in the case of the Nauvoo Pageant, delicate ornamentation that is more theatrical than historically accurate. In the Mesa and Nauvoo Pageants, updated narration that avoids the declamatory style of earlier recorded pageants like the soundtracks for the Manti and Hill Cumorah pageants also lends to the contemporary feel. Most noticeably, the dances staged throughout the Mesa Easter Pageant are choreographed in a style where musical-theater dream ballet meets the contemporary category of television’s So You Think You Can Dance. The up-to-date articulation of the production might seem at odds with the sacred story. More dangerously, the modern updates might be read by some believing audiences as inauthenticPage 74 → to the Bible stories, and inauthenticity is the first step down a slippery slope to blasphemy. I believe, however, that Mormon audiences accept these anachronisms as part of their own efforts to make the story real for them today. Mormons have a long-embedded practice of applying scriptures to the exigencies of the modern world. In the Book of Mormon, this methodology is called “likening the scriptures.”82 Medieval scholar Leslie Aronovick describes a similar technique: “Trying to imagine past religious events which affect us now, it is often impossible not to transfer contemporary attitudes or elements back onto the past. If anachronism is not the inevitable result of this striving to know an historical God, it is often the intentional product of a related endeavor to make Him relevant to today’s believers.”83 Pageant producers are invested in updating their work to keep the pageants fresh for new audiences and to keep the pageant experience profound for new and returning cast members. Rather than devolving into blasphemy, contemporary interventions in the Mormon pageantry assure participants and spectators that they are watching something good.

Qualifying for Exaltation On its website, the Nauvoo Pageant logo invites audiences to: “See it this summer, remember it always!” while the Manti Pageant similarly invites audiences to “make a memory this year.” The Mesa Easter Pageant website doesn’t advertise this way, but rather explains that the Easter Pageant “presents the life, ministry, and mission of Jesus Christ through music, dance, and drama.” The Hill Cumorah Pageant chooses to encourage audiences to: “Come feel the Savior’s love.”84 This focus on Jesus Christ, his love, and how it makes participants and audiences feel could easily be the slogan for any of the pageants. The stories for all Mormon pageants are drawn from sacred texts that focus on the importance of the Savior in the plan of salvation, a message which the Church embraces; the administrative Handbook for the Church explains that the “invitation to come unto Christ pertains to all who have lived, or will ever live, on the earth.”85 The messages of exaltation embedded in the pageants are simultaneously for those who see them and for those who perform them. The message itself also has a dual function: to preach the gospel to those who have not already been converted to the Mormon Church and also to strengthen the Page 75 →testimonies of those Mormons that participate and attend. The relationship between bringing people to Christ and the missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints impact Mormon pageantry in very practical ways, from the plots of the pageants to their scope to the amount of people invited to participate to the efforts to maintain enormous audience attendance. The invitation to “Come Unto Christ” is also representative of the four purposes of the Church, which have been codified in the Handbook, a two-volume policy book that provides instructions for the administration of the Church: “In fulfilling its purpose to help individuals and families qualify for exaltation, the Church focuses on divinely appointed responsibilities. These include helping members live the gospel of Jesus Christ, gathering Israel through missionary work, caring for the poor and needy, and enabling the salvation of the dead by building temples and performing vicarious ordinances.”86 The Church organizes these purposes with an eye toward the exaltation of all. The goal to live the gospel of Jesus Christ, including caring for the poor and needy, encompasses efforts to maintain the spiritual well-being of current believers. The goal to gather Israel puts emphasis on expanding the scope of members to a global community, while the injunction to care for the poor requires a relationship to the world outside membership in the Church. Finally, the mission to redeem the dead expands the responsibility of Mormons from their own fold, beyond those in their own communities or in need across the globe, to a responsibility for everyone who has ever lived.

A final answer to the question of why the Church has reanimated American new pageantry seems obvious—the Church must believe they are effective at furthering the mission of the Church. Why else continue to produce expensive, localized, narrowly focused theater for large, and largely LDS, audiences? I believe it is because Mormon pageantry is particularly well suited to fulfill the purposes of the Church by providing a unique opportunity for members to set aside their daily lives to focus entirely on spiritual things.

Helping Members Live the Gospel of Jesus Christ In his work on the Hill Cumorah Pageant, James A. Bell considers the pageant a “ritual cultural celebration.” He builds on Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s theories on transformation to suggest that those participating in pageants are transformed at the intersection of more obvious religious Page 76 →rituals that effect a lasting transformation, and theater, in which actors playing roles return to their pre-performances selves after the curtain goes down. For Bell, the Hill Cumorah Pageant is a liminal space where participants are removed from their everyday lives to devote their time, energy, money, and health to the “special devotion” of acting in the pageant.87 As a result, they transform through “their own personal, miraculous spiritual experience” at the pageant.88 Bell’s assessment here echoes clearly the first purpose of the Church: to help members live the gospel of Jesus Christ, a goal that is achieved through the unique setup of the fully immersive pageant experience. At the Hill Cumorah and Nauvoo Pageants, where participants live on site for anywhere from two to five weeks, the communal living environment is a carefully constructed aspect of the pageant experience. At all pageants, every element that can be controlled (accommodations, dining, casting, rehearsal schedule, devotional rhetoric, composition, technical support, and costume fittings), and even the elements that cannot be controlled (the weather, pageant protestors, or physical illness), are put in service of creating an experience where members of the Church better live the gospel of Jesus Christ. Participants are reminded continuously of the miraculous spiritual experience they are having. The negative aspects of the experience are coded as trials to overcome, or sacrifices to make that will, in the end, only enhance the pageant experience. They reaffirm the power of the pageant’s spiritual experience as they bear testimony of their miraculous spiritual experiences to each other in organized meetings and less formally structured conversations. During all my years attending and participating in Mormon pageants, the most frequently repeated adage was that pageants “change lives.” In conversations with directors from the different pageants, I asked them what they saw as the Church’s primary goal for pageants: to preach the gospel to nonmembers or to strengthen the faith of those that participate. In each case, directors reported that the two functions were inseparable. In order to be successful missionary/performers, pageant participants must build their own faith. The best way to build faith is to be a missionary/performer. As one pageant director explained: [The goal] as I’ve understood it over the years is that you invite the cast to look after [each other]: serve them, love them, reach out to them, know names of their children the day that you meet them. Take care of them in every single possible way that you can. The reason you’re doing that is for them to have the best experience they possibly can, but also that depth Page 77 →of love—it can’t be hidden on stage. When you’re seeking hard to create Zion each day, it’s not just for the sake of the family casts who have come from Canada, Utah, Idaho, Florida to spend two weeks performingВ .В .В . it’s because your guests have also driven from all over North America.89 What the director outlines here is how the intertwined goals of the Church function in pageants. Pageant participants are service-oriented, serving each other in a community while always keeping their guests in mind. In so doing, the participants think less of themselves and more of the audience for whom they perform. As pageant participants focus on others, they build and grow their own testimonies far more effectively than they would if they were invited to participate exclusively in activities focused on self-improvement. Families are certainly aware of the impact that this experience will have on them, and many travel far to participate. FBI Special Agent Bill Matthews, stationed in Bangkok, described his experiences performing with

his wife and children in the Hill Cumorah Pageant in 2007: “We’ve taken family vacations where we’ve gone to Disneyland. But we thought this would be a little more meaningful than just going to an amusement park.В .В .В . We just hope that the story reaches people. The pageant is not for the people who are in it, not primarily, but for us, it’s a phenomenal spiritual experience in a sacred place.”90 Matthews’ assessment of the purpose of the pageant suggests that the missionary aspect of the performance is always secondary to the ways in which families are strengthened both in the midst of participation and also in the memory of the event long afterwards. Another participant described how the pageant has been a teaching tool for her young children: Eli said to me, “So that guy isn’t really Jesus, he’s just an actor. And we’re not really Nephites.” And then he looked around the whole stage and said to me, “But we are all really Heavenly Father’s children. I figured it out.” Then I told him that was good, because me telling him these past six years didn’t leave a dent, but him figuring it out on his own makes all the difference in the world.91 The relationship that pageant participants have with the characters they are cast to play is one of the most meaningful ways that they better live the gospel of Jesus Christ; they are coached to act as if they are characters of the Page 78 →scriptural past. The pageant rehearsal process reflects this important connection as pageant producers work not to cast talent but to cast those who will spiritually grow from participation. In the Nauvoo and Mesa Easter Pageants, casting of the lead roles does take basic talent into consideration. The core cast at the Nauvoo Pageant goes through a competitive audition process with callbacks. In the Mesa Easter Pageant, the challenging choreography requires a dozen highly trained female dancers, so part of the audition process is selecting these participants through competitive auditions. However, in the Manti Pageant, anyone who would like to participate is provided a role in the production. Participants do “audition” for the lead roles, but anyone who wants to participate in the ensemble simply has to sign up in the group of their choice, and they are provided a role. Lead roles are double-cast to protect against emergencies that might take an actor out of the pageant for a night and to provide even more opportunities for participants. The family casts of the Nauvoo Pageant and the entire cast of the Hill Cumorah Pageant are selected from applications where potential families fill out an online application and are chosen based on the information gathered there alone. The auditions to actually assign roles in all the pageants follow the same principles and emphasize the importance not of theatrical talent but of the potential for the spiritual growth of the participants. The casting of the major characters is driven by a balance of necessity and by what the directors consider revelation. For directors, the casting process begins with a prayer, invoking heavenly guidance to find those participants who will best fit the part and to find the best parts to uplift and provide a strong spiritual experience for everyone. When I participated in the casting of the Hill Cumorah Pageant in 2011, the entire directing team knelt down in prayer and asked God to inspire us to make the right casting choices. Certainly, physical appearance and basic acting skills are taken into account in the audition process. For example, the man playing the role of the wicked King Noah in the Hill Cumorah Pageant must be large enough to be a substantial presence on the uppermost stage and to wear an elaborate costume with a heavy headdress. The man playing Jesus in the Mesa Pageant must be able to handle memorizing an extensive role and performing to the voice-over with conviction. On the other hand, the vocal quality or talent of the performers is never considered as there are only twenty actors in all of the annual pageants whose voices are ever heard. The directors also understand that finding the “best” person for the Page 79 →part means discovering intangible qualities of rightness for the part, and assessing the impact that playing this specific role will have on the experience of the participant. In short, the directors seek to pick the actors that God wants to play the role, for whatever reason he may have for inspiring the casting choice. The participants generally accept their assignments cheerfully; those cast in roles where they are one of a large group on stage are “proud to be crowd.”

The current director of the Mesa Pageant has added an interview to the audition process to see how hopeful participants represent their desire to be involved in the pageant mission. She invites groups of fifteen or twenty to answer questions focused on eliciting emotional responses to various scenarios from Jesus’s life. For her, “it’s kind of nice to get to know those people in a more intimate way, just talking to them, like вЂwhat is your reason for giving up a month of your life to do this?’” She points out that participants are not judged on who has the best reason to be in pageant, but that certainly, “the reason is sometimes more important than skill, because we’re casting missionaries, we’re casting actors, we’re casting families.”92 Once cast members are selected to be part of the pageant and assigned their roles, the rehearsal processes for the pageants are necessarily intense. Both the Mesa Easter and Manti Pageants rehearse evening and weekends for a month before performances. At the Nauvoo and Hill Cumorah Pageants, the pageants are mounted in exactly one week of full-day and evening rehearsals. Rehearsals are another place where the spiritual experiences of the cast members are given equal, if not more weight, than the theatrical elements of choreography or blocking. In addition to all of the extra religious events—devotionals, group scripture study, missionary training—the actual directing process of pageants is done to build a stronger testimony of the gospel. I observed at the Nauvoo Pageant, for example, that directors spent less of their time in traditional directing, like creating composition, guiding acting choices, or setting entrances and exits. Instead, there would be a very basic set of instruction for the cast; the rest of the time would be spent talking about spiritual things, and sharing testimonies and faith-promoting stories. At the very end of the rehearsal period, the cast would then run the scene a single time. When I asked a director about this practice, she replied, “I think the idea is that we hope that the cast has primarily a spiritual experience.В .В .В . There is really no way for them to stand on that stage and be someone else. There is no way even for those who are playing these iconic roles to know what those Page 80 →people felt. The only thing we know and we feel is what we feel about the gospel and that’s all we can ask them to expressВ .В .В . [I] hope we can provide them with an experience where they can feel something and then share that feeling with the audience.”93 As Mormons participate in pageants, they live the gospel of Jesus Christ and are better prepared to share it with others, which are both primary purposes of the Church.

Gathering Israel through Missionary Work The aggressive missionary efforts of the Church result not only in the pageants but also in the Church’s public relations campaigns and in the full-time volunteer labor of thousands of young, single Mormons as well as older, retired couples and single women, or “senior” missionaries. Today, these efforts are not confined to white-shirted young men and women in skirts knocking on doors; they now include a wide variety of means to share the gospel. The vast majority of materials that teach about Mormon history and beliefs are recorded media for the screen—the best-known examples being the “I am a Mormon” campaign, the Mormon Channel on YouTube, or feature-length films like Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration (2005), or Meet the Mormons (2014 and 2017). Mormon pageantry joins these efforts as examples of live performance also constructed to allow a wide viewing audience to meet Mormons. Pageants bring hundreds of participants and thousands of spectators together, which provides a wide net to cast for non-Mormons who might be interested in learning more about the Church and for Mormons who could share the gospel with their non-Mormon friends and family. Obviously, mediated missionary efforts are the easiest way to widely disseminate an approved message. Once a Mormon Message has been filmed, for example, it has a potentially unlimited life on the internet, and no matter how often it is viewed, the fixed cost of production remains the same. Pageants, on the other hand, require a significant annual outlay of time, money, and efforts. As live missionary productions, they are performances that fall on a spectrum somewhere between missionaries knocking on doors and professionally produced Church videos. Full-time missionaries apply for service after completing rigorous physical and spiritual assessments. The applications are vetted by top Church officials; the service area for each missionary is revealed to a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, whose job it is to make assignments. Page 81 →This process takes several weeks, after which prospective missionaries are notified via letter as to where they will serve. Full-time

missionaries are ecclesiastically set apart for their service and bound to follow strict mission guidelines of behavior and comportment. These missionaries support themselves for the twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four months that they are on their missions.94 This missionary service is different than the more integrated efforts of “member-missionaries,” who are meant to be the primary contact between their non-Mormon friends and family and the full-time missionaries. Indeed, at each Mormon pageant, the casts are set apart as special witnesses of the gospel and are trained by missionaries about how to most effectively share their testimonies with audience members. Audience members are urged to learn more about the LDS Church, or to refer non-Mormon friends and family members for visits from missionaries. Pageant presidencies track the number of contacts made with non-members who are inspired by the pageant to learn more about the Church and they report conversion success stories with pride. As part of their pageant experience, the actors who circulate before and after all of the Church pageants are trained to ask patrons if they would like to learn more about the gospel, or if they could recommend a friend or family member who might. These recommendations, or referrals, are the data the Church gathers to track the effectiveness of the missionary aspect of pageants. The number of referrals gathered each night is not released to the public, nor even sometimes to pageant directors. However, anecdotal evidence of the great missionary success of the pageants abound. At nearly every pageant, pageant presidents, directors, and volunteers report high referral numbers. Several pageant administrators shared with me, that they were told by “Salt Lake”—a metonymic reference to central Church leadership—that they have the “highest” numbers of referrals. Clearly, not all pageants can be the best at gathering names, but the pride of owning this ranking points to the seriousness with which pageants take their mission to share the gospel. It also suggests that the Church, while not releasing the actual missionary statistics to the pageants or the general public, must find in the numbers a reason to continue to produce the pageants. Even if the missionary efforts seem slight in the face of the expense and effort of pageant production, Mormon pageantry fulfills the purpose of the Church to gather Israel through missionary work. The missionary purpose of the Church is outlined in Doctrine and CovenantsPage 82 → 29:7–8, and continues to drive missionary work today: “And ye are called to bring to pass the gathering of mine elect; for mine elect hear my voice and harden not their hearts; Wherefore the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked.” The “gathering of Israel” described here is metaphorical. Missionaries are meant to find the Lord’s elect and bring them into the fold of his elect people, or Israel, through the gateway of baptism. Missionaries that bring any converts into the Mormon Church have gathered the righteous into the kingdom of God. Pageant participants see themselves as a part of this mission, and the pageant experience provides an opportunity for the Church to directly fulfill one of its purposes in a creative way.

Enabling the Salvation of the Dead Mormon missionary work is built on the belief that the ordinances provided by the Church are necessary for exaltation. As described in the introduction, these can only be performed by the living, on earth, with the proper authority of the priesthood administered through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.95 In this way, missionary work and the call to “redeem the dead” are two sides of the same coin. Both purposes of the Church are focused on sharing the gospel with those who don’t have it, whether they are alive but haven’t yet heard the good news or they died without ever hearing it. In the first purpose, missionaries and members share the gospel with their families and friends through “missionary opportunities,” while in the second, members share the gospel by performing proxy ordinances in temples. Sharing the gospel either with the living or the dead speaks to the urgent desire of Mormons for everyone to have the opportunity for exaltation. Adding members also increases the numbers of the faithful who are able to return to the temple to complete ordinances for those who have died. As John Fletcher points out in his work on the similar

missionary zeal of evangelical Christians, A gap exists between what is and what ought to be; another, better world is possible.В So vital is this truth, so life-giving, that sharing it, spreading it, and persuading others of it is worth the risk of breaking social proprieties,Page 83 → alienating the powers that be, and seeming, in short, kind of crazy. But how could they, how could I, do otherwise? .В .В .В [H]ow much would I have to hate people not to do all in my power to act on my deepest convictions and try to move the world to the better place?”96 Mormons generally feel this urgency and work to fulfill the call to live the gospel of Jesus Christ, share the gospel through missionary work, and redeem the dead, so that all may have a chance of exaltation. Pageants are a particularly expansive way to achieve these goals. All in all, in the course of one calendar year, estimates suggest that over 4,000 Mormons participate in some way with a pageant, while an additional 270,000 people attend. As pageant participants work as missionaries for the living and the dead through their production and performance of religious stories on stage, they are simultaneously working toward their own exaltation. Mormon pageants are performances that prepare members for exaltation by encouraging them to live the gospel through the overt missionary goals of the pageants and by their respect for and performative engagement with the dead. Those that attend pageants are invited to know more about the gospel and invited to “come feel the Savior’s love” so that they, too, may get on the path toward eternal life as outlined by the plan of salvation. This goal is clear and the methods for preaching this message are the result of correlated efforts of the Church administrators to make sure the pageants are wholesome and uplifting, and to present an officially approved scriptural narrative. For Mormons, the doctrine of the redemption of the dead is a belief and a material practice that involves research and ritual. The dual focus on family history and temple rites indicates the religious practice of resurrecting the past. As Mormons engage in family history and temple work, they are performing doctrine. The connection between this performance and the performance of the dead on pageant stages is intertwined—Mormon pageant performers necessarily read their participation in similar terms to their engagement with this most fundamental Mormon doctrinal practice. Mormons look forward to the annual tradition of performing in pageants or the pilgrimages they take year after year to attend beloved productions. They can trust that the performances will achieve the marker of “good” entertainment, free from inappropriate content or innuendo. They understand that participating in a pageant will give them opportunities to further the purposes of the Church, to live the gospel, and to share the gospel with Page 84 →the living and dead. For these reasons (among others, I’m sure) Mormons have reanimated American new pageantry as their primary production style. They produce six pageants each year and continue to plan for future spectacular spectaculars. Understanding why pageantry is such an appealing theatrical form grounds the rest of this book, in which I explore how Mormon pageantry resurrects the past.

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Chapter 3 Performing Near the Dead Pageant Stages and Holy Ground We believe that more and more our valley will become identified with The Mormon Miracle Pageant. That people will come again and again to renew their spirits and that visitors from all over the world will find their way to our hillside, that it will be the mecca for many a pilgrimage. —Mabel Anderson, wife of the first Pageant Executive Committee Chairman R. Clair Anderson, 1972 Eric Fielding was the set designer commissioned to create a stage for the 1988 version of America’s Witness for Christ at the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Taking inspiration from Mesoamerican architecture and ornamentation, he designed a set of seven enormous interlocking metal platforms, each with multiple levels, trap doors, stairwells, entrances, and exits. Fielding’s set creates the world of the play without upstaging the spectacle; it is versatile, functional, and elegant. The set was so large that the truck delivering stage three to New York from Utah was denied access to the state of Ohio because it exceeded state limits for oversized loads. After several days of fruitless efforts to secure an exception to the limit, the truck eventually had to drive around Ohio and reached the Hill Cumorah near Palmyra, New York, only three days before opening night.1 In preparation for designing the pageant set, Fielding visited the Hill Cumorah several months after the final production of the original America’s Witness for Christ to get a lay of the land. The pageant set was gone, but he noticed that all the light towers and a number of strangely shaped hedges—planted to mask structure footings, lighting equipment, and special effects—still dotted the hillside. Fielding explained, “To me, the Hill Cumorah is a sacred site. And to see those unattractive and distracting artifacts from the Page 86 →pageant marring the simplicity and beauty of the clearing on the hillside was very upsetting.”2 He decided that as part of his design, he would make every effort to have as little impact as possible on the hill during the eleven months of the year when the pageant was not there. Fielding’s positioning of the Hill Cumorah as a sacred site is based on its history as a place where living and dead come together in important ways. First, the Hill itself is one of several Church history sites in the Palmyra, New York, area, which are currently maintained as Historic Palmyra and include the Smith Farm, where Joseph Smith lived with his parents; the Sacred Grove, where he received his prophetic call; the Hill Cumorah; and the Grandin Printing Press in downtown Palmyra, where the Book of Mormon was first printed. It is also the location of a Mormon temple, a most sacred Mormon space, which was constructed in 2000 and is located within walking distance of the Smith Farm and the Hill Cumorah. The Hill is revered as the location where Joseph Smith was directed by the angel Moroni to retrieve the gold plates he eventually translated into the Book of Mormon. Moroni was the final prophet of the Book of Mormon. He survived the final battle that destroyed his nation and eventually buried the golden plates that were a record of his people. Smith didn’t just visit the Hill once but was directed to visit annually for four years, where he would meet with Moroni to receive “instruction and intelligence” until he was ready to handle the responsibility of the ancient record.3 The meetings between Smith and Moroni were literally a meeting of living and dead. The Hill also shares a name with the site of the final battle between the nations whose histories are recorded in the Book of Mormon. As such, a tradition grew up in the Church that the drumlin in upstate New York is the same location where millions of Book of Mormon peoples lost their lives. For example, in his work, Mormon Doctrine, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie stated categorically: “Both the Nephite and the Jaredite civilizations fought their final great wars of extinction at and near the Hill Cumorah (or Ramah as the Jaredites termed it), which hill is located between Palmyra and Manchester in the western part of the state of New York.”4 McConkie was in

good company—several other Mormon scholars and apostles echoed this interpretation throughout the midtwentieth century.5 However, since the 1970s, Mormon scholars have moved toward an interpretation of the geography of the Book of Mormon that assumes the two locations are separate. Indeed, the Hill was unnamed until well after the publication of the Book of Mormon. While some had started calling Page 87 →it Cumorah after Smith found the plates there, other names were still in circulation; in 1888, The New York Times called it “Golden Bible Hill,”6 and ten years later, the Mormon publication Young Woman’s Journal, reminded readers that those that live in the area more accurately called it “Mormon Hill.”7 Eventually, the name Hill Cumorah stuck, and today it is listed as such on public records of the area. Currently, the official position of the Church is to not make any proclamations tying Book of Mormon lands to specific geographic locations. There are still apologists who argue for the “hemispheric geography model” for the Book of Mormon (that the Book of Mormon lands refer to all of the Americas, including upstate New York). But others subscribe to the “limited geography model” (the Book of Mormon happened somewhere in the Americas). Some even suggest that the Book of Mormon is a foundation myth rather than a true history and has no locational reference to actual landmarks.8 However, the tradition that the Hill Cumorah is where the plates were buried and where the final battles of the Book of Mormon took place remains a strong force in shaping encounters with the space. The Hill is thus sanctified by the sacrifice of the thousands who died at Cumorah as recorded in the Book of Mormon. It is also sanctified by the recent past of Mormon history, when Joseph Smith went to the Hill Cumorah to meet with an angel and unearth gold plates that he would translate into a new testament of Christ. Fielding’s efforts to honor the sacred space through careful environmental design was achieved; the landscape of the hill was redesigned as part of the pageant design. Non-indigenous plants were removed and replaced with trees and shrubs endemic to the region. All the lighting towers were made removable, and no permanent hedges were planted on the open hillside. Now, as Fielding describes, “when the pageant is not happeningВ .В .В . [visitors] see a simple, open clearing on the hillside, framed by the stately pines and maples that cover the sacred Hill Cumorah. In many ways, the absence of my set for the Hill Cumorah Pageant is something I am more pleased with than the set itself.”9 Fielding’s design process—and his reflections on it—reveal the reverence that Mormons give to locations that have been marked as holy ground. There are numerous sacred spaces in Mormonism, spaces both public and private. Churches are public, and when the buildings are open, anyone is welcome to enter.10 Temples are highly visible sacred places of Page 88 →the Church and are simultaneously public and private: only members approved through an interview process can go in, but their grounds are open to the public year-round. Some even have visitors’ centers to encourage public visibility. The family home, considered primary sacred space in Mormon doctrine, is decidedly private and intimate. The Mormon vision of sacred space is even expansive enough to include promised lands of the scriptures from Israel to America. The most sacred of spaces in Mormon belief and practice, however, are those where the living and the dead can meet, both metaphorically and literally. Mormon pageantry directly engages with three sacred spaces: Mormon heritage sites, holy temples, and prophetic America. In this chapter, I will discuss how Mormon pageants resurrect the past as they are built in close proximity to—if not directly on—ground where the dead are interned and memorialized, and to which the dead return. First, I discuss the formation of sacred space in Mormon heritage sites where early members of the Church lived and died, and how pageants relate to those dead. Then I explore the relationship between pageants, temples, and temple work. Temples are considered the most sacred of all Mormon buildings. They are particularly valued for their ability to bring the living in contact with those who are on the other side of the veil as families are bound together in this life and the next. Finally, I examine how Mormon pageantry directly engages in fulfilling the prophecy of America as a promised land, an ongoing process that has been defended to the death by early Saints

and soldiers, and must still be defended by Mormons today. The placement of Mormon Pageants on holy ground helps pageant participants and spectators alike resurrect the past with an eye toward exaltation for themselves and their families.

What a Glorious and Wonderful Thing Took Place Here Every single Mormon pageant performance is situated on a site that is sacred to Mormons and where Mormons believe they can encounter their kindred dead. As mentioned in the introduction, the Clarkston Pageant is held at the cemetery where Martin Harris, a founding member of the Church, is buried. The Castle Valley Pageant is held on a bluff overlooking Castle Dale, Utah, the location of the last settlement organized by Brigham Young and where Page 89 →pioneers lived and died. The Hill Cumorah Pageant is one of the multiple locations at the Church’s Palmyra Heritage Site. As described earlier, the Hill itself has a double heritage as the location where Joseph Smith retrieved the golden plates and also as the memory of a forgotten battleground. The Manti Pageant is an event featured at the Manti Temple, which itself is a featured building of the Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area. The Nauvoo Pageant is held in the heart of Historic Nauvoo, a restored nineteenth century living history town not unlike Williamsburg, Virginia. Finally, the Mesa Pageant is held on the grounds of the Mesa Temple, a temple significant as one of the first temples built outside Utah, for its unique architecture, and for its position as a Mesa community landmark. In his remarks at the dedication of the Hill Cumorah Visitors’ Center, Mormon president Gordon B. Hinckley emphasized the divine visitations associated with the Hill Cumorah and its surrounding holy ground: Joseph Smith learned more concerning the nature of God in the initial visit in the grove than all the learned divines arguing though all of the centuries ever really had a knowledge of. Then to have this marvelous new testamentВ .В .В . speaking as with one voice in the witness and testimony of the Son of God, the Redeemer of mankind. What a glorious and wonderful thing took place here, right here at this hill. I amВ .В .В . glad to be back and walk this ground where Moroni walked so very, very long ago.11 President Hinckley concluded, “May we be true and faithful to the great trust which has been given us as witnesses of these things, ever standing ready to declare, and unashamed of the knowledge which we have.”12 Mormon pageantry is one such declaration, and it is performed on the very ground that honored the dead who “walked so very, very long ago.” Those who participate and watch Mormon pageants are witnesses to “these things.” They are not restricted in their testimony to things they learned via scripture study, Sunday school, or personal prayer. They are witness to a recreation on the site of the actual event, which lends their beliefs a reality of experience. Mormon heritage sites are sacred spaces. Mormon pageants, literally built on these sacred heritage sites, draw unique connections between the events that sanctified the ground in the past and the events being restaged as part of the pageant narrative in the present. In so doing, they reaffirm the importance of the foundational history just as the history authenticates the pageant performance. As visitors encounter the pageants staged on heritage Page 90 →sites, they come into communion with the past and with the spirits who haunt the holy ground, which enables them to build their own testimonies of the events that made the heritage sites holy. As such, visitors to Mormon pageants become pilgrims who resurrect the past through their faith. These spectators look forward to the future when they will meet these valued dead in heaven. Pageant administrators make sure that participants understand that they are performing on holy ground. A primary means by which this relationship between belief and sacred space is constructed is through the use of devotional rhetoric in pageants. This rhetoric emerges with repeated and pervasive descriptions of the space as sacred, as illustrated by the designer’s description of the Hill Cumorah that started this chapter. Rodger Sorenson, who directed the Hill Cumorah Pageant for several years, describes it in similar terms: at the pageant, “modern-day Saints come to a sacred space to learn about and tell their sacred stories.”13

In another example, the directors of the Nauvoo Theatrical Productions, Craig and Heidi Camp, use the idea of Nauvoo as sacred ground as a primary recruiting tool to find Young Performing Arts Missionaries (YPMs). The Camps are responsible for finding about forty young single Mormon musical theater performers, stage technicians, and musicians to serve a full-time four-month performing arts mission in Nauvoo. The YPM program is unique in all the Church; missionary work is done through performance and performance is dedicated missionary work. The experience was frequently described to me thus: “YPMs are missionaries who perform, not performers who are on a mission.”14 Theater YPMs perform in stage plays, street-scene vignettes, throughout Nauvoo as roaming a cappella singers, and as the specialty dancers in the Nauvoo Pageant. Other YPMs make up the Nauvoo Brass Band, which plays at community events, on wagon rides, and throughout the town. To find the talent necessary to staff the program, the program directors hold recruitment meetings where former YPMs can bring friends who might be interested in participating. At one such meeting, Craig Camp explained that one of the primary reasons young Mormons should audition to serve a mission in Nauvoo is that “Nauvoo is sacred ground. Angels walk there.”15 He urged prospective missionaries to consider becoming a YPM so that they could have the experience to encounter the dead in Nauvoo themselves. This anecdote reveals the three ways that sacred space is produced: because of a theophany (angels walk there), via institutional control (the Page 91 →testimony of a Church authority), and out of the faith of believing visitors (the potential YPMs who believe and want to encounter angels). In his excellent work built on the theories of Mercea Eliade, John Sears, Edward Linenthal, and Belden Lane, Rowland A. Sherrill suggests that there are three ways that sacred space is produced. The first is how a site—natural landscape or dedicated building—is made sacred through theophany, or the manifestation of God on earth. In other words, God produces sacred space by his presence, either revealed unexpectedly or called upon by a group of believers.16 For Mormons, the Sacred Grove is such a space. When Joseph Smith was a young man living in Palmyra, New York, about five miles away from the Hill Cumorah, he went to pray in a stand of trees near his family’s homestead to ask God which church he should join. In response, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Smith to tell him not to join any existing church, but that he would be led to restore Christ’s original church to the earth. This vision sanctified the grove as a place where God literally was manifested on earth.17 Other Mormon heritage sites include primary locations vital to the foundation of the Church across America and where God, Jesus, and angels walk among the living. The first Mormon temple in Kirtland, Ohio, is a site where Jesus Christ, prophets of the Old Testament, and hosts of angels manifested themselves. Nauvoo, Illinois, is perhaps the largest Mormon heritage site. The entire village has been reconstructed to honor the revelatory work of God and other heavenly beings who helped establish the organization of the Church through regular visitations. The newly reconstructed Nauvoo Temple, a replica of the one built there by early Mormons, furthers this sanctity. God didn’t just visit Joseph Smith in Nauvoo; he continues to commune with his people there in the temple, the house of God. Other heritage sites like Martin’s Cove, Wyoming, the Salt Lake Temple, and Temple Square in Utah have similar histories of theophanies. Sacred space is also produced through institutional efforts, which can range from preservation to commercialization. Here, a community elaborates and focuses the meaning of a space vital to their group identity. In the case of the Sacred Grove, the Church purchased the land of the Smith homestead, the tree-covered acreage that surrounded it, and eventually the Hill Cumorah in the early twentieth century. Once purchased, all three of these places were turned into heritage sites, complete with signage, well-maintained paths, restored buildings, and tours led by missionaries who interpret the site following an approved script. The church named the copse Page 92 →of trees the Sacred Grove, in case there was any question of its position set apart from the world. Throughout the twentieth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints aggressively purchased land with the intention of historical preservation and memorial celebration. Today, the Church lists over a dozen heritage sites where they invite visitors to: “Investigate places where Joseph Smith Jr. worked and played with family members. Ponder his divine calling as you experience places where he saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and learned from the angel Moroni,” or “Experience Kirtland and Hiram, Ohio, where Joseph Smith received revelations to guide the growing Church. Learn about the places where the Lord taught Joseph about the

kingdoms of glory, the Word of Wisdom, priesthood offices and keys, and other foundational truths.”18 The Church maintains these sites as sacred through institutional resources, year-round professional maintenance, and extensive marketing of the sites as holy ground. Finally, sacred space is affirmed by the immediate interaction between the space and the audience. Believing visitors at a site justify and reaffirm the sacred ground through their faith.19 In the Sacred Grove, at Nauvoo, on Temple Square, in Manti or Mesa, those who visit generally do so because they already believe that it is someplace special. This knowledge is underscored by the institutional mechanisms that mark the ground as sacred. Then, as believers open themselves to the spiritual possibilities of the heritage site, they can have spiritual experiences that affirm that it is sacred, just as they believed it to be. In so doing, they witness that God was in fact there—the whole reason they came to visit in the first place. Significantly, all three of these means of affirming sacred space are in play at each of the four annual pageant sites. Mormons believe God has been made manifest on earth at the Hill Cumorah, in Nauvoo, in Manti, and at the Mesa Temple; these locations are quite literally sacred ground. The pageant sites are maintained as sacred through external efforts connected to the sites themselves: guidebook notations, roadside historical markers, visitors’ centers, and missionary interpreters. They are also maintained as sacred through internal rhetoric that continually reminds pageant participants that they stand in holy places. Finally, pageant sites are renewed as sacred each year as thousands of visitors come to the pageant sites, bringing with them their beliefs. In the encounters of believers and sacred ground, both visitor and ground are sanctified. The expansive engagement of the pageant audiencePage 93 → reaffirms the sacredness of the site, just as the site reaffirms a visitor’s belief in the sacred.

So, What Have You Seen Today? Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that heritage is the remaking of an obsolete (mistaken, outmoded, dead, and defunct) way of life. It is created, she says, through a process of exhibition—as knowledge, as performance, or as museum display—and in so doing, it “produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past.”20 At the Mormon heritage sites that host the four annual pageants, Mormon pageantry is the primary exhibition that resurrects the past into something new and glorious, thereby turning an obsolete way of life into heritage. It does this primarily by dramatizing the very moments—God’s visit to Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove, the angel Moroni leading Joseph Smith to find the golden plates in the Hill Cumorah, the sacrifices of pioneers who gave their lives to settle the West, the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith—that first produced the sacred space. A close look at the pageants and their relationships to the heritage sites where they are performed reveals how pageants resurrect the past by providing visitors with a living encounter with it. Both the Hill Cumorah and the Nauvoo Pageants produce holy ground as they engage with the heritage locations where they are set and stage the very acts that made the ground holy in the first place. This is self-referentially reinforcing. The Nauvoo Pageant is narrated by Parley P. Pratt, a famous Mormon leader who lived in Nauvoo in the 1840s. He speaks directly to the audience throughout the pageant, and his dialogue assumes that those seeing the pageant have spent time in and around Nauvoo during the day. He asks, “So, what have you seen today? ”21 As he mentions different places around the village, he points to where they are from the perspective of the stage. The audience is vocally appreciative of the shared experiences he describes, from eating cookies at Scovil bakery to getting a “fine fancy prairie diamond” ring at the local blacksmith shop.22 His question connects the spectators who have come to see the pageant, the participants who are reenacting events that happened in the town, and the literal locations where these events happened in the past. This engagement with the town of Nauvoo continues through the play. Page 94 →When King Follett tells the audience that the early settlers of Nauvoo “came together to build a temple on that bluff,” he points to the bluff above the temple stage where the audience can clearly see the reconstructed Nauvoo Temple.23 In a lovely choreographed sequence, the city of Nauvoo is “built” by the ensemble who run wide silk ribbons down the length of the stage as they call out the names of the streets of Historic Nauvoo in order, a map that is of necessity familiar to all those who have navigated the area to reach the pageant, usually on foot down the very streets called out in the pageant.

The epic stories of the Book of Mormon cannot engage the Hill Cumorah with the same specificity the Nauvoo Pageant uses to connect with Nauvoo, as the Book of Mormon action is far removed from contemporary upstate New York. Instead, the Hill stands in for the Americas more broadly until the final episode of the show. In this episode, time moves forward to 1820, to the time of Joseph Smith’s first vision. The scene is reenacted on the hill in a stand of trees not unlike those of the actual Sacred Grove just four miles away. The narrative then moves on to the visits of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith, where Smith was instructed to go to the Hill Cumorah and look under a rock to find the records hidden there by the Lord.24 In preparation for the pageant, a hole is dug on the Hill above the stage, and each night prop gold plates are placed in a box in the hole, which is then covered by a rock. When the narrator of the pageant explains that Joseph goes to the Hill Cumorah to dig up the gold plates, the actor playing young Joseph literally digs into the hill to retrieve them. This is a powerful moment in Mormon pageantry, where the action slips between recreation and actuality. A similar moment was staged for many years in the Manti Pageant. For the first forty years of the Manti Pageant, the Book of Mormon sequence was introduced with a scene that directly tied Manti’s Temple Hill to the action of the pageant. Spotlights focused on the character of Moroni—not as the angel who visited Joseph Smith, but in the flesh, standing in the center of Temple Hill. The narration of the pageant explained, “There is a tradition that once Moroni stood upon the crest of this very Manti hill. And here he did a strange and wonderful thing. He knelt down, bowed his head in prayer and dedicated the hill for the building of a temple to the glory of the Lord.”25 As the narrator spoke, the participant playing Moroni put words into action—kneeling down, bowing his head, and gesturing broadly to the temple site. While the scene was short, the dramatization of this tradition is yet another example of how pageants borrow the sanctity of Mormon heritage sites while also reaffirming them as sacred. Page 95 →In this case, the scene in the pageant furthered an unsubstantiated folk story about the dedication of Manti’s hill by Moroni during Book of Mormon times.26 The story was so deeply embedded in Manti cultural memory that, in addition to being dramatized in the pageant, the story was for years artistically represented in a painting inside the Manti Temple. The claim was powerful enough that a group of Manti citizens connected to the pageant commissioned a statue of Moroni be permanently erected near Temple Hill to represent the pageant yearround.27 Controversy erupted in 2013 when the Central Utah Pioneer Heritage Association (CUPHA) determined to not keep the statue of Moroni in the newly built Pioneer Heritage Gardens after their careful research indicated the story was, indeed, a myth.28 At that same time, the painting was removed from the interior of the temple, and the scene was removed from the pageant. The recognition of the story as a myth doesn’t negate the power of the scene, which dramatized a sacred moment while also reaffirming its sanctity. The myth of Moroni’s time in Manti, as staged for so many years in the pageant, brings to life a beloved character of the Book of Mormon in situ as he might have appeared in holy scripture. The narration of the legend along with the reenactment by the actor playing Moroni confirmed the holy ground of the Manti Pageant. This circulation of sanctity is enhanced by the pageant participants and spectators who come for the pageants but stay for the testimony-affirming encounter with the heritage sites. The connection between living and dead at Mormon heritage sites is confirmed when visitors pilgrimage to encounter the space. They bring with them their own preconceived ideas of the power of the space, its place in Mormon history, and the cultural value of the visit. Pageants allow pilgrim tourists to connect both with the representation of sanctifying events and also with their own memories of equally powerful spiritual moments that prompt them to return time after time to pageant locations. Situating pageant participants and audiences as believers is key to understanding how producing pageants on or near the dead helps to achieve their aims of exaltation. Without this belief, sacred space slips back into heritage tourism or commemoration rather than an actual engagement on holy ground. Belden Lane outlines the relationship between believing audiences and encounters with the sacred in his work Landscapes of the Sacred. He argues that visitors must already have some kind of religious sensibility that guides their desire to have a spiritual experience at a particular site.29 Rowland Sherrill calls this encounter, “an existential triangulation of time and space Page 96 →and supernature (human imagination and the Holy having

вЂmet’ in some locale) in moments made possible by a spirituality itself (stemming from a faith in the possibility of such moments).”30 Figure 3. Manti Pageant stage on Temple Hill. Photo by Saskia Tielens. Many visitors time their visits to Mormon heritage sites to correlate with the presentation of a pageant. While thousands visit heritage sites throughout the year, the numbers swell during pageant weeks. Part of this is certainly the function of pageants as entertainment. Contemporary pilgrims, as Lloyd E. Hudman and Richard H. Jackson suggest in their analysis of Mormon tourism, generally travel for recreation and pleasure in addition to religious devotions. Hudman and Jackson call these visitors “tourist pilgrims.”31 Indeed, the corollary interest in local heritage sites on which each pageant is located is both a cause and effect of religious tourism. Tourists come to Nauvoo because they want to see Nauvoo. The pageant is simply one of the offerings that they can attend on a family vacation to a site important in Mormon history. In planning such a trip, though, visitors clearly favor attending when the pageant is there, so that they have the additional experience of seeing history recreated live on stage. Page 97 →James A. Bell, in his analysis of the Hill Cumorah Pageant as a pilgrim’s process, suggests that the Hill Cumorah—and I would add, all pageants—are places “of cultural unity and common celebrationВ .В .В . that exist outside the general LDS Church social structure yet [are] bound by a unity of belief.”32 In this formulation, everyone at pageants—visitors and participants alike—form a Mormon community that is tied together by their presence on holy ground. As these tourist pilgrims come to pageants, they expect and look for sacred experiences in sacred spaces. When visitors have these sacred experiences, it confirms things they already believe. Having these feelings in a place marked as sacred, however, opens up the possibility of an extra-special witness. When pilgrims put their faith to this, the sacred site itself is reproduced. Heidi Lewis describes her memory of being in the cast of the first Nauvoo Pageant at the moment when the fabric Nauvoo Temple is constructed on stage. She suggests the very kind of reification of sacred space that happens when believing audiences bring their own faith to a site: “And whether it be because of the beauty and striking resemblance of the panels to the temple itself or the shorter psychical distance relayed by the actors’ commitment to the moment, the audience of 2000+ cheered enthusiastically each night as the temple reached its full height. It was a triumphant moment for the Mormon Saints to have finally completed the temple after five years. This triumphant moment was celebrated not only by the people of Nauvoo in 1846, the audience and actors celebrated also.”33 In this example, the cheering at the completion of the temple was doubled. First, the actors on stage, representing “the people of Nauvoo in 1846,” cheered as part of their stage action in the world of the play, reinforcing the importance of this sacred building to the story of the pageant. This reenactment of the past signified the cheering of the actual Saints of the 1840s for whom the building was initially believed to be sacred. Second, the participants and the spectators cheered to reaffirm both the power of the past moment but also their own ongoing belief in temples as houses of the Lord. The engagement of the audience of participants and spectators connected them in real ways to the Saints of the past and confirmed the sanctity of the actual temple in full view above the stage. Performance studies scholar Lindsay Livingston argues that LDS Church history sites, “[s]uspended as they are between history, memory, and contemporary phenomenological experienceВ .В .В . trip lightly between functioning as absolute, sacred space and present, social space. Compellingly, Page 98 →the space at these sites is expected to вЂperform’—to live up to the imaginary landscape church members have created in their minds.”34 Livingston’s suggestion that these Mormon heritage sites “perform” to match the preconceived ideas of the audiences about the holy ground reveals the power of the audience’s belief in both creating and maintaining sacred space. The heritage sites where Mormon pageants are performed resurrect the past as they focus the audience’s attention on history, engage the audience’s present belief, and model how action today might be preserved to bless the future.

The House of the Lord There has been an explosion in the construction of LDS temples in the twenty-first century. In 1963, when the President of the Church, Thomas S. Monson, had just been called as an apostle, there were only twelve operating temples in the world. Four of these were in Utah, and only three were outside of the United States.35 As of January 2018, when Monson passed away, there were 159 operational temples around the world, eleven under way, and twelve more announced for construction. The Church estimates that 85 percent of the members of the Church now live within two hundred miles of a temple.36 The importance of temples in Mormon worship cannot be overstated. Mormons see their temples as contemporary articulations of the ancient temples the Lord instructed to be built by Moses and Solomon in the Bible, and Nephi in the Book of Mormon. They are encouraged through modern scripture, over the pulpit, and in Sunday School curriculum, to make temple worship a focus of their devotions, even if they have to sacrifice and journey considerable distances to the nearest temple. For Mormons, temples are a physical representation of their devotions and a dedicated space where practiced devotions can more easily reach God. A gilded inscription on the side of the Salt Lake Temple makes this double devotion clear: “Holiness to the Lord. The House of the Lord.” Mormon pageantry borrows and reinscribes the power of the temple—a sacred building where Mormons believe they can literally encounter the dead, whom they represent by proxy in ordinances necessary for exaltation. Mormon temples are the spatial representation of the intersection of the Church’s purposes to help members live the gospel of Jesus Christ, spread that gospel through missionary work, and redeem the dead “by building Page 99 →temples and performing vicarious ordinances.”37 As members attend the temple, first for themselves, then for their ancestors and others who have passed on, their own faith is strengthened. They make (and remake) particular promises of obedience, faithfulness, and sacrifice. The importance of temples is the primary message of missionary work, which encourages non-Mormons to join the Church and receive the blessings of the temple for themselves. As Mormons make temple covenants for the dead, they are spreading the gospel to those who didn’t receive it in this life and allowing them the possibility to be redeemed after death. In this context, the expansive and expensive temple building project of the Church makes sense. The necessity of performing sacred ordinances for the living and the dead also explains the urgency with which early Mormons built temples. In both Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois, great cost and labor went into building sacred houses of worship where the Mormons could perform these eternally significant rituals. These ordinances are considered ultimately sacred and are performed only in temples, first for members and subsequently for the dead. Latter-day Saint temples are the central place where living and dead meet in Mormon practice. For Mormons, the separation between this life and the next is not an impenetrable obstacle but a permeable barrier—the veil. In temples, Mormons literally take upon themselves the names of the dead, act in their stead, and offer their participation in the ritual up to the dead in the spirit world in the hopes that they will accept the rituals done for them on earth. Mormons frequently report encounters with these dead in the temple—feelings of warmth, acceptance, presence, or even visitations from those for whom temple work is being done.38 Mormon apostle Quentin L. Cook recently shared the story of one such visitation: Occasionally in the temple the veil between us and those on the other side becomes very thin.В .В .В . Several years ago in a temple in Central America, the wife of one of our now-emeritus General Authorities assisted a father, a mother, and their children in receiving eternal covenants in the sealing room, where the temple mirrors are located. As they concluded and faced those mirrors, she noticed there was a face in the mirror that was not in the room. She inquired of the mother and learned that a daughter had passed away and accordingly was not physically present. Page 100 →The deceased daughter was then included by proxy in the sacred ordinance. Never underestimate the assistance provided in temples from the other side of the veil.39 The notion that deceased relatives and sometime strangers are active participants in their own saving ordinances

lends a heightened awareness of the importance of history for living Mormons. Resurrecting the past is not just a theatrical performance but a religious one as well. The physical proximity of temples to pageants collapses some of the differences between temple ritual and theatrical performance. There have been no official statements on why certain areas are chosen for a temple instead of others; announcements are simply made over the pulpit at the Church’s semi-annual worldwide General Conference. However, there is a clear indication that population matters—temples are built where there is a critical mass of Church members to keep them busy. The exception seems to be temples that are attached to Church historic sites. The populations of the local areas are unlikely to be large enough to support a temple on their own. Instead, it seems as if the temples have been constructed in Nauvoo and Palmyra to overlay a modern sacred site—a temple—on a historical one. As a result, the four annual pageants are not just performed at sacred heritage sites but also in proximity to Mormon temples. The Mesa Pageant is held on the Mesa Temple grounds, while the Manti Pageant is held directly adjacent to the Manti Temple. Both the Palmyra Temple and the Nauvoo Temple are close to the pageant venues. The Manti Pageant makes the most use of this proximity, with the playing space of the pageant running up the hill onto the temple grounds. The temple stairs and steeples are even used to stage some of the scenes of the pageant. The Nauvoo Pageant stage was constructed to make the most of the view of the temple, also on a hill above, where the temple is used as a focal point rather than part of the set. The Mesa Temple is the nearest distance to a pageant as the Mesa Easter Pageant is held on its grounds, and visitors are encouraged to walk the grounds and go to its attached visitors’ center. As it is four miles away, only at the Hill Cumorah Pageant is the temple too far for integration into the pageant experience. However, those that participate in the pageant often make regularly scheduled trips to the temple as part of the pageant experience, and visitors frequently include temple visits as part of their pilgrimage to Historic Palmyra. Page 101 →The doctrine of the redemption of the dead moves from belief to book to body as Mormons are prompted by their belief in living ancestors to learn more about their lives on earth. Part of family history research is getting to know one’s ancestors in a more complete way—searching for letters, journals, artifacts, and birth and death records. It is visiting cemeteries, farmsteads, plots of land, and sometimes even the countries of one’s heritage. For Mormons, part of this research is to gather the primary source documents necessary to identify individual ancestors so that temple rituals can be conducted for them by proxy in temples. As a result of these and other efforts to engage Mormons in working toward the redemption of the dead, the interest in and facility for learning about the past is a growing part of Mormon practice. In particular, the doctrine of the redemption of the dead impacts how Mormons see their own relationship to their kindred dead as they recognize the eternal nature of their daily decisions and the legacy they will leave behind. In a recent sermon to the general membership of the Church, Allan F. Packer argued: “Family history is more than genealogy, rules, names, dates, and places. It is more than a focus on the past. Family history also includes the present as we create our own history. It includes the future as we shape future history through our descendants.”40 This same conflation of past, present, and future has an even more specific impact on those Mormons who resurrect the past onstage in Mormon pageants.

In Temples, the Dead Are Made Alive The primacy of Mormon temples as sacred spaces—preached over pulpits and confirmed by their ecclesiastically limited access—creates a cultural memory of temples that precedes the material encounter with pageant stages connected to them. Lindsay Livingston compellingly argues that “shared narratives so completely infuse the imagination of cultural groups that when group members participate in pilgrimages to their sites of origins, those places are always already phenomenologically charged, even for visitors only casually associated with the group. It is, therefore, impossible not to imbue the material experience of the space with the previous spectral experience one has constructed around that space.”41 It is to the shared space of pageants,

heritage sites, and temples that audiences and pageant participants come to prepare for exaltation. Page 102 →For temple-attending members of the cast and audience, being at a pageant near a temple brings with it the cultural memory of deeply significant religious rituals necessary for salvation. I assert that the proximity of pageants to temples imbues pageant stages with a sanctity similar to temple worship. This imbrication is underscored as pageants overtly integrate temples into their narratives and staging. Perhaps the most spectacular integration of a temple into a pageant is in a famous scene in the Manti Pageant. When the audience enters the pageant seating area for the Manti Pageant, they face Temple Hill, which rises above the otherwise flat landscape of the desert valley. At the top of the hill, dominating the view for miles around, is the Manti Temple, a gracious Second French Empire-inspired building constructed of cream-colored oolite limestone quarried from the hill on which it stands. This pageant pays great heed to the theatrical injunction to “show not tell.” Any opportunity for dramatization of the events narrated is taken. As a result, the show frequently embeds flashbacks and visions in the ongoing narrative, as dictated by the prerecorded script. The most celebrated use of this technique occurs during Joseph Smith’s translation of the golden plates into the Book of Mormon. The narrator announces the translation to the sounds of trumpets and rolling drums: “Thus, the curtain rises, shedding light for the first time on American antiquity!”42 The lights at this moment focus on the top of one of the temple spires, where a participant portraying the angel Moroni stands with a trumpet to herald the dramatic introduction of the Book of Mormon world that dominates the action for the next forty minutes of the pageant.43 The placement of a live Moroni with a trumpet on top of the Manti Temple is an iconic image for audience members, Mormons and non-Mormons alike. Gilded Moroni statues top most Mormon temples around the world (the Manti Temple is one of the very few exceptions; the lack of a statue is what allows a live Moroni to stand on top of the front-facing octagonal tower of the temple).44 This incarnation of Moroni in the pageant, and as a statue on most temples, refers to the second coming of Jesus Christ, following LDS interpretation of New Testament scripture. Mormons believe Moroni is the prophet foretold by John the Revelator when he described, “And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earthВ .В .В .”45 The actor brings the statue of an angel to life, on top of a Mormon temple where participants and spectators believe that angels walk. It is a spectacular episode of resurrectingPage 103 → the past with the dangerous staging (tiny platform, great heights, strong winds) adding to the dramatic impact. This is not the only time the Manti Pageant uses the temple as part of its set. The Henshaws are the fictional couple whose conversion story serves as a through-line for the narrative of the pageant. Mary, the wife, dies in childbirth when the Henshaws are crossing the plains to Utah. After arriving in Utah and moving to Manti, Robert is also killed in an Indian attack. In a surprising special effect, Robert emerges almost immediately from the crowd surrounding his fallen body. Dressed in a white tuxedo with tails, he moves away from his corpse, staring at wonder both at his corporeal form on the ground below and also at his new spiritual form. Against the dark sky and with the multiple spotlights on him, Robert glows celestially as he backs away from the scene of his death in confusion. As the pioneer battle scene fades away, Mary also appears, dressed in a long white gown, and descends the hill toward Robert, trailing an extensive train of white behind her. Robert at first doesn’t recognize her, but she reminds him, “It is I, beloved, Mary, your wife, whose body you laid in the cold earth of Wyoming. Come, I’ve been waiting for you. Oh, don’t be afraid. Death is just like passing from one room into another. Remember, I told you I would come for you. Here, take my hand. Now, now you are here. It was true Robert, we are together again, see! And hand in hand we shall go home.”46 Then, fitting actions to words, the Henshaws climb hand in hand up the hill toward choirs of angels, also dressed in white, who line the temple walls singing triumphantly. The couple climbs up white granite stairs toward the brightly lit temple, which is remade as the celestial kingdom, the heaven of LDS theology. Their exaltation is assured due to their faithfulness to God’s commandments, combined with their willingness to sacrifice their lives keeping those commandments, and is made possible by the very temple whose stairs they are climbing. In

this moment, the temple is the house of those who have already lived (the angels, and the Henshaws, and the dead that the spectators have encountered themselves in the temple), a house of the living (all the pageant participants and spectators), and heaven of the future, where living and dead can be together forever. In Nauvoo, the temple is located on a bluff overlooking the pageant stage and is too far away to be used as part of the set in a practical way. However, the Nauvoo Temple is a highlight of the entire Historic Nauvoo experience. One of the first buildings planned in Nauvoo was a temple to replace the Page 104 →Kirtland Temple that had been abandoned when the Mormons left Ohio for Missouri before finally settling in Illinois. The Nauvoo Temple was not quite completed in 1844 when Joseph Smith was killed and the Church was thrown into disarray. Brigham Young, the new leader of the Church, began plans to leave Illinois but delayed departure until after its completion. By November of 1845, enough of the temple was completed that the Latter-day Saints began using it to complete religious ordinances in the temple for themselves and their ancestors. The dramatization of the temple construction in the Nauvoo Pageant highlights the power of sacred temple space and the importance of its saving ordinances to the families of Nauvoo. The temple is “built” in a movement sequence where some of the men in the pageant begin pantomiming sawing logs or hammering nails, while others begin to physically construct a large wooden flat. The women of the pageant fill the stage with baskets from which they pull long panels of white material that are handed back from woman to woman until they are affixed on the wooden frame. At the climax of the scene, the frame is pulled vertically in the air to reveal a beautifully painted and embroidered backdrop in likeness of the actual temple, with three entrance “doors.” As the cast performs this labor, they sing the song “Praise to the Man,” a memorializing hymn that celebrates Joseph Smith’s life and describes him as “ascended to heaven,” and “crowned in the midst of the prophets of old.”47 The connection of this song to the building of the temple reworks what could be considered hagiography into a completion of the theme of the play—Smith’s role as a prophet in Nauvoo and his sacrifice as a martyr is subsumed by the message that he preached of families sealed together forever in temples. Rather than juxtaposing the action, this hymn reconfirms the importance of Smith’s message, the importance of temples to the early Saints in Nauvoo, and the importance of temples to Saints today. As the temple rises in the background, Becky and Robert Laird, the Scottish converts who are the protagonists of the show, have a melodramatic conversation about how the temple will allow them to be sealed as an eternal family. The haste with which Mormons completed work in the temple before Nauvoo was abandoned in 1846 (the temple was open twenty-four hours a day to keep up with the influx of members who hoped to complete the ordinance work for themselves and their ancestors before their exodus) is dramatized in the pageant as the entire cast exits the stage through the Page 105 →upstage temple. The spectators are invited to even see themselves as part of those who enter the temple as the scene ends with Brigham Young speaking directly to them: “Come brothers and sisters. Wherever the Lord leads us, we will build another temple. And those who come after us will build a great many more, all over the world—hundreds of temples that will stand as testimonies of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”48 Here, the audience is implicated into Young’s prophecy as they already know it has come true. It is a clever means to resurrect the past on stage. Audiences are required to make little effort to immerse themselves in the historical world of the pageant because of its meta-theatrical elements: breaking of the fourth wall, representational props and set pieces, and familiar contemporary hymns. Additionally, the setting of the Nauvoo Pageant is literal; one does not need to imagine being in Nauvoo because one is actually in Nauvoo. Instead of putting creative imagination into creating the world of the play, participants and audiences are free to engage their belief in the message in the here and now. This message is made even more real when the cloth temple is taken down as the Mormons of Nauvoo leave on the exodus west. The narrative history of Joseph Smith and Nauvoo ends here, and the pageant concludes as every cast member, including those who have died, reappear on stage dressed in light colors and bathed in heavenly side lights. Brilliant lights come up on the actual Nauvoo Temple, which is centered on the bluff over the pageant stage, framed by the night sky.

At the pinnacle of this sequence, the crowd parts to reveal the Lairds with their new baby girl downstage right. They turn upstage and a little boy—their dead child, now resurrected—runs across the stage into their arms as music swells sweetly and triumphantly. I found this scene to be one of the most moving spiritual moments in the pageant—a moment when the visualization of the Lord’s power on earth is made manifest through the blessings of the temple, which literally hangs over the proceedings. There is a different spatial relationship between the Mesa Temple and the Mesa Easter Pageant, which is held directly on the temple grounds on a large grassy lawn that serves as a barrier between the busy Main Street that fronts the temple and its adjacent visitors’ center. The grounds are lovely; all temple grounds are. In Mesa, particular effort has been made to plant odoriferous flowers and herbs, so that walking around the gardens is a distinctly sensual experience. There is also a sense of geographical specificity to Page 106 →the gardens: in addition to the irrigated, well-manicured, and fragrant beds, there are palm trees that dot the acreage of the gardens and a popular cactus garden that includes plants indigenous to Arizona. Palm trees make an excellent natural backdrop to the pageant stage. The desert of Mesa evokes the desert of Christ’s Israel, or at least a westernized image of what spectators might think Israel looks like. The pageant stage is perpendicular to the visitors’ center and the temple. When audiences come to the pageant, they walk straight toward the temple. When they sit in the folding chairs facing the stage, the temple is to their left. For those who sit on the grassy areas on the far right-hand side of the seating area, their field of vision includes both the temple and the stage, since blankets and lawn chairs need to be set at an angle in order to get the best view of the pageant. The result is that the temple is fully present in the pageant; the stage feels like an annex to the temple itself and the stage architecture is obviously inspired by the temple architecture. The Mesa Temple is unique compared with most other spire-and-Moroni topped buildings. With its low profile, flat-topped roof, carved exterior, and lack of a steeple, it evokes a sacred building from times past, something that is noticeable to pageant participants and audience members alike. One pageant participant, cast in the role of a Roman soldier, pointed out to me, “One of my favorite things too is how the temple looks at night with these palm trees. When we line up for the last scene at this gate, you feel like you’re in JerusalemВ .В .В . [Y]ou feel like you’re part of it, [which] makes it more personal. It feels like Jerusalem: the temple, the palm trees, and the moon and everything.”49 The landscaping and the architecture of the Mesa Temple enhance the world created on the stage without playing an integral part of the pageant. The temple is actually not in the focus of the Mesa Easter Pageant in the same way as it is in the Manti or Nauvoo Pageants, where the scripts overtly reference their temples, or where parts of the temple structure are actually used for staging. Instead, the reverse is true. The Mesa Pageant stage, tucked away to the side of the temple lawn, seems an integral part of the temple grounds; another structure, like the visitors’ center or the reflecting ponds, that is meant to point toward the most sacred building that God has dedicated for entrance into his presence. For those performing in the pageant, its location on temple grounds blesses the pageant work with the same hope for an encounter with the dead that is evoked in temples. The actual grounds of the temple set out a boundaryPage 107 → of sacred space that allows the performers and audience to better feel the Spirit because they engage their belief that they are walking where the Lord walks. Tyler Maxson, one of the two men who currently portray Jesus Christ in the pageant, describes an experience he had rehearsing the scene where Jesus falls to his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane: “I suddenly had the sense that I should not be there, that we were on hallowed ground, even though we were just rehearsing.”50 Temple ground is hallowed ground, even without the intervening pageant’s recreation of other sacred spaces, like the Garden of Gethsemane. When the two come together—sacred space on holy ground, the pageant stage borrows salvific efficacy. Figure 4. Shepherds in the Mesa Easter Pageant against a backdrop of the temple grounds’ palm trees. Note the live sheep and lambs. Photo by Tim Hacker. This extension of temple sacred space out to the pageant stage is felt by participants. The pageant artistic director suggested during evening notes with the cast and crew before the pageant that there is a “bubble of peace”

that surrounds the temple grounds.51 She testified that the feeling at the pageant on the temple grounds is so inviting that many audience members want to come back again and again. When I asked her if the Easter Pageant could be performed anywhere else, she replied, “I don’t think I would want it Page 108 →anywhere else, I think that [the temple] lends to the spirituality of the cast; I think it lends to the reverence, to the inspiration. I might see things on those grounds that I wouldn’t see other places, or feel things. It’s a sacred place for a sacred show, a pageant.”52 For Mormon audiences who have participated in rituals in temples on temple grounds, participating in another kind of performance on temple grounds provides a similar holy experience. Pageants, like temples, help participants and spectators imagine the future exaltation where the faithful can be together forever.

Exaltation Is a Family Matter Samuel Morris Brown coined the term “heaven families” to describe the kinds of family connections envisioned theologically by Smith, where the entire human race is sealed together across generations in what Brown calls a “chain of belonging.”53 In contemporary Mormonism, heaven families are not just an imagined theology but a practical organization that foregrounds the importance of the eternal family in lived Mormon experience. Mormons believe that families—sealed in temples by proper priesthood authority—are not “until death do they part.” Instead, they believe families can be together forever. Embedded in the very notion of a heaven family is the idea that the present is literally tied to the past as today’s family is tied to ancestor families. When Mormon couples are sealed in a temple, they participate in a ritual ordinance that binds them together eternally. Any children born to this couple are considered “born in the covenant” and are also sealed to their parents. Adopted children must attend the temple with their new parents to participate in a sealing to become part of the eternal family. Legal divorce doesn’t sever this sealing; only a special dispensation granted by the first presidency of the Church can dissolve a sealing ordinance.54 If children born in the covenant or sealed to their parents grow up and are themselves sealed to spouses, the families become linked. This chain moves backward and forward forever. Current LDS prophet, President Russell M. Nelson preached in a recent sermon: “While salvation is an individual matter, exaltation is a family matter. Only those who are married in the temple and whose marriage is sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise will continue as spouses after death and receive Page 109 →the highest degree of celestial glory, or exaltation.”55 This doctrine of the primacy of the family unit is necessarily exclusionary. However, just as the theology of the redemption of the dead provides ordinances for those who are not introduced to the gospel in this life, it also provides the sealing ordinances for those who do not have the opportunity for marriage and children in this life. As Church president and prophet Ezra Taft Benson explained, “I assure you that if you have to wait even until the next life to be blessed with a choice companion, God will surely compensate you. Time is numbered only to man. God has your eternal perspective in mind.”56 The temple is therefore not just a place to worship but a sacred training ground where kindred dead, living families, and hopeful descendants are tied together eternally. Mormon pageantry models the heaven family structure both on and offstage. The proximity of pageant locations to actual temples helps participating families to remember the covenants that they made in the temple. As they practice being a heaven family during the pageant experience, they strengthen the chains to those who have passed and look forward with hope to those who will come after. Families are the building blocks of all pageant participation. In Mesa and Nauvoo, lead roles are cast independently depending on talent or availability, while ensemble roles are filled by families, with preferences given to complete family units. In the Manti Pageant, any interested person can participate, which means the pageant is largely made up of teenagers and some families. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the only way to participate is as part of an entire family unit. Married individuals are not accepted into the cast without their spouse; parents with children must both attend in order for the family to participate. In the case of part-Mormon families, where one spouse is a member but the other is not, the pageant will consider nonmember spouses for the

cast, and the family cannot participate without them.57 No matter how they are organized, pageants privilege families. For example, at the Mesa Pageant, this is evidenced in the backstage organization. Characters who act on stage together are not grouped according to scene but are called “families” (the Roman Soldier Family, the Angel Family, the Unbeliever Family). In his welcoming remarks to new pageant participants, a former artistic director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant would begin with a homecoming celebration: “Some of us have been on this sacred ground before. Others of us are standing here for the first time. All of us are returning home. Welcome home.”58 The Hill Cumorah Pageant structure, from shared Page 110 →meals to casting to staging directions, foregrounds the idea of the pageant as home and participants as members of a large, extended family. At the Nauvoo Pageant, the same rhetoric and a similar organization are employed. The families who participate in the Nauvoo Pageant, or the family casts, are organized together as small family groups in “districts” headed by a “district leader,” drawn from the core cast. When not on stage, the districts spend all their time together. On stage, families are largely instructed to stay together, although there may be some separation depending on special casting needs. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, family casts are organized into cast teams, which are divided by age, and then their roles on stage are additionally divided according to the casting. The cast team leaders are referred to affectionately as the cast team “mom and dad.” In both pageants, then, biological families are not necessarily spending all their time together. However, in pageant participation, they are engaged together working toward a single goal. As one cast team mom at the Hill Cumorah Pageant explained, “Cast teams create family while you are away from your family.”59 When these teams are reorganized once again on stage in acting groups, the sense of family is retained by the crosssection of participants from each of the age groups creating entirely new, but still connected, family groups. Pageant participants are not just rehearsing and putting on a show but are on a seventeen-day religious retreat, with special Church services, theological classes, service projects, historical site tours, daily devotionals, missionary efforts, and more. Families room together, eat together, and participate in all their daytime activities together once the show has opened. Families who choose to participate in the Hill Cumorah and Nauvoo Pageants need to be on-site, full-time for two weeks. In these two pageants particularly, families generally treat the pageants as the primary family vacation/experience for the year. For example, in 1997, Donny Osmond left his starring role in the Broadway tour of Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat to play Samuel the Lamanite in the Hill Cumorah Pageant.60 Osmond’s decision was widely covered and brought significant attention to Mormon pageantry. Reports in Playbill, by the Associated Press, on CNN and Good Morning America, as well as extensive coverage by the LDS Church, enhanced this exposure.61 Osmond explained that he had not renewed his contract to play Joseph because he wanted to be with his family: “This was a family vacation decision.В .В .В . My oldest son will be going on a mission soon, and we wanted this special time together at the pageant. I want to take a backseat to my Page 111 →family here. The family institution is in jeopardy today, and more attention needs to be given to it.”62 Osmond’s comment here reveals the dual purpose of the pageant in relationship to the families that make up Mormon pageant casts. Clearly, families do the pageant together largely to have a unique family experience, or “special time together.” But Osmond also seems to see the publicity of his participation as an opportunity to preach the importance of the “institution” of the family in society. The LDS Church teaches that heterosexual two parent families are the building blocks of a strong society and nation. Families that are sealed together are committed to each other, not just for this life but forever. As families come to pageants to build, strengthen, and protect themselves, the pageant doubles the work of temples as a sacred space that resurrects the past and builds the future. A similar strategy of organization is used at the Nauvoo Pageant. Here, the family casts perform together more regularly because the roles needed in the ensemble are those of the families who lived in early Nauvoo, unlike the much wider variety of roles necessary for the epic stories told at the other pageants. The families offstage become the families on stage, which provides families the opportunity to be both themselves and more than themselves

through pageant performance. Perhaps the most powerful performance of the Nauvoo Pageant that I witnessed is an example of how families use pageants to rehearse the promise of temple togetherness. During a late afternoon run-through of the pageant, the participants were in street clothes; there was no lighting or sound support. Only the composition of the staging helped to focus my attention, and I sat up close to the stage to make sure I could hear what was being said. At the end of a large celebration scene in the pageant, the stage directions require parents to gather their children, light lanterns, and participate in an evening prayer as if at home. There was one family on stage that was obviously a real family; they were all wearing matching black t-shirts: mom, dad, and four teenage children. As they moved into their clearly blocked positions for a kneeling prayer, the father went to each of his children and gave them enormous bear hugs before putting his arm around his wife and kneeling down next to her, with his arm still around her. The entire family knelt so close together that they were touching. From the looks on their faces and their body language, it was clear that this was not acting. The father of the family was inspired in the moment to embrace his children. The stage direction to kneel and their placement on Page 112 →the stage had clearly been created by the directing team. How the family chose to enact this moment with physical intimacy and love for each other seemed entirely genuine. The pageant provided a scenario for family worship. The family expanded that scenario into real family bonding. The stage, for a moment, brought the past of the characters the family was playing into the present so that they could imagine an eternal future as a family together, as they had covenanted to do in the temple. In addition to the sense of family that is built into the cast teams and districts that organize the rehearsal week, groups that act together on stage are composed like families. This evokes the eternal family connections hoped for through temple sealings. It hints at a vision of life in heaven after this life, where all the exalted will live as families. The directing teams at pageants are well aware of the connections between the eternal chain of belonging forged in Mormon temple ceremonies and the work of pageants. It is emphasized not just in their work with the cast but also through directorial visions. The heaven family is purposefully composed onstage at the Hill Cumorah Pageant in the climactic scene when Christ visits the people of the Americas following his death and resurrection in Jerusalem. Following the spectacular destruction scene is the single moment of silence in the entire pageant, a musical pause that stretches nearly forty seconds. In the darkness of the destruction’s aftermath, several voices are heard explaining that “the Savior has died” and lamenting, “O that we had repented!”63 Then spotlights cut through the darkness to focus on the image of Jesus Christ, suspended high above the stage. Christ is costumed in a white robe made of reflective fabric that illuminates him even more brightly as he descends. By the time Christ begins to speak to the people of the New World, showing them the wounds in his hands, feet, and side, the stage is full of every cast member in the entire show. Each of the seven platforms of the stage are filled with actors who have performed together in different scenes: “Lehi mob” together, “Noah citizens” together, “Boat moms and kids” together. Each director responsible for these different groups has blocked the groups to know when to enter the stage for the Christ scene and how to act during the scene. The division of labor into the various groups delegates responsibility such that the scene can be staged as efficiently as possible. The various groups, organized backstage, stay in their groups for this scene and then return to their staging areas as a group. The use of these performance groups is, of course, for ease of staging; it is an impressive organizational feat to create a scene with over 700 people Page 114 →moving on- and offstage, kneeling in unison, responding to a range of actions without pulling focus, and then exiting fluidly. The use of constructed family groupings is also a way to underscore the extended family units made possible through faith in Christ, obedience to his commandments, and participation in his ordinances. Most important to the composition of this scene is the placement of all of the pageant children, with those cast as their parents, in the center of the stage. Page 113 → Figure 5. A family participating in the Nauvoo Pageant Gold Family Cast, 2013. Photo by the Mormish Girl. Courtesy of growingupmormish.blogspot.com.

A key feature of Christ’s visit to the Americas, both as recorded in the Book of Mormon and as presented by the pageant, is his ministry to children. At the heart of this climactic scene, Christ instructs the crowd to bring him the little children, and he blesses them. The use of children in Mormon pageantry foregrounds the value of children to Christ. In the Hill Cumorah Pageant, children are revealed to be special in his ministry in the New World, just as they were important to his ministry as recorded in the New Testament. The sheer number of children participating, however, also makes clear once again the importance of families and children in contemporary Mormonism. The composition of this moment on stage hints at how the family unit, as sealed in temples, builds heaven in very real terms. Families, each assigned to important roles in the society of the pageant, all come together to create a single image, where children are the heart and Christ is the focus. In so doing, they help to create an image of the heaven family, linked in a chain of belonging that resurrects the past into the future.

America, the Promised Land The placement of pageant stages on Mormon heritage sites and in close proximity to temples is a geographic overlay of sacred space. The pageant stages borrow from the sanctity of these spaces just as they endow the spaces with additional meanings. There is a third sacred space that functions in Mormon pageantry that deploys a larger, metaphorical understanding of holy ground—the promised land of the United States of America. In the Manti Pageant, Joseph Smith explains a Mormon vision of America in a conversation with his councilor Oliver Cowdery at the start of the Book of Mormon section of the pageant. Smith is in the process of orally translating the Book of Mormon and Cowdery is serving as a scribe at the top of the scene. The pageant authors invent a conversation between them Page 115 →that introduces the relationship between the America of the past and the America of Smith’s early nineteenth century: Joseph: Oliver, read that last sentence back to me. For this is the voice of God resounding through the lips of ancient American prophets to Americans of our day whom he chooses to call Gentiles. Oliver: “And this shall be a land of liberty unto the Gentile”? Joseph: Yes, yes, that is correct.В .В .В . We are but stewards of this land, choice above all other lands, and if ever there are those who do not value it and cherish it, and who cease to preserve it, then Zion will surely be lost to them physically and spiritually.64 Important to this dialogue is the pageant’s definition of “Gentile” as “Americans of our day.” Mormons generally interpret Gentile to mean a range of things from “anyone not of the house of Israel, or not Jewish” to “nations who are without the gospel of Jesus Christ.” In the Book of Mormon, the usage is almost exclusively the latter.65 But to fit the specifics of the story the pageant is trying to tell, emphasis is placed on America, on battles for its physical and spiritual safety and well-being, and on “Americans of our day.” These connections drive home how the ancient message of the Book of Mormon is resurrecting the past for live audiences in the present moment. While Smith is speaking in the early nineteenth-century present, the reception is clearly meant to speak as well to those sitting in the audience now. In contemporary Mormon pageantry, the belief that America is a promised land for God’s righteous people is articulated as a prophecy. The founding of America is shown as a fulfillment of that prophecy, and contemporary audiences are encouraged to maintain its promise today and into the future. As Smith explains in the Manti Pageant scene above, God has promised that if his people are righteous, America will be protected. If they are unrighteous, they will lose peace and freedom. The importance of righteous living in America has been defended by pioneers and patriots who gave their lives to keep this promise. As Mormon pageantry celebrates these dead, they invite pageant participants and spectators to work equally to fulfill the promise. Benjamin Barber centers his discussion of American self-identification, An Aristocracy of Everyone, between two fascinating poles. The first is the narrative of the “Chosen People,” which developed out of Jewish and CalvinistPage 116 → traditions that suggest that God himself calls certain groups and sets them aside for a special destiny. America has long been impacted by this narrative, which inspired founding fathers, supported westward

expansion, and emerged with force in the nativist movements of the late nineteenth century, the 1920s, and today.66 According to Barber, the opposite side of American self-identification is built on the Enlightenment notion of tabula rasa, the “empty spaces” of land. The uncontaminated innocence of a new world allows a people, and perhaps particularly Americans, to be set apart from that which they left behind.67 In the framework of the tabula rasa interpretation of promised lands, Americans are not a chosen people. They are what Barber calls a “choosing people: men and women capable of denying themselves the blood consolation of an exclusive ascriptive community in favor of a membership in an inclusive voluntary community rooted in choice and law.”68 Rather than interpreting America in one of these two ways, LDS doctrine preaches that America is simultaneously both. For Mormons, America is a chosen land founded by inspired people and a tabula rasa whose special destiny creates an inspired people. God has chosen Americans and blessed them to live here. Americans who choose to follow God’s law are therefore entitled to continued prosperity. The connection between obedience to God’s commandments and national prosperity are fundamental to the Mormon worldview. Mormons have appropriated an interpretation of scripture (both old and newly revealed) that places the responsibility of keeping America righteous on the Mormons. Built into doctrines preached by Latter-day Saints are a series of beliefs that reaffirm the divine purpose of America as the birthplace of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Mormons believe that America was “discovered” both in ancient times and in the modern era by people led by divine inspiration. The sacrifices of these explorers—from the deprivations they survived on their journeys to the battles they fought to defend the land—are an important part of this narrative. The Book of Mormon recounts the history of three different groups of people led by God to the Americas; it also explains that Columbus and other European settlers of America were inspired of God, too.69 For Mormons, the Constitution of the United States is a document written with a divine purpose.70 The Second Coming of Christ will be centered in the United States, and the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth will be modeled on a political union of the Church organization and AmericanPage 117 → government. Mormon belief that America has always been meant for a theodemocratic system of governance (ruled by God, “theo, ” and through the agency of man, “democratic,”) is not just idle speculation or proof-texting of ancient scripture.71 Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS Church, recorded several specific revelations about the special position of America as God’s promised land. One of these revelations was received by Smith in December of 1833, in response to persecution Mormons were encountering in Missouri. In the revelation, the Lord chastises the Saints for their transgressions and promises blessings for their endurance. The Lord also reveals the divine origin of the Constitution of the United States of America: And again I say unto you, those who have been scattered by their enemies, it is my will that they should continue to importune for redress, and redemption, by the hands of those who are placed as rulers and are in authority over you— According to the laws and constitution of the people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles; That every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment. Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another. And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood.72

According to this revelation, the Lord himself inspired founding leaders of the United States, inspired the creation of the Constitution, allowed its establishment, and “redeemed” the United States through violent defense.73 The revelation suggests two fascinating points at the intersection of politics, doctrine, and performance. The first is how Mormon religious practice is intertwined with political action. If God himself “established the Constitution,” then its principles can be interpreted in the same way as other Page 118 →“just and holy principles.” The moral agency that drives righteous living of Mormons in America today therefore includes a theological investment in political action. The second point is how this revelation, unique to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, privileges Mormons with insider knowledge about how God sees America. There is no other religion where America figures as a modern and literal promised land to this extent. As D. G. Hart points out in his work on evangelical Protestantism in the twentieth century, evangelicals believe in a redeemable America in large part because of their conviction that the United States is, first and foremost, a Christian nation. As a result, they crusade morally and politically to keep religion as a crucial element of social order. Hart argues that evangelicals believe that “the greatness of a society [is] linked inexorably to the moral health of its citizens, and morality has no proper foundation without faith.”74 This relationship between citizens and nation emerges only after the founding of America as a Christian nation; the foundation of the nation comes first and the spiritual connection to it comes second. For Mormons, however, the revelation about the Constitution in the Doctrine and Covenants is key in both explaining the belief in sacred America but also in showing that Mormons know that America is a holy land. America was a land promised to the righteous who were led here to found it. The holy ground came first, and the nation formation followed. Because of this knowledge, Mormons must be obedient to God’s commands in order to have safety and security in America. The relationship between obedience and prosperity also opens the possibility for the opposite—if citizens of America stray from obedience, the punishments are harsh. God has shown in scripture that he is unafraid to destroy the wicked from off his land to make room for those who will obey. This knowledge is worked into the fabric of Mormon pageants, which celebrate the contributions of the patriotic dead. In particular, the pageants emphasize the connection between righteousness, peace, and prosperity and the need to defend these to the death.

The Lord God Almighty Delivered Us from Destruction! Mormon pageantry insists that America is a promised land. It was discovered, not just through fifteenth century political ambition or geographical Page 119 →chance but as inspired by God himself. The Hill Cumorah Pageant tells the story of the Book of Mormon, a narrative of migration where Lehi and his family are told by God to travel to the Americas to establish a new nation. The Nauvoo Pageant dramatizes how Joseph Smith was led by God to found Nauvoo; Brigham Young in the Manti Pageant insists on settling the pioneer Mormons in a Utah valley that he had seen in a prophetic vision. The Mesa Easter Pageant is the one exception to the overt preaching of this prophecy. Its total focus on the story of Jesus’s life is disconnected from prophecies about America. In each of the cases of the other three annual pageants, however, America is the land chosen by God and established by his hand to bring about his purposes. For example, in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the narrator contextualizes the journey of the family of Lehi from Jerusalem to the New World: “After they sailed for many days, they came to the promised land, the land that we call North and South America. The Lord had already brought other people to America, just as he would later bring Columbus. He gave this promise to us and everyone who ever lived here: as long as we are righteous, we will be free.”75 While God provided this land to those he led here as a blessing, he also attached some stipulations to maintaining the land. The Book of Mormon teaches that if those to whom America has been promised will obey the Lord, they “shall be kept from all other nations,” and “there shall be none to molest them, nor to take away the land of their inheritance; and they shall dwell safely forever.”76 However, if they are disobedient, “he will bring other nations unto them, and he will give unto them power, and he will take away from them the lands of their possessions, and he will cause them to be scattered and smitten.”77

This promise of America is so important that the nation is worth defending against incursions from “other nations,” and against the forces of unrighteousness from within. Mormon pageantry argues that America, as a sacred land, is worth dying for. The willingness of the righteous to defend America and examples of this defense across time are a primary aspect of pageant narratives. Elaborate scenes of wars, blood sacrifices, martyrdom, and marching armies are strong visual reminders of the language of defense and death that dominate Mormon rhetoric about protecting America today. As I have argued elsewhere, there is an inherent paradox in between America’s pride in being a nonviolent and law-abiding country and the American public’s willingness to accept violence as a given part of our social fabric.78 In his study, “Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture,” Page 120 →John Calweti suggests that Americans must believe “that their dedication to law and peace [is] not sufficient or complete enough unless it [is] tested by their willingness to commit criminal and even violent actions in support of their crusades.”79 Observations of this paradox in history and popular culture suggest that violence in America can serve both as an evil and as a moral necessity. What defines which type of battle is being fought is dependent largely on the way in which the violence is represented. In turn, the way violence—private or national—is represented is dependent almost exclusively on the legitimizing moral opinion of the popular majority. William C. Culberson argues in his cultural history of vigilantism in America that, “the line dividing violent acts from criminal acts is a matter of cohesive social values, aspirations, and the tests of time that define motives for political or private purposes. For the source of social cohesion is not the Constitution or written laws, but a consensus regarding the dominant norms and values of society.”80 In Mormon pageantry, the violence of the pageants—ancient battles of the Book of Mormon, the assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Indian attacks on pioneers, and even Christ’s crucifixion—are carefully packaged to bring the participants and spectators into consensus that defending Christian principles to the death are not criminal, but rather violent acts of righteousness. The Manti Pageant foregrounds the necessity of war to defend Christian values as an integral part of America’s importance to God’s plan.81 The grand narrative of this violent patriotism is familiar to Americans both from the literal civil war and in foreign policy that sets up America as the great defender of democracy in the world today. The mechanisms of the narrative are discreet stories from the Book of Mormon that have no thread in common other than the way that each represents a threat to the promised land and triumph over that threat. These scenes alternate with other short scenes that illustrate the evils of the fallen civilization, or the events surrounding Christ’s birth and crucifixion. The final sequence in the Book of Mormon section of the Manti Pageant is that of the prophet Mormon, his son Moroni, and the battles that they are fighting to save their people from destruction after they have not heeded the warnings of a prophet. As all people in the land have become unrighteous, they are exterminated from America, which makes way for new colonies of people who are righteous to again be led to the promised land. The narrator sorrowfully recounts the aftermath of this devastation and reminds the audience of their connections to the Lord’s promise, “Surely these people are Page 121 →speaking to this generation.”82 Spectators are invited to see the possibility of such destruction in their own lives. The implication that the Book of Mormon is a past prophecy with great relevancy for the present and the future is cemented immediately following the narrator’s pronouncement. The pageant returns to the story of Joseph Smith, now with a completed Book of Mormon in hand, as he preaches to a group of people in 1830s New York, “This book is true. American scripture. It is a work of God. Where else but in a country of religious freedoms would the Lord wish to restore his gospel in its fullness and establish his church?”83 Smith’s dialogue here resurrects that past. He preaches that the reason the Lord restored his gospel in the United States was because it is a land that respects religious freedom. As God’s promised land, America is worth fighting and dying for. The use of violence in defense of America as a mark of righteousness has one impact on the spectators who are subject to the rhetorical and affective power of battle scenes. It has another impact on those who participate in the battles. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the extensive battle sequences throughout the production require casting dancer/fighters who can both keep up with the complicated choreography and have the physical stamina to wield

the variety of stage combat weapons provided for the battles. All of the other roles in the pageant can be cast regardless of experience, expertise, or ability, but these fighters and dancers need to have skills specific to their roles. On the morning of casting, men and women who want to be dancers or fighters self-select into gender-segregated groups where they learn choreography and then repeat the dance sequence multiple times while choreographers walk the lines handing casting cards to the best movers in the group. For the men, there may be up to a hundred dancers ages fourteen to forty lined up in rows. The men’s audition choreography is an athletic mix of modern dance, solo fight improvisation, jumps, leaps, and a final stabbing motion, all set to the music of “Kung Fu Fighter.” The entire casting process takes less than ten minutes, and thirty “Frontline Nephite and Lamanite Battlemen” are selected. From the remaining men, the fight choreographer, called the “Battle Master,” selects men to fight as “Backline Nephite and Lamanite Battlemen” and to serve as extras in the battle scene as “Backline Battle Banner and Torch Bearers.” The men not cast are released back into the general casting pool.84 In many ways, participating in pageant battles is a coming-of-age ceremonyPage 122 → that prepares young pageant participants to see themselves as defenders of their faith and defenders of America. Kent R. Bean, an American studies scholar and long-time Manti Pageant participant reported his own experience participating in the Manti Pageant as a young man: My anxiousness to experience “the pageant” grew with all the complicated emotions that accompany those turbulent early teen years. Not only did I feel a desire to be a part of the pageant, but I was particularly attracted to the thought of being a standard bearer in the battle scene. Even though we only stood there, [my friend] Manny explained to me that one had to be twelve years old and a certain height to qualify to be in the scene. I understood from talking to him and from talking to some thirteen-year-olds who had been standard bearers last year that this was a particular rite of passage, a beginning, a threshold. Two years as a standard bearer and one would “graduate,” at the age of fourteen, to become a full-fledged warrior in the thick of armed combat.85 Bean’s recollections point to how enacting violence as a member of a pageant cast is an important and sought-after experience for young people participating in pageants.86 It seems clear that the attraction is largely to the opportunity to enact live violence in a physically and morally safe environment. However, the embodied experience of fighting, coupled with the rhetoric of America as a promised land, creates an environment that shapes the experience of those participating. In his work, Liveness, Philip Auslander argues that with the proliferation of repetition (using media such as CDs, DVDs, television broadcasts, etc.), audiences generally encounter a mediated event before a live one. Rather than the live event being primary with the mediated version a “record” of the original, audiences come to expect live performances to mimic and mirror the mediated versions of the event that they have already seen. As Auslander explains, “the traditional privileging of the вЂoriginal,’ live performance over its elaborations and adaptation is undermined and reversed.”87 Following Auslander’s revision and applying it to the staging violence in contemporary Mormon pageantry, it seems clear that the cast enters into the performance of war with a particular horizon of expectations about violence, battles, and fighting that is drawn from other mediatized events. For example, as the Hill Cumorah Pageant dramatizes the battle between the two ancient nations of the Nephites and the Lamanites, cinematic images of Page 123 →war (particularly those set in pre-gunpowder periods) become the model vision of what warfare should look like. In other words, the young men playing the Backline Nephite and Lamanite Battlemen come at their roles and their fight choreography with preconceived notions of what a fight with swords and spears should look like. They also have a previous sense of the narratives of these battles from previous exposure both to the Book of Mormon itself and to other war narratives from films and video games. Janine Basinger argues that the war films produced during WWII established a story pattern now recognized as

the “combat genre,” no matter the war in which the story takes place.88 Robert Eberwein summarizes this pattern by its formulaic points: “ethnically and geographically mixed group of soldiers and the hero distanced by virtue of his leadership responsibilities; a particular objective; internal conflict within the group. A faceless enemy; few if any women; reminders of home; a last stand; propaganda; common behaviors (writing letters, singing); and death.”89 Indeed, the three battle sequences in the Hill Cumorah Pageant fit almost exactly into this model. Nephi, Laman, Lemuel, and Sam are (to appropriate a phrase) a band of brothers. As family, they are not ethnically mixed but are ethically different, which leads to internal conflict within the group. Nephi is the distanced hero who is eventually faced with the difficult objective of defending his life and the life of his people from Laman and his people. This is the first battle scene. These Lamanites become the faceless enemy—the narrative of the story keeps the focus on the Nephites throughout. There are few, if any women.90 There are clear visual reminders of “home” throughout the production, particularly as home is figured nostalgically as a time and place of peace and prosperity. The records being kept by the prophets throughout the production, symbolized by a large set of golden plates that is a primary prop, become the sign of home. Finally, there is second battle scene that ends in the death of all the Nephites and the Lamanites. Due to their previous exposure to images and narratives of war, the past and present of the battle scenes are collapsed into a singular embodied experience of the present. No representation of war can ever come close to recreating the original event. In the pageant, the fear, smells, weather, weapons, pain, and even sound of actual war is sanitized and made aesthetically palatable for both participants and spectators. Fight choreography has the freedom to use violence to further theme, or to move the story along. A Hill Cumorah Pageant battle master discussed with me that this is the point of Page 124 →the battles in the Pageant—to tell the story of who is wicked and who is righteous. He explained that he always choreographed the righteous to be honorable fighters and the wicked to fight dirty; his choreography reflected these moral choices with the wicked fighters hitting below the belt or coming at their enemies from behind while the righteous fighters would always face their combatants and follow established rules of swordsmanship.91 All of these textual and physical interventions in the staging of war detract from the actual event, which is problematic if pageants are reenactments of war. However, as resurrections of the past that invite those participating to see themselves as modern-day warriors for Christ, the battle scenes are particularly effective. The means by which the past is resurrected to support and defend America as a promised land come first from the mediatized vision of war brought to the pageant by those who are fighting. As most of those cast in battle roles are young (14–20 years old), they come raised on post-9/11 combat films and first-person shooter video games. The second addition comes from the fact that the young men playing these roles are active, believing members of the LDS faith and who are at the Pageant not primarily to perform, but to build their relationships with Jesus Christ, to build their testimonies of the Book of Mormon, and to practice being missionaries. The characters in pageants are described as fighting for a higher cause. In the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the character of Nephi states at the end of the first battle scene, in which the Nephites beat back the Lamanites, “We could not have defeated the Lamanites with our strength alone. The Lord God Almighty delivered us from destruction! ”92 Each night this segment is performed, each of the surviving actors is encouraged to reflect on his or her relationship between the performance on stage and their performance of faith in daily life. They are guided by direction from pageant coordinators to superimpose their current spiritual battles onto the literal battles of the past. For those pageant participants playing warriors who either kill, are killed, or both, the role they are taking upon themselves is not that of the warrior literally, but that of a warrior spiritually. Here, the past is made present and looks forward to a future where the young men of the pageant will embody their faith not as actors in a pageant, but as “Christian soldiers.” Unlike the great battles of the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants, or the violence of the Passion in the Mesa Easter Pageant, the violence in the Nauvoo Pageant is restricted to a narrative telling of the death of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. However, the same ideology of America as Page 125 →a promised land runs through the Nauvoo Pageant, as does the value of defending righteous values to the death. For example, the play’s narrator, Parley

P. Pratt, explains to the audience that after a difficult arrival into Nauvoo, things quickly got better: “Because we were following the prophetВ .В .В . God prospered us and helped the Church to grow.”93 The selection of the word “prosper” in the Nauvoo Pageant sanctifies America as a promised land through the use of a phrase repeated throughout the Book of Mormon and the pageants that dramatize it. All of the people who are brought to the Americas in the Book of Mormon are told that if they will obey the Lord, they will “prosper in the land.”94 America is also figured as the promised land not just for those peoples brought here in ancient times but also those who converted in the early days of the Church. In the Nauvoo Pageant’s highly theatrical construction of square streets with strips of fabric, Parley P. Pratt and Joseph Smith explain Smith’s vision of the town. Smith preaches, “Such a city, when built up, will contain a population of fifteen to twenty thousand.” Parley explains to the audience, “One might wonder why the prophet’s plans were so bold and expansiveВ .В .В . But the prophet knew the Lord was preparing the hearts of thousands to embrace the gospel вЂand gather them together from the four corners of the earth.’”95 The Nauvoo Pageant is largely made up of scenes that reveal Nauvoo to be a fulfillment of God’s prophecy that as his people are righteous, they will prosper. As they prosper, they also share in making true the promise of America. The citizens are shown working together cooperatively to feed the hungry and house the poor. The entire town comes together to work on building the temple. People without faith are made to feel welcome; people with faith are strengthened in their beliefs. Just as Joseph Smith predicts during the construction scene, the citizens of Nauvoo also joyfully welcome the flood of immigrants shown as arriving to join the Latter-day Saints in America. Pageants dramatize God’s hand in establishing America, which sanctifies pageants in America and reminds participants and spectators of their sacred responsibilities to protect America now and in the future.

The Honored Dead The use of famous historical figures on stage or in connected celebrations provides a living genealogy of authority to pageant narratives. It covers Page 126 →present patriotism with the patina of approval for celebrated leaders of the past.96 In Mormon pageants, the celebrated leaders of the past include scriptural heroes (Moroni; Mary, the Mother of Jesus; Jesus) or figures from early church history (Joseph and Emma Smith; Brigham Young). In the Manti Pageant, however, these religious figures are even joined by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The presence of American founding fathers alongside Mormon prophets makes clear how the honored dead of America’s past are requisitioned in service of affirming America as a promised land. Nauvoo is the final resting place of Joseph Smith. He was the mayor of Nauvoo and was running for President of the United States when he was brought up on charges relating to his authorization of the destruction of a printing press in Nauvoo.97 He surrendered to the charges and was imprisoned at the nearby county seat in Carthage, Illinois. Before he could be brought to trial, a group of armed men with painted faces stormed the jail and shot Joseph Smith and three others who were staying with him. Smith and his brother Hyrum were both killed. Mormons consider both Joseph and Hyrum Smith to be religious martyrs. The staging of the martyrdom is the climax of the Nauvoo Pageant, and it is a moment that reaffirms the holy ground of America. Indeed, Smith’s final words in the pageant before his martyrdom are, “This is the loveliest place and the best people under heaven.” This comment refers doubly to Nauvoo and America, which is kept free by the Saints of Nauvoo, the “best people under heaven.”98 The death of the Smith brothers is narrated by the other characters in the pageant who tell the story plainly but with detail: “Soon about 150 men appeared, their faces blackened with gunpowder to hide their identities. Shortly after five o’clock in the evening, the Prophet Joseph and his brother Hyrum were shot—martyred in defense of the Kingdom of God.”99 Center stage in a spotlight, Hyrum “grasps Joseph’s shoulder in the famous statue’s pose.”100 The iconic statue referenced in the script is found at the front of the jail where Smith was incarcerated at the time of his death.101 The pose, with Hyrum standing behind and to the left of his brother, grasping his shoulder with one hand

and his arm with the other, while the two men stare straight ahead, is familiar enough to Mormon audiences to create in them a powerful memory of the actual site of martyrdom. Most spectators and many pageant participants will have toured Carthage Jail and seen the statue as part of their visit to Nauvoo. The story of the martyrdom is already familiar to Mormon audiences and images of Joseph Smith pervade Page 127 →cultural consciousness. The carefully staged pose is intended to cue for audience members the events of the martyrdom by tying the stage picture to the Carthage Jail memorial and also to remind them of the emotional impact of the site and their engagement with it. Foregrounded in the narrative of the martyrdom in the pageant is Smith’s request for John Taylor, one his companions, to sing “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.” This Methodist hymn, beloved by Joseph Smith, underscores the core cast’s narration that “shortly after five o’clock in the evening, the Prophet Joseph and his brother Hyrum were shot—martyred in defense of the kingdom of God.” At the end of the narration, the humming of the hymn shifts to the sung lyrics: “These deeds shall thy memorial be; / Fear not, thou didst them unto me.”102 The use of the hymn’s lyrics in this moment cement Smith’s death as a sacrifice; a deed accomplished as if for God himself. The actual assassination is not dramatized. Instead, the two men playing Joseph and Hyrum stand on stage together, Hyrum with his arm around Joseph. After the narration is complete, the two men exit, walking together in lockstep. The notable aspect of this staging is that the men exit not offstage but out into the audience, where they are followed at first by a spotlight; then the spotlight fades, leaving the two men walking in silhouette out onto the flats of Nauvoo. The entire focus of both characters and spectators in this moment are on the retreating forms of the martyred heroes. Audiences turn away from the stage to follow the disappearing figures of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. As the participants playing the roles of the Smith brothers fade into silhouette, they invoke the actual spirits of Joseph and Hyrum in the minds of the spectators. The dead and living come together as the audience sees the characters of Joseph and Hyrum disappear into the night, defenders of religious freedom in America. Mormon heroes are not the only ones whose deaths are in defense of America and religious freedom. Mormon pageants celebrate secular heroes as well, turning patriots into prophets. In the Manti Pageant, the character Brigham Young has been leading a handcart company of pioneers across the plains toward the land of his prophetic vision. During a rest stop along the way, the United States Army appears, represented by a colonel in uniform and a supporting band of three teenage boys, carrying rifles and a large American flag. They come with the request from President James Polk to muster a Mormon Battalion to fight in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848.103 Young must decide whether to support the country that had done nothing to protect his people or to continue on his journey west. His Page 128 →first reaction in the pageant is to reject the proposal because the Mormons have been “denied their constitutional rights of freedom of worship.”104 But then he takes himself off to the side of the central action to pray for heavenly guidance. The response is a vision that encapsulates the Mormon view of sacred America. In overlapping tableaux, Brigham Young has visitors who each provide insight as to whether he should provide Mormon volunteers for an army battalion. The choice to invent this epic vision as part of the Manti Pageant epitomizes how Mormons believe that God has favored America as his promised land. It turns prophets into political philosophers and politicians into prophets who warn Americans, past and present, of the necessity of following God’s law in order to protect America from God’s retribution. Saskia Teilens points out in her analysis of the Manti Pageant that the appearance of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Young is a reminder “that the American experiment of democracy is a divine one, too valuable to be lost, and it is now up to the Mormons to save it.В .В .В . This is a Mormonism that was revealed to its people verbatim, and is not subject to the organic renewal that other faiths go through. The pageant is very clear: Mormonism has not changed, or shifted emphases, either in doctrine or practice, since its founding in 1830.”105 Fixing the patriotic vision as unchanging from past to present is another way the past is resurrected on holy ground in Mormon pageantry.

Young’s first vision is of Captain Moroni (not to be confused with Moroni, the son of Mormon, who becomes the angel Moroni). Captain Moroni is a famous leader in the Book of Mormon who defends his people, the Nephites, against the advancing armies of the Lamanites. In an effort to rally his troops, he created what is familiarly known to Mormons as “the Title of Liberty.”106 To emphasize the importance of civil liberty, family, and freedom of religion, Moroni takes his cloak and writes upon it: “In memory of our God, our religion, our freedom and our peace, our wives and our children.”107 In the Manti Pageant, this event is staged early on. In that scene, Moroni raises his own Title of Liberty, and the narrator explains that Moroni causes this same manifesto to be raised all over the land. Then, similar banners are raised up all across the hill beneath the Manti Temple in a dramatic tableau. When Captain Moroni appears to Brigham Young in a vision, he again displays his cloak and calls out the Title of Liberty. Since the audience has seen this character and heard these lines before, seeing him again Page 129 →brings with him a host of references about America as a promised land for those that keep God’s commands. The next vision of a political leader is not from the Book of Mormon but is of George Washington. He is recognizable to audiences from his tricorn hat, breeches, and overcoat, as if crossing the Delaware. He speaks a portion of his first inaugural address: “Every step by which the people of these United States have advanced, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency. The propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which heaven itself has ordained.”108 Bringing in George Washington at this point in Young’s vision affirms the manifest destiny of the early colonists and the hand of God in the establishment, not just of a promised land in the larger geography of the Americas but of the United States of America specifically. The quote also shows that Book of Mormon prophets were not the only ones to warn America of the dangers of disobedience to God’s law. Washington’s testimony that “the propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right” is seconded by the next colonial vision. Thomas Jefferson reminds Young that “We shall need the favor of the being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”109 I discovered that this character was Jefferson only after searching for this particular speech and finding it in Jefferson’s second inaugural address. The fact that Jefferson is not named in the narration and cannot be indicated by costuming or props as easily as other notable American presidents, seems beside the point of his inclusion. What is clear from the staging is that the exact identity of this president is less important than an understanding that founding fathers of the past (whoever they may be) haunt the Mormon belief in a God-fearing, God-anointed America. Finally, an adult Joseph Smith appears to quote one of the Mormon Articles of Faith: “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers and magistrates and obeying, honoring and sustaining the law.”110 While this quote is dated to the time of Joseph Smith, it is also a very contemporary inclusion, as Mormons are encouraged to memorize these Articles of Faith as children. Knowing all thirteen Articles of Faith is a mark of devotion, and even if adult audiences can no longer recite them all word-for-word (though many can), they are at least very familiar. Concluding Young’s vision with Page 130 →this statement reminds pageant participants and the Mormon audience of their responsibility to uphold God’s law in order to protect and preserve America.111 Inspired by these prophetic visitors, each holding a powerful pose in a strong tight spotlight that lingers before slowly fading, Brigham Young realizes that, of course, he should muster a battalion of soldiers. He returns to the pioneers and agrees to the Army’s proposal. The scene ends with a swelling of patriotic music as Brigham Young hands out weapons to a series of enlisting men. Young’s centrality to this action blesses and authorizes the military service and again affirms how Mormons are the ultimate defenders of America.

Speaking to This Generation I return now to the insights of the set designer of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. One of the primary responsibilities he felt was to design a stage with one eye toward theatrical needs but the other toward the maintenance and beautification of the site on which the pageant stage would sit. Indeed, each pageant stage has a unique spatial

relationship and responsibility to the heritage site on which it is constructed and the temples that are close by. Resurrecting the past in Mormon pageantry is built on the material relationship between performance and sacred space where pageants perform on sacred grounds, where they perform sacred grounds, and where the sacred grounds themselves perform. The holy ground of pageant stages resurrects the past as it is produced and as it performs. The implication that the past lands, upon which these stories occurred, has great relevancy for the present and the future is a trope that runs throughout Mormon pageantry. All four annual pageants recognize the spectators at the end of the pageant, either by directly speaking to them or by engaging present discourses that are familiar to contemporary audiences. In the Hill Cumorah Pageant, following an immense battle sequence where everyone is slaughtered, Moroni is left alone on stage to “write the sad tale of the destruction of my people.” Paraphrasing Moroni’s words from the Book of Mormon, he speaks directly to the audience: “You who will receive this book many years from now, I speak unto you as if you were present, even though ye are not. But Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me and I know your doing. I know that you waste yourselves with envy, strife, malice, Page 131 →persecution, and all kinds of evil. Ye love money and wealth more than you love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted. Why are you ashamed to take upon you the name of Christ?”112 This is compounded in the remarkable resurrection of the past when the character playing young Joseph Smith appears to unearth a large stone from the actual Hill Cumorah and to dig a small hole. From that hole, the character playing Smith reaches down and retrieves the golden plates, which have been preset in the hill. The rest of the entire pageant is staged on Fielding’s mammoth set. The pageant moves this one scene onto the hill to most clearly make use of the power of the holy ground, where dead and living come together. In the Manti Pageant, the narrator implicates the audience even more clearly when she reminds them of their connections to the Lord’s promise: “Surely these people are speaking to this generation.”113 Those hearing these words are forced to encounter their relationship to the story of sacred America told through the complicated narrative of the founding of the LDS Church and the stories of the Book of Mormon. The pageant is for them—for us—today. The final image of this pageant is choirs of angels literally standing along the walls of the temple, welcoming the Henshaws, reunited and glorified in the imagined future. The holy ground of the temple represents the holy ground of heaven for the characters of the pageant, but it also helps the participants and spectators to imagine how their attendance at the temple will help them achieve the same exaltation. In the Mesa Easter Pageant, the ecumenical Easter story is capped off with a single reference to Mormon doctrine when the narrator informs the audience that the Lord “has called prophets and apostles today, who speak for him and teach us the divine plan.”114 Tying together the Mormon belief in living prophets to the plan of salvation and the mission of Christ, as told through the stories of the Bible, draws these three beliefs into the present as well. While the pageant has immersed audiences into the past of ancient Jerusalem and the life and times of Jesus Christ, it is the contemporary situation of a stage on temple grounds, in the middle of a large metropolitan area in America, alongside a busy road, that ends the show. The lights come up to reveal that the sacred pageant stage is just part of the larger holy ground of the Mesa Temple. The Nauvoo Pageant resurrects the past most clearly as the real Nauvoo Temple is illuminated in the night sky above the pageant stage. As the stage fills with the entire, expanded cast all dressed in light, heavenly colors, a Page 132 →voice over of beloved LDS prophet Gordon B. Hinckley echoes through the space. He emphasizes the deep importance of the sacred space of the past, the temple, and those who journey from one sacred space to another: “Today, facing west, on the high bluff overlooking the city of Nauvoo, thence across the Mississippi, and over the plains of Iowa, there stands Joseph’s temple, a magnificent house of God. Here in the Salt Lake Valley, facing east to that beautiful temple in Nauvoo, stands Brigham’s temple, the Salt Lake Temple. They look toward one another as bookends between which there are volumes that speak of theВ .В .В . thousands who made the long journey from the Mississippi River.”115 The voice of Hinckley ties together past and present for believing audiences, for whom Nauvoo’s holy ground is reaffirmed by the testimony of a man revered as God’s prophet on earth.

In each of these examples, the pageant ties space (holy ground) to faith. As Fielding explained, he “believes the Hill Cumorah is a sacred site.” It is his belief, in large part, that inspired his design process. As I have discussed throughout this chapter, the faith of those who come and participate or attend the pageants has a material impact on the production of the sacred space. The theological sanctity of heritage sites, of temples, and of America is embedded in Mormon pageantry. These three sacred spaces are places where visitors can enter into a literal or metaphorical relationship with the dead. Pageants have a material impact on where they are placed just as the place inspires and sanctifies the pageant. The placement of Mormon pageants on holy ground resurrects the past as it invites all to remember those who have died defending America and religious freedom and to secure themselves and their families in the endless chain of belonging envisioned in Mormon temples. As Fielding noted about the original Hill Cumorah Pageant, during fifty weeks of the year that the pageant was not on-site, the Hill was dotted by strange hedges and “unattractive and distracting artifacts from the pageant.” These traces were hard to erase. It required digging up hedges and smoothing out uneven places. New landscaping was installed to artistically frame the Hill as it now appears today. Even the lovely new landscaping, however, cannot ever entirely erase the pageant from the hill. In practical terms, it takes some time for the Hill to return to its natural state due to the sheer volume of traffic and weight across its lawn over the course of the two weeks of the current pageant. In Nauvoo, the pageant stage is permanent and mostly sits empty when not in use during the month of July. The Manti Pageant hill Page 133 →sits barren, like the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and the temple grounds at Mesa return to a large, open lawn that fronts the temple from Main Street. The very open space of Mormon pageantry, however, stands out in stark contrast to the surrounding historic sites. While the “simple, open clearing” Fielding designed at the Hill Cumorah absolutely provides a beautiful frame for a sacred site, visitors cannot help but be aware that in addition to viewing the site as it is, they are also visiting the site as it is not. Mormon holy ground is finally haunted by the pageants, even when they are gone. Mormon pageantry leaves a mark.

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Chapter 4 Performing the Dead Actors from Both Sides of the Veil I think it’s really cool being here and not so much being in costumes. Actually, I like it better when we are rehearsing without costumes just because I feel like I’m actually there and this is actually what’s happening, and how it’s really real peopleВ .В .В . I mean, when the costumes are there, they’re kind of distracting, and I don’t really feel that this is actually happening. But when we’re in our regular clothes I feel like this actually happened right here and it could be happening right now, you know? —A participant in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, 2011 In 1915, newlyweds Willard and Rebecca Bean were called to represent the Church in Palmyra, New York, and to oversee the establishment of a heritage site at the original homestead of the Joseph Smith family. The Beans were the first members of the Church to live in Palmyra since Joseph Smith founded the Church and published the book of Mormon there in 1830.1 Their five-year mission stretched to nearly twenty-five years, during which time they lived in the original Smith home and facilitated the purchase of the Hill Cumorah and six hundred surrounding acres, as well as the nearby Martin Harris and Peter Whitmer farms on the Church’s behalf.2 When the Bean Family—Willard, Rebecca, and Willard’s two children from his first marriage—first arrived in Palmyra, they were met with open resistance from the neighborhood to their presence. Families would walk across the street to avoid meeting them in town, shopkeepers would not sell them goods, and their oldest son was forced to sit in the back of the classroom in a special desk so that no one would be forced to sit next to “that Mormon boy.”3 They combatted this ostracization by immersing themselves in the community and making themselves available to participate in any way they could. They opened the farm to anyone who wanted to see where Page 136 →Joseph Smith had once lived, and Rebecca provided curated tours. Willard organized a basketball league and coached a local team, preached every Sunday in the center of town, and organized public exhibitions to showcase his skills as a professional boxer.4 They even named their first child born at the Smith Farm “Palmyra,” in honor of their new home. At the end of their extended mission, the Beans had grown their family from four to eight, and they had fully integrated themselves into the community. Despite the initial resistance of Palmyra to their presence, they left a community that included new Mormon historic sites, other missionary families, and a small LDS congregation. Willard Bean recorded in his autobiography that at one farewell celebration, a friend gave a tribute: “[Upon their arrival] some of our super-pious folk became suspicious and began to look for an excuse to get rid of them. [As we could not] have them arrested and put in jail, we had to tolerate them. We learned to respect them, still later we learned to admire them; and now we are reluctantly bidding farewell to the most versatile family that ever lived in Wayne County.”5 As Bean reflected, “We found no friends on our arrival in Palmyra, and when we took our leave, we left no enemies.”6 Seventy-five years after Rebecca and Willard Bean left Palmyra to return to Utah, their great-great-nephew Steve Bean and his wife Marcia were called to serve as the site missionaries on the Smith Farm in Palmyra. Steve Bean’s grandfather was Willard Bean’s nephew, Monte L. Bean, the pioneering Seattle businessman and founder of the life science museum at Brigham Young University. As a direct relation to the original site missionaries, the twenty-first century Beans spent much of their mission sharing the stories of Rebecca and Willard. For Steve Bean, this was an unparalleled opportunity to really connect to his past. He reports: It was motivating to me to walk where [Willard] walked and revel in his memories. But as fun as this was, our purpose was to testify of the restoration and the role of Joseph Smith who, more powerfully,

walked the same paths and famously knelt in the Grove now known as Sacred. We loved our time [in Palmyra] and cherish the memories dearly. My hope is that what we did there, and how we conducted ourselves as representatives of the Savior, was acceptable to Willard, Monte, and of course, Christ.7

Bean’s image of himself walking where his ancestor walked is layered with his testimony that he walked where Joseph Smith also walked. As a Page 137 →missionary, he sees himself as a representative first of Christ, then of his church founded by Joseph Smith, and finally of his own ancestors. He also talks of “what he did” as being “acceptable.” For Bean, his service was an offering to the Lord, who will assess his contributions to the building up of God’s kingdom. For the Beans, their experiences on site in Palmyra were heightened when their son Trevor joined them with his wife Tami, and their five children, to live with them and participate in the Hill Cumorah Pageant in 2015. Trevor and Tami had been in the pageant as newlyweds and wanted to have the pageant experience again with their entire family. Trevor reports his experiences being in the pageant in language that echoes that of his father’s: that walking where Willard walked made Willard more real. In sharing this story with others, Trevor encouraged, “find the Willard in your family and emulate him or her in your life.”8 The story of the Beans—from Willard and Rebecca, to Steve and Marcia and Travis, Tami, and their children—illustrates how Mormon pageant participants see themselves in relationship to the parts they are playing, the space they are performing in, and the meaning of the pageant experience in their spiritual lives. For Trevor Bean, performing the Hill Cumorah Pageant prompted him to “find” his ancestor through research and family history work. Being on-site at the pageant, where his ancestor had been before him, made this ancestor “more real.” His encouragement for others to similarly find their past and then “emulate” it is the very process of resurrecting the past through performance. It is not enough just to walk where someone had walked, but it is also vital to act as someone had acted. In this emulation, the dead come back to life more real than before. Strengthening the bonds between the family members builds a chain of belonging Mormons believe they can take with them into the eternities. As pageant participants resurrect the past in contemporary Mormon pageantry, they simultaneously speak for the dead and for themselves. The collapsing of past and present testimonies of gospel principles creates a powerful stage presence that resurrects spirits of the past. In this chapter, I examine how participants in Mormon pageants act for and in behalf of the characters they are asked to play. Performers resurrect the past as they take on the lives of the dead that have gone before and act in proxy for them, making them come alive, not just through the playing of a character but also by standing in for them in ways meaningful to exaltation. Participants in Mormon pageantry perform the dead in a variety of ways that help those on both sides of the veil work toward exaltation. Page 138 →First, pageant participants create characters through acts of devotion that they believe make their performance real; if one really loves one’s family offstage, then it is easy to “act” like one loves one’s family onstage, since it isn’t acting at all. Second, the dead are performed through specific acting choices that foreground sincerity of action and intention. Finally, the ritualized repetition of actions by pageant participants in their blocking helps to engage their bodies in the development of testimony, which allows them to better perform the dead. Actors in Mormon pageantry invite the spirits of the past to influence their performances and believe the dead inspire them to act out their living testimonies, which are necessary to lead participants to Christ and exaltation.

Living Proxies To proxy in a performance is to substitute a living body as a kind of placeholder for an absent body—one that is lost, at a distance, or dead. In Ghosts, Alice Rayner suggests that a similar kind of replacement is the foundation for mimesis: It is the very capacity to substitute one thing for another, to reconstitute a lost object in a present object, to transform the material objects for the world into imaginary objects, and the imaginary into

the material, that characterizes the foundation of mimesis. This sense of mimesis is not a matter of visible reflection or mirroring.В .В .В . It is, rather, the point in a psychic topography where the experience of loss generates the demand for a substitute.9

For Rayner, history passes through bodies into the world as performers embody both the “material specificity” of that which has been lost, and the “gaps that arise in the process of imitation and repetition.” Ghosts are therefore “neither the original nor the copy, neither lost past nor performing present, the history-ghost makes the past perceptible in the present but is made by what it is not.”10 Joseph Roach describes the process of acting for the dead as surrogation, which is enacted by an effigy (the material replacement): “Effigy fills, by means of surrogation, a vacancy created by the absence of an original.”11 Roach suggests that the word “effigy” is not only a noun meaning a portrait, Page 139 →a likeness, or an inanimate reconstruction of a living being but also a little-used verb that evokes the presence of an absence, particularly to “body forth” something from the distant past. In surrogation, performance creates history and provokes memory, as a performance is a “set of actions that hold open a place in memory” and actors function as “a fetishized substitute for the corpse.”12 One of the markers of surrogation is its relationship to forgetting—untroubled succession requires that the community forget encounters that threaten the stately progression of genealogy. Roach points specifically to encounters between Europeans and Circum-Atlantic peoples and how representations of these encounters “performed not only their identity but also their threatened continuity.”13 In these cases, the replacement is revealed through the erasure of the other in discursive, political, and/or geographical realms. Similar to Rayner’s ghosts, Roach’s effigies are a troubled double representation of presence and absence, materiality and ephemerality. When Mormons perform the dead in Mormon pageantry, however, they are not just acting as a substitution or a surrogation where an effigy fills in a gap. Instead, pageant performance of the dead overwrites one material presence over another in a palimpsest where the living are placed over the dead, but the traces of the dead remain. This is not simply the effect of a stubborn remnant from the past, but a purposeful invitation to the dead to impose themselves upon the living. The difference emerges from a theology that doesn’t believe death to be a loss or an absence but instead a continuation of life in another realm. It is this conviction that grounds the doctrine of the redemption of the dead. The belief in a responsibility to redeem the dead materially alters the relationship that pageant performers have to playing their roles in Mormon pageantry. The connections between the proxy ritualistic religious work for the dead in Mormon theology and practice, and performing on stage are made strong through devotional rhetoric in addition to script choices and lyrics that emphasize the sacred pageant experience. Language that connects performance to devotion is a standard part of religious practice; indeed, speech acts that bind believers to observances are the very heart of ritual. These are in evidence at all Mormon pageants and much of the language crosses pageant lines. Most interesting are those phrases that require the verb perform in such a way that religious ritual and theater practice collapse into one. Mormons perform acts of service, they perform their labors, and they perform temple ordinances. Page 140 →In a sermon to the entire Church, Mormon apostle Dallin H. Oaks discussed the embodied practice of temple work: “Our temples are living, working testimonies to our faith in the reality of the resurrection. They provide the sacred settings where living proxies can perform all of the necessary ordinances of mortal life in behalf of those who live in the world of the spirits.”14 Oaks’s emphasis on “living, working testimonies” reminds his listeners how belief requires action, and testimonies are dependent on practice. It is no wonder, then, that participants in Mormon pageants feel a resonance between the work they do to embody a character of the past onstage and the work they do to redeem the dead in temples. They are “living proxies.” Oaks’s observation also points out how Mormons believe death to be life in another world, just beyond the veil.

As Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer explains, “I remind you that it is a veil, not a wall, that separates us from the spirit world. . . . Veils can become thin, even parted. We are not left to do this work alone.”15 Another apostle, Russell M. Nelson, testified, “As a special witness of Jesus Christ, I testify that He lives! I also testify that the veil of death is very thin. I know by experiences too sacred to relate that those who have gone before are not strangers to leaders of this Church. To us and to you, our loved ones may be just as close as the next room—separated only by the doors of death.”16 Mormons are thus aided in their daily devotions, not only by the community of believers in their families and congregations but also from the dead. Pageant participants perform the dead through acts of faith, charity, and devotion that help them draw nearer to Christ and to their loved ones beyond the veil.

We Were Just Supposed to Be Us At a devotional before one of the Mesa Easter Pageant performances I attended, a director relayed to the congregation of pageant participants that some teenagers, still in costume, were heard saying “un-Christ-like things” after the pageant the night before. Some non-Mormon visitors overheard them and were visibly upset. Pageant participants were reminded to be a “light to the world” at all times. The announcement of this infraction was met with a silent pause throughout the room; this was a very bad thing. It was as if the entire congregation for just a moment was holding its breath. The idea that cast members might have offended audience members seemed genuinely distressful, both to the pageant director making the announcementPage 141 → and to those listening. After the first moment of silence, a noisy buzz filled the room. I assume that all were discussing what they knew about the teenagers and their comments.17 Clearly, there were some in the congregation for whom this incident was not news. It seems likely that the teenagers in question were also in the room. However, the announcement was not a public shaming but instead a reminder that pageant participants, especially those in costume, had a spiritual responsibility to maintain a certain decorum. This decorum was as much to show their own commitment to living the gospel of Jesus Christ as it was for pageant public relations. The implication was not that pageant participants needed to stay in character on- and offstage, but that their own personal characters should be such that they transition in between being in-role in the pageant and being themselves on stage without a difference in behavior. Pageant participants are encouraged to be disciples of Christ at all times and in all things, and in all places. This injunction is spiritual. Mormons believe that at baptism, they enter into a promise with God the Father to “mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life.”18 Mormon pageantry is a particularly public way of witnessing for God; participants are therefore doubly cognizant of their own spiritual responsibility. Pageants support participants in this performance of righteousness by creating an environment to better know and live the gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as to share that gospel through missionary work. As participants personally change by offering up acts of faith, service, and devotion, they don’t need to inhabit a character. They resurrect the past as they become that which they represent—disciples of Christ. The time actually spent rehearsing and performing in a pageant is just one part of the Mormon pageant experience. These moments of more traditional theater-making are enhanced by a wide range of dedicated religious activities—devotionals, classes, lectures, special musical performances, and Sunday worship services that are attended by the pageant participants all together. All these activities are constructed to provide participants with opportunities to grow spiritually. Far more time is spent in these activities than more traditional theatrical activites. For example, there is no acting training Page 142 →in Mormon pageantry—no classes in developing a character, no vocal warm-ups or dance workshops. Instead, the participants are trained to be better people, then invited to act like that onstage. At pageants where the participants live on-site and are all together for two weeks while they rehearse and perform (the Hill Cumorah and Nauvoo Pageants), the pageant organizational structure provides built-in opportunities for

ongoing religious study and spiritual conversation that trains the participants to be more like Christ in their own lives. When performers in these pageants are not on stage, they are in assigned groups called cast teams at Hill Cumorah and pageant districts in Nauvoo. These groups are kept occupied with community-building games, scripture study, and other activities one might expect at a summer Bible camp. Pageants maintain a ban on media (cell phones except as cameras, iPods, TV, movies, etc.) during the experience, so the religious activities dominate. Additionally, all pageants establish patterns of community devotion: each rehearsal and performance starts with prayer. Sometimes they begin with spiritual thoughts, special guest speakers, and/or notes from directors. All pageants use the singing of hymns throughout as a means of community building and spiritual awakening. Even more important are the framing devices that emerge in formal religious meetings and in the process of mounting the production. Directors, choreographers, cast team leaders, and core cast members all utilize similar language to encourage pageant participants to act as if they were the disciples of the scriptures or the faithful, early members of the Church. Participants are encouraged to support one another at all times, forming faith communities like those recorded in the scriptures they are dramatizing on stage. Participants agree that being in a pageant is hard. Across all pageants (with the possible exception of the Mesa Easter Pageant), participants uniformly remember the weather and physical hardships as the most challenging parts of the experience. In the pageant experience, difficulties are part of the practical realities of trying to put together a production of this size and scope, outdoors, in upstate New York or central Illinois or a Utah desert, in the middle of the summer. But these “trial” aspects of the pageant, as many describe it, are generally also remembered as positive, as participants feel a sense of accomplishment of overcoming the difficulties, just as those they proxy had to overcome great trials and persecution in the name of Christ. Mormons have a long history of hardship, borne out of the difficult beginnings of the church in the mid-nineteenth century. The result is a well-developedPage 143 → sense of self-preservation and Mormon cultural ability to see life’s difficulties as an endurable means to a stronger end. Viewed in the context of revelations to Joseph Smith where the Lord chastises his complaints, the value Mormons place on spiritual and physical trials is also doctrinal. Famously, in the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord lists over fifteen different “tribulations” that Joseph Smith might encounter, even including the “very jaws of hell” but then reminds Smith that “all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.”19 Participants in Mormon pageantry therefore not only accept the difficult working conditions but also celebrate them as a positive part of the overall experience. I universally found that pageant participants believe that they are experiencing something remarkable when they work on a pageant, no matter the working conditions. As Mormons overcome hardship without complaint and serve one another in the process of putting on the pageant, they create an entire attitude of devotion and service that is integral to the exhausting process of putting on a pageant. Pageant participants take up the challenge to truly act like disciples of Christ, or even to act like Christ. When these participants then put on a costume or climb up a lighting tower, they don’t need to also put on a role. They are already in role and the lives they have been living provide the characterizations necessary to resurrect the past onto the stage and into their present lives. Martha S. LoMonaco found in her interviews with core cast members of the Nauvoo Pageant that, as district leaders in charge of cast member groups, the core cast emphasized how participants have to be “living like and with the same faith as the people we are telling the story about.”20 This statement encapsulates the methodology of performing the dead: pageant performers strive to live like those that they represent in the past so that when they are on stage, they are not acting at all but merely sharing with an audience their own life, costumed from the past, but evidencing the same faith. The abandonment of trained acting in favor of presenting a lived reality happens in the family casts, most of whom come with little-to-no theatrical experience and no interest in taking up the craft. One of these participants reported to LoMonaco: “My wife and I were trying to figure out how we should be acting and what we should be doing and who we should be representing. As we performed and finally started to understand, we realized that

we were just supposed to be us. We’re in love and we care for each other and we care for our family and that is what we represented on stage.”21 In other words, the Mormon families who perform in pageants “represent” Page 144 →themselves on stage. Representation presumes some kind of performative gloss over the actions of the family. They are not just being themselves, but they indicate for the audience those parts of themselves necessary to play the roles of the dead they stand in for. For this family, that part was being “in love” as a family, a selection of characteristics that then shaped how the family from nineteenth-century Nauvoo was seen on stage. The man who played Joseph Smith the year LoMonaco attended Nauvoo explained pageant acting in terms of his relationship with the dead in his daily life: “There’s a connection with the people who came before and where we are now.В .В .В . We are who we are and that’s what we bring to the stage. We’re telling the story of these people who lived 150 years ago, but we are doing so honestly, living and working together in a very Christ-like, kind, loving, family-oriented community which emulates their experience.”22 Jill Stevenson suggests that this kind of acting is built on the daily devotions that are already a part of Christian worship. Stevenson uses Phillip Zarilli’s psychophysical acting theory as a model for understanding how belief is an inextricable part of evangelical performance. She argues that acting in religious drama, such as the “Last Supper Communion” at the Holy Land Experience, is not a unidirectional mode of communication but an open communication between performer and a metaphysical presence. Performers of faith are prepared for this kinesthetic energy exchange as it mirrors a similar exchange in their daily devotions. Stevenson explains, “many evangelical Christians set aside time each day to read the Bible and to pray, a purposeful self-presencing ritual through which they enter into a heightened, open relationship with God that has both mental and physical components.В .В .В . This daily activity allows believers to practice cultivating awareness and attentiveness, and therefore it may prepare them to engage other religious media with bodies primed for an energetic devotional encounter.”23 In Mormon pageantry, the ongoing spiritual activities allow believing participants to have this “energetic devotional encounter.” Mormon pageantry—like daily scripture study, frequent personal prayer, or weekly family activities—is one way that Mormons open up their relationship with God. Pageants are actually a particularly effective means of learning to live the gospel of Jesus Christ as they are a compact, heightened devotion where every aspect of participation is calculated to provide a spiritual experience. As a result, pageant participants describe their labor as a religious sacrifice rather than an opportunity to perform in a play. Clearly, the rehearsal time dedicated to putting on the production is significant, but no more so Page 145 →than any other community theater production. The notion that the time spent in rehearsals is a spiritual sacrifice seems related to the fact that those participating are not “theater folk.” They do not have a history of dedicated rehearsal time nor do they have acting as an extra-curricular activity or hobby other than the time they spend participating in a pageant. The long hours are therefore surprising to them and may feel more onerous than for those who participate in theater in a more regular way. Additionally, the pageant season intersects with other busy times in a family’s life. The Mesa Easter Pageant competes with sports seasons, formal dances at high school, and sometimes school spring break. The other pageants require a significant time commitment at the height of summer. Families who participate in the Hill Cumorah Pageant or the Nauvoo Pageant sometimes spend all of their vacation days away from work to participate. Participants cannot have conflicts with any rehearsals if they want to be in a pageant, so all other activities have to be put on hold. However, the rewards of performing are not equal to the time put into preparation. Instead, participating in a pageant is a sacrifice of time, effort, personal comfort, and more, that is a reward unto itself. As pageant participants sacrifice to participate, they double the sacrifices of historical disciples of Christ, the early Christians of the Book of Mormon, and early Latter-day Saints. They see themselves in the past, just as the past is written on their present devotions. The Mesa Pageant has by far the largest number of professional performers who volunteer to participate. The performers in the Mesa Easter Pageant who are professional actors and dancers, a notable number, value their volunteer participation in the pageant as much, if not more, than their performance in secular productions. The

dancer who plays Mary Magdalene explained that, “It’s interesting how all of us keep coming back, coming back, coming back.В .В .В . I asked the girls one day what makes us keep coming back, becauseВ .В .В . we’re all trained dancersВ .В .В . and a lot of us have gone and performed professionally different places, but for some reason we all keep gravitating back for the Easter Pageant every year. For us it just feels different than just a typical, normalВ .В .В . dance production.”24 For these participants, the pageant is not just a sacrifice of free time but of other possible work. This pageant performer is willing to leave professional dance opportunities each year (when I spoke with her, she had been portraying Mary Magdalene for eight years in a row) because the dancing she does in her life is what she believes Mary would have done in her life. The opportunity to Page 146 →donate her talents to portray this role on stage is simultaneously a sacrifice and a devotion. It is also an opportunity for the actress to strengthen her own relationship with Jesus Christ through pageant performance. She explained, “It’s like this: how do you express to the audience that this is a joyous experience? Would you be able to portray that through just standing there and speaking? What would we do as women? We would be jumping and singing, right? That’s how we would express our excitement, so I think that’s probably why [Mary dances.]”25 She is referring, of course, to her primary stage action in the pageant—dancing. Mary’s discovery of the resurrected Christ and her spreading the news of his return is staged as an elaborate dance sequence with Mary at the center. As this pageant participant points out, the pageant features the song and dance to show the heightened emotion of joy that Mary might have felt because she feels that’s how contemporary women might react, too—“jumping and singing.” For the dancer, her performance of Mary Magdalene is more about her present emotional state and the imagined emotions she might feel when encountering Christ than about creating Mary as a role. Even the contemporary choreography helps the actress perform the dead. The same collapse of past and present feelings and contemporary actions functions for the pageant participants who are cast to play Christ. This role is particularly complicated for actors who feel the impossible task of performing as if they were the perfect son of God and Savior of the world. All the men I spoke to who were playing (or who had played) Christ reported that they simply felt unworthy of the responsibility of portraying him. They were keenly aware that their performances could but faintly approximate Christ’s life and works. Instead, their description of playing the role took a performance cue less from traditional acting techniques and more from the scriptural injunction: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”26 The responsibility to resurrect the dead through performance here is mediated by a most challenging commandment of Jesus—to be perfect, even as God is. This is clearly a goal that cannot be achieved. However, Mormons embrace the challenge and focus their daily devotions around being as much like him as they can. Indeed, saying the purpose of the Church is to “help members better live the gospel of Jesus Christ” is another way of saying the purpose of the Church is to help members be perfect, even as God is. The Page 147 →men who perform Jesus, therefore, can draw on their own daily efforts as Christians to “be like Christ,” which sounds like a theatrical direction but is more a call to religious action. I spoke with several of the men who played Christ, and they all reported a similar technique for inhabiting the role. They suggested that they don’t try to act like Christ the historical character by putting themselves “in role” as him, nor do they attempt to model their acting as inspired by the vocal choices of the voice-over actor whose lines they speak. Instead, the performers who portray Christ try, as fallible people, to act as much like Christ as possible. They try to be kind to everyone, to be patient, and to listen. They go out of their way to serve the other pageant participants on stage with them. They model their behavior and interactions with cast, crew, and directors as much on Christ as they can. Then they believe their performance will naturally be Christ-like. One performer who had formerly played Christ offered this method of proxy performances as advice to a newly cast Christ, who remembers it as the best advice he’s received on how to “play” the role. He was told: “You know what, you need to be there for the cast. If you’re there for the cast and you put yourself aside, and just be there for the cast, the Spirit will take over and you’ll be fine.” The performer continued, “And so that’s been my goal. When I walk through the arch, I just say, вЂokay, I’m going to let this

be whatever it needs to be’ and then forget all the acting stuff.”27 In this interview, I had asked the pageant participant about his acting process and how he plays Christ. However, his response led him to conclude that he doesn’t do things on stage to perform Christ, but that he acts like Christ in his own life, which allows him to do things on stage. His comment reveals how proxy performance leads participants toward exaltation. It gives a reason for the sacrifice and ties the performance on stage into a performance of devotion in daily life. As the actor tries to act Christ-like, he is a better Christ on stage. As he is a better Christ on stage, he is more Christ-like in his life. I noted that the men who played Christ in all the pageants smiled more frequently than I would have expected. This acting choice sometimes ran counter to the very solemn voice-over for Jesus but created an environment on the stage where the cast felt fully welcomed as disciples of Christ. As pageant participants act—both onstage and in their daily lives—as they would if they were in the presence of Jesus Christ himself, they proxy both those who knew him and they think imaginatively forward to a time when Page 148 →they will actually meet him. The resulting performance on the stage between disciples and Christ is therefore an extension of devotion of the performers rather than a relationship newly developed as part of the pageant narrative. Much like the men cast to play Christ in the Mesa, Hill Cumorah, and Manti Pageants, the men who are cast to play Joseph Smith in the Hill Cumorah, Manti, and Nauvoo Pageants have a similarly complicated resurrection of the past. Joseph Smith, of course, was not perfect. However, he is deeply revered by Mormons as the prophet of the restoration of Christ’s church on earth. Actors who portray him feel a particular desire to be accurate in their portrayals. But, just as in the case of those who play Christ, the accuracy is not one of historical specificity but of emotional veracity. For example, the core cast member who played Joseph Smith the year I was in Nauvoo explained: Joseph, you could think of him as sort of the District Leader for the whole church. There is not much distinction between what I try to do on stage and what I try to do with my district.В .В .В . But in general, what you are trying to do is just help them to have the best experience that they could possibly have, you just serve them in any way that you possibly could, and you just love them automatically because of how you are serving them. And that love comes out on stage.В .В .В . It is a joyful dance, not acting like it is a joyful dance.28 This pageant participant makes it clear that, in order to create specific characters from scriptural stories or from Mormon history, daily acts of devotion are required. These come not only in the self-improving spiritual education and the sacrifices of the performers but also in literal acts of service where participants donate their time and efforts to the pageant and the Lord.

This Is Their Offering Actors on stage are not the only ones who perform the dead through acts of devotion. There is also an overlap between the labor involved with running a pageant and the labor involved in being a disciple of Christ. For the crew, hooking Jesus up to a safety harness, helping him climb onto a small platform, securing the harness to the platform, and operating the lift to take Page 149 →him safely soaring above the stage is simultaneously theatrical labor and a religious offering. At the Mesa Easter Pageant, I was provided access to follow the lead technicians during one performance to see all of the special effects, quick costume changes, fog machines, hydraulic lifts, and animal wranglers that make the pageant work. At each stop, the crew was anxious to point out how the facial expressions of everyone on stage clued the viewers into the spiritual aura of the scene. In my field notes, I recorded: It is true that the closer you get the more emotionally moving it is.В .В .В . The facial expressions are important. The focus is incredible. Also, you become aware that they never break character. When, from the audience, it seems like the actors are just mumbling, they are actually continuing a conversation as if it were really happening, i.e., “The tomb is empty!” or “What’s up

with Judas running out of the upper room?” This is even true for the crew backstage. Watching the “magic” of the lift up of Jesus I had a different kind of awareness. . . . It’s not the trick itself that is spiritually moving, since watching from backstage reveals the trick. It’s watching the coordinated efforts of 5–6 backstage people, all focusing on making it the most important moment. This is their offering.29

A Nauvoo Pageant participant noticed something similar about backstage labor as devotion in one of their rehearsals. Directors of the Nauvoo Pageant spend nearly half of their onstage rehearsal time in devotional discussions asking participants to share the feelings they have as inspired by the scenarios they are acting on stage. In one such rehearsal, a director had blocked the family cast of women to sit to the side of the stage and pantomime sewing. The only theatrical direction she gave was to block the sitting and explain the pantomime. The rest of the rehearsal time was spent telling the story of an early woman in the Church, a seamstress, who was very poor. The Church organized for as many as possible in the community to bring her clothes to mend so that she would be able to make a living. One of the pageant participants raised her hand to comment that the sacrifice this early Latter-day Saint made in leaving her home and coming to Nauvoo was the same sacrifice made by all the volunteers who leave their homes to sew costumes for the pageant.30 Having spent time in pageant costume shops, I agree with this observation; the costuming crews dedicate Page 150 →their efforts to the pageants as an act of charitable service that shows their devotion to God. Karol Jean Kasteler Miller was the designer commissioned to create the fabric replica of the temple for the Nauvoo Pageant. She and a team of over eighty women crocheted, embroidered, and cross-stitched the fabric panels of the temple nearly non-stop for over thirty days and nights. It took ten women an additional ten days and nights to sew the temple tower. Miller reported: Sometimes sisters would clutch their sewing bags and say, “I just don’t want to go. Can I come back tomorrow?” The sisters felt an urgency to complete the sewing so our temple would be built by the deadline. We had one goal in mind—completing the temple in time. We felt a connection with the building of the original Nauvoo Temple and the early sisters in Nauvoo. As we sewed, we reflected on their tremendous sacrifices. We sensed that we understood in some small way the feelings of those pioneer sisters as they labored hard to assist in completing their temple. We pushed harder.31 The sacrifice of making costumes in a suburban garage does not, of course, approximate the abject poverty of a woman living the nineteenth century eking out a living on the kindness of a religious community. But in performing the dead, the effort is not to inhabit the material living conditions of the past but to reveal the consistency of belief across time. In both cases, participants were sacrificing time and offering up their talents as acts of charitable service to build up the kingdom of God. In this way, the seamstresses of today are the seamstresses of yesterday. The connection that pageant participants make between their own righteousness, their religious devotions, and their performances onstage and offstage collapses the past and the present, and looks to the future where such devotions will be rewarded. A member of the Mesa Temple presidency at a Mesa Easter Pageant made this resurrection of the past clear. He was the devotional speaker in the meeting I described above where pageant participants were encouraged to act like Jesus in all times and in all places. He quoted John 3:17: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Then he encouraged the pageant participants to substitute the last “him” with “me.” He then read, “that the world through me might be saved.” By focusing on the individual, pageant participants were Page 151 →encouraged to see their performances beyond the present and into a hopeful future where their efforts have furthered the purposes of the church. Their ability to participate in the work of salvation is built on the doctrine of the redemption of the dead, where Mormons see themselves as participants in the act of salvation through their attention to their kindred dead.

John A. Widstoe, an early twentieth-century apostle, explained the responsibility of covenant members of the Church: “Since the plan is intended for all men, we became parties to the salvation of every person under that plan. We agreed, right then and there, to be not only saviors for ourselves but . . . saviors for the whole human family. . . . That places us in a very responsible attitude towards the human race. . . . To do this is the Lord’s self-imposed duty, this great labor his highest glory. Likewise, it is man’s duty, self-imposed, his pleasure and joy, his labor, and ultimately his glory.”32 All Saints, whether the actual disciples of Jesus, the Christians of the Book of Mormon, the early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Saints today who help with the backstage labor of retelling their stories in a pageant, are bound by a shared responsibility to save the “whole human family.” As pageant participants devote themselves to spiritual improvement and good works, they act as if they are those who came before to set an example of righteousness. Pageant participation is a pleasure, a joy, and a labor. As they perform the dead, both living and dead look forward to a glorious future of exaltation.

Performing a Conviction of Truth In Michael Kirby’s important early work on acting theory, he wrestles with the continuum of acting and nonacting. He wonders, “at what point does acting appear?” and responds, “at the point at which the emotions are вЂpushed’ for the sake of the spectators.”33 For Kirby, acting is independent of belief—it doesn’t matter, he argues, if the actor “really believes” what he is portraying. Even if actors really do believe their pretense, the audience may not believe that they are authentic. Additionally, even if the performer really believes and the audience believes that she believes, the performer is still acting.34 The separation between belief and acting as theorized by Kirby puts them on two opposite ends of a scale. A performance would necessarily slide between the two extremes of belief (authenticity, the real) and acting (constructed, fake): the more one believes in one’s performance, the less one is Page 152 →acting; the more one acts, the less one believes. As Kirby points out, however, no performance will be entirely authentic, nor will it ever be entirely fake. Instead, performance always requires the construction of emotional content, just as it also always authentically engages the actor. As I argued earlier in this chapter, when Mormons perform the dead in pageantry, they intentionally try not to act but to engage in their own devotional practice and have that read on stage as the devotions of the characters they are playing. But—to Kirby’s point—of course, the participants in Mormon pageantry are acting. They wear costumes, repeat someone else’s words, and behave as if they are from the past. They are portraying famous and familiar historical figures, but their performances aren’t constructed to help the audience suspend their disbelief and enter into the past. Instead, pageant participants attempt to assert their own testimonies of the gospel of Jesus Christ in addition to, or even in spite of, their characters. One Young Performing Missionary (YPM) describes spiritual acting in these terms: “[I] believe that [I was] called of God to perform [my] conviction of the truth of Mormonism.”35 The missionaries and pageant participants see their primary role as that of evangelists and their secondary role as musical dance theater performers. The directors of the YPM program emphasize this balance of investment by repeatedly reminding YPMs that they are “missionaries who perform, not performers who happen to be on a mission.”36 The result is that participants worry less about realistically portraying characters from the past and focus more on acting in a style that will most realistically portray their present testimonies. In order to telegraph this intent to audiences, participants engage in a particular acting style that foregrounds their sincerity and authenticity. The performance methodologies that pageant participants employ to convince the spectators that they are sincerely testifying of their beliefs is a collapse of the past into the present that is the mark of resurrecting the past. I first identified this performance style in my notes from core cast rehearsals for the Nauvoo Pageant: “All of the cast is really good at group acclamation. I need to find a way to talk about this kind of group movement, sweet smiles, physical contact, and knowing glances and chuckles.”37 Across all the pageants I attended, I observed carefully constructed and communally enacted attempts to convince audience members of the veracity of the emotions being felt. Pageant participants achieve this performance style through

both physical and vocal choices that are a blend of psychological realism and Page 153 →melodramatic expressionism whose primary purpose is to reveal sincerity. In his work, The Bible on the Broadway Stage, Henry Bial suggests that some of the particular anxieties about representing biblical characters and text on stage are centered on a careful balance of spectacle, authenticity, sincerity, and irony. He argues that sincerity, or “consistency between one’s professed beliefs and one’s actual behavior,” is not the same as authenticity, which is an inherent quality.38 Stylistically, sincerity can be read as innocence by those who favor a more nuanced relationship between feelings and actions. This innocence, Bial suggests, can either be innocent or disarming. It frequently presents as earnestness or even over-earnestness. Most importantly, as sincerity is a behavior, it must “continually be reasserted.”39 The participant playing Peter in the Mesa Easter Pageant performances I attended in 2013 is a frequent pageant participant, performing in both the Mesa and Nauvoo Pageants in a variety of lead roles. For years, he played the role of Jesus Christ in the Mesa Pageant. While he doesn’t perceive himself as a professional actor, he has acted enough in both pageants and in other venues to understand the acting fundamentals of creating a character. However, he made it clear that traditional acting is not what happens on a pageant stage. Instead, he feels that the thing he has learned in all of the roles he has played is that “really all we can portray is our own testimony. And I think that’s most important and most effective in this work, [which] is also missionary work and gospel sharing.В .В .В . Familiarity with the character is important, but all we can convey is not who they were as much as who we are [as] we are teaching about them.”40 This man’s assessment of his performance suggests that he is not trying to convey “who the character was” but is sincerely trying to share his own testimony with the audience. For Mormons, a testimony is a personal knowledge of spiritual truths that cannot be proven via traditional methods but can be discovered through study, prayer, and obedience. Testimonies are a privately gained set of beliefs in the fundamental principles of the gospel that are meant to be publicly shared; this act of sharing is called bearing testimony. From the time Mormons are little children, they are taught to bear their testimonies of basic gospel principles—the divinity of God the Father, the importance of the atonement of Jesus Christ, the truthfulness of the restoration of the gospel, the power of prayer, the importance of charity. Children begin giving public talks in church on Sundays when they are three years old, and most of these Page 154 →talks end in small testimonies. Additionally, monthly meetings are set aside so that the entire congregation is given an opportunity to share testimony at the pulpit.41 To present their testimony performances most effectively, Mormon pageant participants attempt to exude a balance of authority and vulnerability that Joseph Roach theorizes as the ineffable “It,” or the “certain quality, easy to perceive but hard to define, possessed by abnormally interesting people.”42 For Mormons, the authority comes from a sure belief or even knowledge of gospel principles. The vulnerability comes from the presentation style that evokes tender emotions, humility, and meekness. In practice, testimonies are strong statements performed gently. While Roach is discussing the relationship between It and celebrity, he clarifies its meaning in religious terms: “Let those marks of strength be called charismata; the sign of vulnerability stigmata. They work cooperatively, like muscles in opposable pairs, and their mesmerizing interplay has a long history as a well as popular currency as the source of public intimacy.”43 Roach’s use of the terms charismata and stigmata are important—he does not equate It directly with contemporary notions of charisma, but instead returns the word and its partner to their Biblical beginnings. Charisma is a term first introduced in the Pauline Epistles of the New Testament and is usually translated as “spiritual gifts.”44 Indeed, throughout the Epistles, Paul uses the term to describe extraordinary spiritual powers that distinguish certain Christians and enable them to be effective evangelists.45 Both Roach and St. Paul intimate that charisma is something one has rather than something one does. However, it seems clear that there are certain things one can do to show that one has it. In contemporary Mormon pageantry, participants use earnest

facial expressions, heartfelt gestures, knowing glances, and line delivery as if through tears to show the necessary sincerity. As one audience member remarked to a Young Performing Missionary in Nauvoo, “You guys are spreading Jesus with your faces.”46

There Is No Artifice on Stage In pageant performance, participants telegraph emotions as they experience them. This happens both in the enormous Hill Cumorah, Manti, and Mesa Easter Pageants, where the pageants are prerecorded, but also on the more intimate stages of the Nauvoo Pageant. Different techniques of physical Page 155 →performance are deployed in pageants as directors and participants work to have the audience see the sincerity of belief despite the physical distances that separate them. It is difficult in writing, even with the help of photographs, to describe the immensity of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. The stage measures 150 feet across and rises five stories up the hill. The bowl where the audience sits holds 8,000 chairs, with room on the sides for additional audience members on blankets. The distance between the back row of the audience and the highest level of the pageant stage measures a staggering 560 feet; the effect is like watching a performance on the middle of the stands of a football stadium behind the goal posts from the vantage point of an opposite end zone that is a field and a half away. The facial expressions of the characters on this stage simply do not matter. In the larger annual pageants—Hill Cumorah, Manti, and Mesa Easter Pageants—performers are not able to use their own voices, tone, tempo, or inflection to indicate their beliefs or the emotions they are feeling. They must borrow their performance choices from the voices on the prerecorded soundtrack. Participants in pageants with a soundtrack are encouraged to memorize any lines they may have and to say them along with the track. They are provided with CD “sides” that they can listen to and learn by rote. So, while the participant may vocalize their testimony during the pageant, it has no impact on an audience who will not hear the performer, only the voice actor. What pageant participants are left with to use to reveal the sincerity of their performance is their bodies. To stage these scenes to most effectively reach the audience, the pageant directors work in teams, one director with the performers and one director out in the audience. The two directors communicate via walkie-talkies. The director in the audience is in charge of relaying information about scope, gesture, and composition that helps the scene be legible. The director with the performers relays this blocking and choreographic information to the actors and then primarily works with them to help them inhabit the characters in such a way that they are able to connect their own testimony to their performances. In 2010, I worked as a directing intern at the Hill Cumorah Pageant. My responsibilities were to assist director David Morgan in staging the King Noah story of the Book of Mormon. King Noah is the most infamous king of the Book of Mormon and featured in one of the most spectacular sequences in the pageant. King Noah has set up a court of debauchery, taxed Page 156 →his people to buy himself and his followers great luxuries, and installed a group of priests who were as committed to wickedness as he was. The Lord, displeased that the people had fallen into unrighteousness, sends a prophet named Abinadi to preach repentance. Noah rejects his prophetic warnings and burns him at the stake (a spectacular moment of pyrotechnics in the pageant); however, Abinadi’s prophecies come to pass as King Noah is deposed and eventually burned himself, just as Abinadi foretells. When helping to stage this scene, I was the director working with the performers on stage. I would take notes from Morgan via the walkie-talkie and adjust the composition of the scene. I also choreographed the scene to the soundtrack. We especially worked with the actors to create body stances and physical gestures that both helped tell the story and, more importantly, allowed performers to reveal their spiritual insights into the character. For righteous characters, this involved the embodiment of sincerity through core to distal arm gestures. Performers frequently made the choice to repeatedly touch their hearts and then extend their arms out either toward heaven or toward the audience. I noted in my field notes that this was “as if they could send their beliefs all the way out into the audiences through their fingertips.”47

It could be argued that the extreme gestures required of acting on such a large stage, so far from such a large audience, simply requires expansive gestures that engage the entire body in order to be seen. However, directors and performers frame these movement choices less in terms of visibility and more in terms of devotional resonance. For example, I discussed with the actors how saying these lines made them feel religiously and asked them to be inspired by those feelings to create gestures that indicated their own testimonies. Their choice to touch their hearts and reach out to the audience indicated their desire to reach them, literally, if they could. It evidenced a deep interest in sincerely sharing how they felt, even when hampered by the great distance between them and the audience for whom they performed. A different technique can be seen at the Nauvoo Pageant, which is significantly smaller in scope. The Nauvoo Pageant is large enough that the live performance is close-miked so that the voices of the core cast can be heard clearly throughout the 2,000-seat audience area. However, the Nauvoo stage is no larger than one might find in any large proscenium auditorium. There is no seat so far from the stage that the audience cannot see facial expressions. In smaller venues, where pageant performers enact vignettes, like the “Trail of Hope,” the “King Follett Discourse,” or the “Women of Nauvoo,” Page 157 →the spaces are even more intimate and microphones are not even necessary. However, even in intimate spaces, pageant participants still use gestural emphasis in their acting to indicate sincerity of their message: close-lipped smiles, tilted heads, hands over hearts, reaching out toward the audience, focus up and out as if to heaven, and/or hands clasped as if for prayer. This acting style is also noticeably communal as actors are consistently grouped in casual but obviously staged tableaux. The stage pictures utilize traditional levels and planes, but all within touching distance. Two actors will put their arms around each other and when another kneels in front of them, one of them will rest their hands on that actor’s shoulder. The physical connections being made are indicative of the emotional and spiritual bonds the actors are trying to convey. These bonds are as much a function of the rapport of the actors as they are a reflection of the characters’ relationships. One core cast member explained this in terms of his relationship to the districts (small groups of family cast members) that he supervises during the day: “There is no artifice on stage: it is all real genuine emotions that you are feeling because of what you feel for these people, because of your personal interaction through the districts, and also what you feel you are trying to accomplish, and what you feel. What you are doing on stage is exactly what you are trying to do offstage. It just all goes into one.”48 The core cast of the Nauvoo Pageant rehearses in Salt Lake City for a month before traveling to Nauvoo for the run of the pageant. I attended several of these rehearsals. Once, when rehearsing for the “Women of Nauvoo” vignette, one of the actors accidently said someone else’s line and the cast burst into laughter. The participant explained that she had fallen back into the pattern of the part she had played for the past four years before being recast in a new role this year. The director enjoyed the moment and suggested that the core cast should look for these “real” moments. He stated, “we want to create an atmosphere so that when you step out of role you are interacting with the audience in the same way that you were interacting with each other on stage.” He suggested that utilizing this acting style is how audiences will know that the actors are always testifying.49 I later observed the participants put the direction to “interact with the audience in the same way” into practice when they performed the “Women of Nauvoo” vignette on location. This small piece is one of the four pageant vignettes performed throughout Historic Nauvoo by the core cast. The vignettes each expand a part of the pageant story; “Women of Nauvoo” celebrates the establishment of the Relief Society, the Church’s Page 158 →women’s organization, and is performed in the Monument to Women Memorial Garden. Figure 6. Pageant participants in the “Women in Nauvoo” Vignette, 2014. Note the expressions of sincerity: close-mouthed smiles, furrowed brows, physical proximity, and focus out towards the spectators. Photo by Tom Simpson. I recorded that, after the production, their “performance of earnestness (!!!) continues. Lots of eye contact and firm handshakes and smiling and nodding.”50 For those engaged in sharing the message of the gospel offstage,

they reassert their sincerity in familiar ways—furrowed brows, direct eye contact, and constant smiles. Indeed, core cast members use identical strategies in mingling with the audience as they did onstage, from Page 159 →the casual but frequent touching of audience members to inviting them into the spiritual community to touching hand over heart as they listen to audience members speak. Another way that sincerity is performed physically is through staging techniques that put the focus of the performance directly to the audience. Mormon pageantry is largely presentational; the fourth wall is thin or nonexistent. In most pageant scripts, characters are given directions to talk to the audience in meta-theatrical ways, recognizing the audience and addressing them directly. In these moments, the pageant performers do not necessarily drop character to speak as themselves, but they remain characters of the past speaking to those in the present. Even in productions where the audience appears to be looking in on the action, the performers all adjust their positions toward the audience. This is more than just “cheating out” as one might do on a proscenium stage. It is an intentional inclusion of the spectators into the community of Saints. In the Manti Pageant, this focus on the audience was particularly noticeable in a climactic battle between the two hostile forces of the Nephite and Lamanite armies. The Nephites are led by Captain Moroni, a twenty-five-yearold man who was appointed head over all the Nephite armies due to his righteousness and skill in battle. The Lamanites are under the command of a man named Zarahemnah. The hillside stage of the pageant is covered with soldiers from the two different armies preparing for and then engaging in battle. Even from the great distance of the audience, the two armies are differentiated clearly because of costuming and composition. The heroic Nephite army is costumed in armor that evokes Roman military uniforms, complete with Galateashaped headdresses, leg greaves, and the split-leather apron in front of a tunic. They stand in a phalanx, holding round metal shields in front and swords on the side. The neat organization of the Nephite army, a clear reference to Western military practices, and Moroni’s blue costume trimmed with red and white makes it obvious which army represents the righteous. The Lamanites, on the other hand, are costumed in fantastical Mesoamerican-inspired outfits replete with elaborate face paint, feather headdresses, scimitars, tomahawks, and accessories with animal skins, beads, and fringe. Most importantly, the righteous Nephite armies face directly forward to the audience, while the wicked Lamanite army is composed loosely across the pageant’s playing space. Creating a difference between the Nephites and the Lamanites through Page 160 →costuming is a key dramaturgical point in the battle between Moroni and Zerahemnah. The differences between the two armies must be marked for the clarity of the narrative but also for the ideological importance of a Nephite victory. While the Book of Mormon is full of battle scenes, this particular war is important in Mormon culture for Moroni’s explicit rhetoric that outlines the righteous cause they are defending. In the pageant, he writes his testimony on his cloak, which he raises as a banner, and proclaims to the encroaching armies, “We are fighting for our homes, our wives, our children and our liberties. Yea, for the rights of worship and for our church.”51 When the actor playing Moroni makes this declaration, he doesn’t angle his body toward the enemies he is addressing. Instead, the actor, with a sweeping hand gesture to encompass the entire audience, speaks the lines directly to them. The implication is clear: we are all (spectators and participants alike) fighting for our homes, families, liberty, and religious freedoms, just as is Moroni in the pageant. The physical gesturing and the breaking of the fourth wall allow the actor to perform the dead, to share his testimony straight to the audience, and to sincerely invite them to believe him. In the Nauvoo Pageant, participants don’t just break the fourth wall to talk to the audience, they even talk to each other by talking to the audience. For example, there is an intimate moment in “Women of Nauvoo” when one woman goes to help another sister who is sick. The sick woman stands off to the side in the garden, and the other woman leaves a chatty conversation with the rest of the group to be with her. The two women are obviously talking to each other, but they only look at the audience. The same focus continues to the end of the moment when the woman returns to all the other cast members who have remained grouped together. The woman scans out to the spectators and says, “Thank you, Sister Douglas, for allowing us to serve you.”52

The invitation to feel a part of the enacted scenarios is clear. The performer was physically telegraphing how she felt about this story, how the spectators were part of the community, and how we, in turn, should feel because of what we were watching. This performer was thanking those watching her for the opportunity to sincerely serve as much as she was thanking the character of Sister Douglas. As performers engage their bodies and transmit their emotions as directly to spectators as they can, they bring the past to life through their earnest sincerity. They perform with the dead and invite spectators to believe the words of the past and the testimonies of the present. Page 161 →

I Really Do Get Emotional Talented acting, following the standards of American realism today, suggests a cinematic emphasis on natural behavior and emotion. How emotion, from laughter to tears, is called up for performance has been a debate for centuries and finds expression in two particular works of acting theory. In his groundbreaking work The Paradox of Acting, Diderot suggests the preeminence of technique. For Diderot, good actors control all of their own feelings and, in so doing, can inspire strong feelings in the audience: “An extravagant creature who loses his self-control has no hold on us; this is gained by the man who is self controlled.”53 Stanislavski’s introduction of emotional recall in An Actor Prepares, later abandoned by him but expanded into the American Method, provides actors with the opposite means of training. Rather than controlling emotions to evoke them in the audience, emotional memory requires actors to use personal memories to guarantee that the emotions they need are actually being felt.54 Common sense suggests that the two means of creating emotion are not mutually exclusive. Media psychologist Elly A. Konijn points out that regardless of how the emotion is created in the actor, whether via technique or recall, “when someone conveys an emotional expression with conviction, this generates a certain amount of physiological reaction.”55 When pageant participants have an opportunity to perform live for audiences, whether onstage, in pre-show missionary work, or post-show discussions, pageant participants use vocal techniques and tears to indicate the sincerity of their intent. These voice modulations are also familiar manifestations of sincerity linked to the embedded culture of testimony bearing that is integral to Mormon worship. Testimonies follow scripted patterns that have emerged as an oral tradition throughout the Church. As religious scholar Jill Peterfeso identifies, the “typical format for Mormon testimoniesВ .В .В . often begins with a statement such as, вЂMy heart is so full, I have to stand before you and bear my testimony, trying to express what I feel.’”56 Testifiers frequently self-reflect on how long it has been since they bore testimony and how difficult it is to speak in front of so many people. Perhaps the most repeated phrase in Mormon testimonies is, “I’d like to bear my testimony; I know the Church is true.” This phrase and the other key moments of a testimony are so ubiquitous in Mormon culture that members have even humorously compiled them into “testimony bingo cards” to be played during the meetings.57Page 162 → In addition to the repetition of common phrases, one other element pervasively appears in Mormon testimonies: crying. Those bearing testimonies frequently pause to keep in their emotions, talk through their tears, or openly weep. One key vocal technique employed by Nauvoo performers is to keep talking through the tears just as if in a formal sharing of a testimony in a Sunday worship service. This tear-talking is a slippage between character and performer that is key in performing the dead. Talking through tears is so effective and expected that it is actually written into scripts to guide the performers to know particular moments when they should most sincerely perform their beliefs. In “Women in Zion,” the main narrator of the vignette welcomes the audience to Nauvoo and describes the temple. Her feelings for the temple bring her to tears, and she pauses to calm herself before asking the audience, “pardon me.” If I had not observed this performer create the moment—tears, pause, “pardon me,” and all—in rehearsal, I might have thought that her emotion in the moment during the actual performance in Nauvoo was real and that her “pardon me” was stepping out of character to apologize for her emotions as an actress.

Yet, while scripted and rehearsed, the pause she took is still evidence of her personal feelings for the temple. The actress reports: What I have learned about doing acting this way and just revealing who I am and my testimony of the temple is that every time I get to look at the temple in the women’s garden and see it through those trees, I really do get emotional, because when I see the temple, I am filled with hope andВ .В .В . I feel that so strongly.58 This participant explained that, for her, the tears are a spiritual confirmation of her own feelings about the gospel first and foremost: “I come seeking for confirmation of truth as well. Confirmation of what I need to be doing. We need that as much as the audience.”59 She cries because she is spiritually moved. The tears are evidence of her sincerity. She is at the pageant to show and do what she believes. Tears are part of the affective process that marks devotion in religious performance. As James Elkins points out in his history of people who have cried in front of paintings: Tears may mislead me, and in some cases I suspect they have. Not all tears signal deep disturbance, and most tears cannot be understood.В .В .В . Page 163 →But tears do one thing that separates them forever from the inarticulate parts of our inner life: they leak from our eyes, and run down our cheeks. They show, without room for doubt, that something has happened. They are witnesses.60 For Mormons, tears are witnesses of a spiritual event where the performers imbue their own beliefs into the beliefs and actions of the character they are playing. A different affective vocalization is utilized by performers on the “Trail of Hope,” a vignette staged by a combination of the core cast and Young Performing Missionaries in Nauvoo. In “Trail of Hope,” audiences walk the same road that was taken by the early Mormons on their exodus west. About a dozen performers are stationed along the road to recreate journal entries from those who were leaving town. One scenario is a selection from the autobiography of Sarah Studevant Leavitt, a Mormon convert whose husband died, leaving her a widow with several children.61 In the performance I saw, a sister missionary told Leavitt’s story in character and then sang Leavitt’s husband’s favorite hymn. The story and the song were tied together with the biblical phrase, “enter into my joy,” and the performance was meant to encourage cheerfulness in the face of hardship. To emphasize her sincerity, the missionary playing Sarah Leavitt expanded all of her vowel sounds: “welcome, on this be-uuu-tiful morning” or put a very heavy emphasis on certain words with pauses for effect: “he sang.В .В .В . as long as he had strength.” She looked directly at the audience that surrounded her, taking care to make eye contact with every audience member, brows furrowed with intent, even leaning forward as if to try and send this gospel message out even more powerfully. This same vocal affect is part of the soundtracks for the prerecorded pageants as well. One of the most constant criticisms I heard from pageant participants was about the quality of the recordings. The Manti Pageant recording is not demonstrably different than it was when it was recorded in the 1970s, and the “new” Hill Cumorah Pageant recording is now thirty years old. To assess the quality of the soundtracks according to contemporary standards finds them lacking in the spontaneity that marks speech patterns of today. Many of the concerns with the recordings might be alleviated simply with new voice talent and sound effects from the twenty-first century. When the Mesa Easter Pageant was newly recorded in 2010, the director specifically coached the voice actor playing the narrator to be “accessible” and Page 164 →to make her tone “conversational.”62 The result is a pageant whose recording is much less declamatory. Even with these updates, the Mesa Easter Pageant soundtrack and the soundtracks for the pageants at the Hill Cumorah and Manti include the markers of vocal sincerity: the extension of vowels, pregnant pauses, and voices quivering with emotion as if tear-talking is being held in check. The result in performance is what one reviewer of the Manti Pageant described as, “sweeping and exaggerated in a theatrical, melodramatic way.”63 However ridiculous this might sound to modern

audiences, there are other ways to gauge efficacy of the vocal narrative style. Henry Bial’s description of sincere performance provides a different way to assess the soundtracks. He explains that sincerity is “an alignment of belief and action.”64 For Bial (quoting Lionel Trilling), “sincerity is a preferable basis for interpersonal relations because in its insistence on вЂthe congruence between avowal and actual feeling,’ sincerity prioritizes the needs of the larger society. At the same time, to those who see human beings as fundamentally flawed or corrupt, sincerity often carries with it connotations of simplicity and innocence. Such innocence (sometime referred to as вЂearnestness’) can be disarmingВ .В .В . it can also seem naГЇve or saccharine.”65 For sincerity to function, the connection between what one believes and how one performs is absolutely necessary. Pageant participants profess an absolute commitment to the performance where they don’t see themselves as acting at all but simply sharing their most heartfelt beliefs. As the Mormon pageant participants engage their own testimonies and use their characters as a means to share their emotions through sincere performance, they proxy for those who might have done the same in the past. The act of bearing testimony functions in pageant performance in much the same way that John Fletcher sees confessions of belief functioning in evangelical performance. Fletcher observes that the most important attribute of an evangelical Christian is “belief on Jesus as Savior and Lord. The latter bespeaks a combination of conviction regarding the authenticity of Christ’s divinity, earthly life, death, and resurrection and trust invested in the efficacy of Christ’s work to forgive and save sinners from Hell, a combination generally articulated through a profession of faith.”66 Pageant participants who share religious convictions with the characters they are playing and with the intended spectators at the performance will have an easier time translating the emotion of a role. However, for them to have the desired spiritual experience, the participants show them their belief. Page 165 →The intent of this performance style is to convince audiences that participants really believe what they are saying and doing is true. Pageant participants believe on three levels. First, they are in role as characters and utilize belief as part of the actor’s craft: endowing a baby doll with life or utilizing emotional recall to evoke real emotion. Second, they believe the theological principles being taught via the stage action or through the direct testimony of the characters. Finally, they believe that their performances have the power to help others better live the gospel of Jesus Christ. The vocal and physical acting choices of pageant performance are constructed to reveal the sincerity of the actor more than the historical reality of the character. Participants who are staged to look directly at the audience, or who have the chance to talk to each other and to spectators, make the choices individually. The utilization of this methodology allows pageant participants to resurrect the past as they act for and in behalf of those they are portraying.

Testimony into Your Muscles Arguably, the most important episode in the Book of Mormon occurs in the Third Book of Nephi; it is certainly one of the first stories told to those unfamiliar with the book (just as I am doing here). At this point in the narrative, the people who had been led by God, centuries before, to the promised land of the Americas, had rejected the Lord. In their disobedience, they also rejected the Lord’s prophets who came to both warn them of the dire consequences if they refused to repent and to prophesy of the impending birth of the Messiah across the ocean in the Old World. The people were given a familiar sign of his birth—a new star in the heavens—and also a sign unique to them—a day and a night and a day without darkness. Very few believed these prophecies, and those who did were about to be put to death by those who didn’t believe. But when the sun went down, the sky didn’t darken. The lives of the believers were saved, but over the next thirty-three years, the miracles associated with the birth of the Savior didn’t prompt repentance. Instead, the people fell into greater wickedness. Political leaders were

assassinated, governments were overthrown, and prophets were murdered. The few remaining faithful in the land began to look forward to a second series of signs—three days of darkness—that would signal the death of Jesus Christ and the reality of his atonement. That sign also came to pass, and it Page 166 →brought with it a “great and terrible destruction” that shook the earth, caused mountains to cover cities and caused other cities to sink into the ocean.67 Once the tumult settled, a voice came to the people out of the darkness: “Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”68 Jesus then descended out of heaven to spend three days with the people in the Americas, ministering to their sick, blessing their children, preaching his gospel, and establishing his church among them as he had in the Old World. This is the crowning moment of the Book of Mormon and an important addendum to Christ’s earthly ministry. Mormons offer this event as evidence that God loves all his children, will establish a personal relationship with them, and invites them all to come unto him. It is also a story rife with dramatic potential—disaster, death, darkness, screams, silence, and then Jesus descending from heaven to bless little children. It is no wonder that this scene is the centerpiece of both the Hill Cumorah and the Manti Pageants. A similarly affective scene occurs in the Mesa Easter Pageant when the resurrected Christ appears to his disciples. Mormon pageantry provides extended representations of a living Christ on stage, interacting with people, talking, eating, and weeping.69 In the Mesa Easter Pageant, participants witness his birth, follow his life growing up with Mary and Joseph, and become disciples throughout his ministry. They see him get baptized, immersed in a river and brought up again, streaming water. Participants watch him perform miracles and are cast in roles of those that are healed. They are invited to the Last Supper; they are with him in the Garden of Gethsemane. They fall reverent and silent during his crucifixion and witness his resurrection. In the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants, participants encounter him as a resurrected being, someone to visit them to show them his love for all his children. They kneel before him, and they reach their arms out to him. He, in turn, blesses them, and he blesses their children. Having a live Jesus Christ on stage in Mormon pageantry provides an opportunity for pageant participants to practice devotional encounters with the living Christ that they worship. Mormon pageantry also helps Mormons work toward exaltation as it provides opportunities for them to enact rituals that help them live the gospel of Christ and redeem the dead through performance. The connections between repeated physical actions and memory are a foundation of ritual practice. Michelle Maize, in her work Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition, argues that consciousness itself is structured by performance: “Moreover, insofar as conscious experience is structured by our Page 167 →bodily dynamics and our sensorimotor interaction with our surroundings, consciousness is not simply something that happens within our brains, but rather something that we do through our living animal bodies and our dynamic bodily engagement with the world.”70 If consciousness is something done through “bodily engagement with the world,” the repetition of actions moves consciousness into permanence. One mother of a family participating in the Mesa Easter Pageant explained this process in this way: They were testifying in their time, we’re testifying in our time through their storyВ .В .В . We’ve had family discussions, where we asked, “Okay, so Jesus actually kicked everyone out of the temple. What would that feel like? Can you imagine? Can you feel that physical force of somebody knocking over tables and throwing money and a whip passing by? Wow.” Just to be able to reenact in a small way really helps you get a testimony into your muscles, into your body.71 For this pageant participant, reenacting moments in Christ’s life is a way of embodying testimony. She frames her testimony as knowledge gained by spiritual means that can be infused into the body. Her thoughts here echo Diane Taylor, who argues in The Archive and the Repertoire that “Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing.”72 Jesus Christ as a character on stage is certainly not an innovation of Mormon pageantry. Christ has been the central figure in liturgical drama since the Middle Ages. In Henry Bial’s Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage, he traces some of the representations of Bible narratives on the most commercial stages in

America. Bial’s work begins with the first, ill-fated attempt of Salmi Morse to stage his great work, The Passion, on a New York stage. This play had an inauspicious beginning with James O’Neill (best known as the father of playwright Eugene O’Neill) being arrested in San Francisco for impersonating Jesus Christ.73 These concerns of the past are no longer a problem in American religious pageants; Jesus is the main character in The Black Mesa Easter Pageant in Kenton, Oklahoma, in the The Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in The Zion Passion Play in Zion, Illinois, and others.74 The character of Jesus appears in contemporary representations of his life like Jesus Christ Superstar, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, or Jesus in India by Lloyd Suh. Stage Page 168 →representations of Christ have come a long way from being legally suspect to being a cameo as a comic effect, as in The Book of Mormon musical, The Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, or End Days by Deborah Zoe Laufer. The character of Christ appears in all of the annual pageants except the Nauvoo Pageant. Obviously, in the Mesa Easter Pageant, Christ is the primary character. In both the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants, Christ appears to the peoples of the Americas as recorded in the Book of Mormon; the Manti Pageant scene seems to have been modeled directly after the scene from the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Finally, in the Mesa Easter and Hill Cumorah Pageants, Christ is represented on the cross during the crucifixion (although in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the image on the cross is a sculpture), and the final image of both pageants is a triumphantly resurrected Christ hovering in the sky.75 The power of having a live Christ on stage is evident in the way that pageant producers, cast members, and audiences relate their discipleship to this encounter with a representation of Christ. Nearly every person I spoke with in pageants explained that actually interacting with Jesus was a highlight of their spiritual experience with the pageant. Many didn’t even differentiate in their descriptions between “an actor playing Jesus” and simply “Jesus.” The pageant participant who played Mary Magdalene in the Mesa Pageant explained this overlap, “When I kneel at the cross I feel like that’s as real as it’s going to feel [when I see Christ again.] There are nights when I feel like, I look at the guy that plays Christ and I think, вЂthat’s not so-andso. That feels like Christ, like I’m seriously really talking to Christ.”76 That there is a possibility of slippage between the character Christ and real Christ in the minds of the pageant participants is confirmed by the strict guidelines that dictate how he can be represented in Mormon pageantry. According to “Portrayal of Deity” in the Church’s Handbook of Instructions, neither God the Father nor the Holy Ghost can be portrayed on stage in Mormon performance, only Jesus Christ. He is to be played by “brethren of wholesome personal characterВ .В .В . with the utmost reverence and dignity.”77 The Savior cannot sing, dance, or say anything other than direct quotations of scripture spoken by Christ. Additionally, the performer playing Christ is not allowed to wear his costume offstage. The FAQ section of the Mesa Pageant answers the question: “Can we get our picture taken with the actors who portray Christ?” with: “Unfortunately, we cannot accommodate this request.”78 Page 169 →If the pageant creators or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as producer, considered the characters in pageants to simply be artful representations, it seems unlikely that there would be such restrictions on how Christ is played. The extensive guidelines reveal instead a perception of Jesus Christ not just as a fictional character but also as a representation of the Son of God. The actors who play Jesus Christ proxy for him, just as do the actors portraying the other less well-known characters that populate the pageants. Every pageant participant who interacts with the Jesus character—either up close (someone playing the apostle Paul, Mary Magdalene, or a blessed child) or far away (angels who trumpet his ascension or crowds who fall down to their knees to worship him)—performs the dead as they act both in role, as the character near Jesus, and as themselves, believers who are striving each day to draw closer to Jesus. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints builds its entire truth claim on a testimony of Jesus Christ—that he lived, was crucified, then was resurrected to a perfected, glorified state, and that he visited Joseph Smith to reorganize his church on earth today in the model of the same church he organized when he was on the earth before. Pageant participants believe that Jesus lives and he will one day return to earth in glory to rule and reign

forever. Of course, pageant participants don’t actually think that the man playing Christ is Christ. Nor do they think that the spirit of Christ possesses the body of the performer as in other religious performances, like shamanic rituals. However, for believers who are trying to follow the example of a living Christ in their daily lives, having a live Christ to actually follow impacts their faith and practice in tangible ways. If, as Mormons believe, gaining a testimony encourages spiritual work to know spiritual things, literally having an encounter with “Christ” makes the spiritual tangible. As the actor playing Mary Magdalene pointed out, Christ on stage “feels like Christ” in large part because she kneels before him each night for weeks in a proxy performance of ritualized devotion. If one strips away all of the cultural trappings of Mormon daily practice, the doctrine reveals itself to be fundamentally grounded in the worship of Jesus Christ, the necessity of following his perfect example, and using his atonement to repent when falling short of that example. The rewards for such obedience are eternal: life after death guaranteed through Christ’s resurrection, and the potentiality of salvation. Pageants provide embodied opportunities to try this obedience on for size and, through the spectacularPage 170 → ending of the pageants, also imagine the exaltation that will reward the righteous. In one of his last General Conference sermons to the entire membership of the Church, the apostle Richard G. Scott reminded members of the importance of acting like Christ: “The greatest example who ever walked the earth is our Savior, Jesus Christ. His mortal ministry was filled with teaching, serving, and loving others. He sat down with individuals who were judged to be unworthy of His companionship. He loved each of them. He discerned their needs and taught them His gospel. He invites us to follow His perfect example.”79 In a General Conference address in 2015, prophet and president Thomas S. Monson reiterated the message and added a consequence of obedience: “As we follow the example of the Savior and live as He lived and as He taught, that light will burn within us and will light the way for others.”80 For all the Christ-centered doctrine and practice of the Church, however, the image of Christ the man, or Christ the glorified being, is not a central focus of Mormon worship. Mormons do not use crosses or images of Christ in their decorations. Most familiar religious images of Christ disseminated by the Church are popular nineteenthcentury paintings by Protestant artists—particularly those of Carl Heinrich Bloch or Heinrich Hoffmann. The work of Mormon artists like Greg Olsen and Liz Lemon Swindle provide Mormons with more updated images of Christ, but the emphasis on the Church is clearly not on understanding him through any kind of artistic representation. Instead, the focus is on creating a personal relationship with the actual, living Christ through prayer and righteous living. Ritualized devotion in pageants becomes a way that participants can also create this personal relationship as they practice their own possible reunion with Christ.

What It Means to Fall down at the Feet of the Savior In Paul Connerton’s seminal How Societies Remember, he outlines how ritual performance creates a shared memory. He suggests that the basic actions of ritual—standing attentively, folding hands as if for prayer, kneeling, or prostrating on the ground—strip away linguistic uncertainty through the limited repertoire of physical gestures generally engaged in ritual. He argues, “The relative sparseness of such actions is their source of strength.”81 As pageant Page 171 →participants repeat actions of encounter—kneeling, raising hands, bowing heads—they ritualize this devotion and encode in it their bodies. Ritualized physical gestures in Mormon pageantry allow pageant participants the opportunity to engage with Christ in physical, material ways. Ritualized devotion resurrects the past as participants perform in role as characters from Christ’s time period, who have died, and as themselves, believers who would kneel before Christ if they were to meet him today. To reenact a scene where the scriptures dictate that crowds of believers fall to the earth to worship Jesus provides even more limited choices in the repertoire: either kneeling or prostrating. While it is not explicit in the scriptures what the ancient peoples would have done on encountering the resurrected Christ, kneeling is the action of choice in pageants. It takes up little space, provides levels for aesthetically pleasing composition, and requires less

physical exertion so everyone can participate. On a stage as large as the ones at the Hill Cumorah or Manti Pageants, those who cannot physically kneel can approximate the devotion by sitting on steps. Connerton continues: “To kneel in subordination is to display it through the visible, present substance of one’s body. Kneelers identify the disposition of their body with their disposition of subordination. Such performative doings are particularly effective, because they are unequivocal and materially substantial ways of вЂsaying’; and the elementariness of the repertoire from which such вЂsayings’ are drawn makes possible at once their performative power and their effectiveness as mnemonic systems.”82 In other words, the basic action of kneeling is a substantial and unequivocal way to say subordination. In Mormon pageantry, those who kneel are acting subordinate. They have been instructed to kneel at a certain time and in a certain way. Their willingness to follow these directions establishes their role in the pageant as characters from the Book of Mormon or the New Testament who were witnesses of Christ. As Connerton points out, the action of kneeling also functions as a mnemonic system for participants to remember their own devotions. They are acting in character but are kneeling themselves, as they would if Christ were in front of them. In this way, the proxy ordinances of the temple ceremony are reversed. In the temple, the living are acting for and in behalf of the dead in a ritual performance where the living overwrite the dead, and they both go through the ceremony. In pageant performance, the dead (the characters) stand as proxy for the living (the participants). The characters on stage being enacted are those who are having the firsthand devotional encounter with Page 172 →Christ. For the characters, this Christ is real. For the participants, playing the characters provides the opportunity to act as if Christ were there. In so doing, they benefit from the actions of the dead. Pageant participants are establishing for themselves a willingness to subordinate their devotions before the Christ that lives in their hearts. The moment when Christ comes to visit the peoples of America is considered the “100 percent scene” for the Hill Cumorah Pageant directing team. They want every single pageant participant to have the opportunity to perform kneeling worship of Jesus Christ. At the Manti Pageant, similar efforts have been made to allow as many people as possible the chance to be in this scene. In 2000, the inaugural year for the scene, pageant director Ivo Peterson explained the efforts the pageant team went through to provide this experience for a large crowd: The challenge was to create a scene that carried the impact of Christ’s visit in America within a narrow eight-minute time frame. We attempted to integrate the scene in such a way that viewers could tell no difference from when the original script ended, and when it began again after the new scene.В .В .В . With only twelve minutes between the end of this scene and the beginning of the pioneer scene that followed, we needed costumes that would be workable for both scenes.В .В .В . In about two weeks designers had to make another 140 costumes. They were completed just before the pageant began.83 Clearly, the efforts to fill the stage with people for this scene are practical—in such large playing spaces, the more people there are, the more impressive the scene, and the scene of Jesus Christ visiting the peoples of the Americas is most impressive. It also provides a verisimilitude to the reconstruction of the Book of Mormon scriptural account, which references many people who witnessed Christ’s descent from heaven to preach to his people in the Americas. But most important is the ability for as many participants as possible to have the opportunity to kneel before Christ. Theater scholar James A. Bell teases out the ritual implications of pageant performance in his work on the Hill Cumorah Pageant. He argues, “participants come to be a part of the Cumorah sacred celebrations, to join in with other like-minded people as part of a cultural celebration, a religious cause with perceived benefits for those involved.В .В .В . The pageant participants are the members of the Mormon community at the pageant who literally Page 173 →don the mask; they are the cultural, ritual performers who recreate and perform the sacred stories.”84 In Mormon pageantry, particularly in moments that require kneeling before Jesus Christ, as in the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants, the participants’ ritualized movements serve as a bridge between past, present, and future.

The director responsible in 2010 for organizing the Christ in the New World scene in the Hill Cumorah Pageant described the process of performing the dead to the cast in a devotional on the first Sunday of the rehearsal period. She started by quoting the scripture in the Book of Mormon that documents his visit: “And when they had all gone forth and had witnessed for themselves, they did cry out with one accord saying, вЂHosanna, blessed be the name of the most High God.’ And they did fall down at the feet of Jesus and did worship him.”85 She then turned the focus onto the cast: You get to imitate that motion, that action, that actual historical event in the Book of Mormon. Not all of you will get to actually, technically feel the actor’s hands portraying the Savior, but you all will get to feel the Spirit of that: what it means to fall down at the feet of the Savior, and worship him, and say “Blessed be the name of the most High God.” My prayer is that while doing this scene you can have a strengthened testimony, and with that strengthened testimony, will be able to share that with those that come to see this performance, and also those around you, and that we can become that Zion community and strengthen one another through this scene.86 The director’s comments foreground the importance of actually doing what the scriptures say, rather than just reading and imagining. The imitation, she suggests, is a means of strengthening testimony through a physical experience that will prompt spiritual knowledge. She tells the cast that she hopes they will use the actions to “feel the Spirit” of what it means to touch his hands or to fall down and worship Jesus Christ. The director began by discussing this acting moment in terms of the past, what she called the “actual historical event in the Book of Mormon.” As she continued, however, her verbs slipped between past and present, revealing how pageant participants are not only reenacting the past but also enacting present belief. In an essay in Lance Gharavi’s excellent collection, Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Religion, Theatre, and Performance, Ronald L. Grimes builds a definition of ritual on the theories of Singer, Geertz, Goffman, Turner, and Page 174 →Schechner. He insists that ritual is not performance in the same way that acting is and that the efforts of scholars to flatten this distinction by rendering everything as “performance” deny the specificity of ritual. Grimes defines ritual as embodied, or a human action that is done with the body. It is condensed and elevated beyond daily behaviors. It is prescribed by very specific rules that dictate what should and shouldn’t be done. Finally, it is enacted. Grimes uses this verb to differentiate from acting/performing, which is pretending. Enacting suggests putting something into force, or making something happen.87 Figure 7. The righteous of the Book of Mormon having fallen to the ground before Jesus Christ in the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Photo by M. Christine Gibson. The resistance of Grimes to calling everything performance echoes what I’m suggesting. Pageant participants perform the dead when provided staging that requires ritual actions. As Grimes says, they are not acting, which is pretending. They are taking upon themselves the roles of those who have gone before and are infusing, in this reenactment, their own present testimonies. At the same time, they are not not acting, as pageants aren’t religious rituals or temple ordinances. They are theatrical performances, and they are all the more powerful for the sheer numbers of pageant participants who all kneel together. The overlap between living and dead and ritual and performingPage 175 → arts in these performances is enhanced through some of the theatrical choices made in pageants when participants encounter Jesus. As the participants in Mormon pageants train their bodies to kneel together in the same way, at the same time, each night for over a week, they take their own bodies back into the past in a ritualistic performance that resurrects that past into the present.

It Is Not a Play, It Is Real! In 1936, long before he was called as the prophet and president of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinckley explained to a radio producer his goal for the future of Mormon heritage sites: As I stood on these historic spots pictures of dusty wagon trains, of weary handcart pioneers, of graves dug in the prairie while wolves stood by, of old men dropping from exhaustion and young men winking at bonneted girls, of a hundred voices singing “Come, Come, Ye Saints” and Pitts

brass band playing music for a dance—these and a thousand other pictures passed before my mind’s eye. There’s a story in every mile of that trail, and as I stood there over the graves of men and women who had walked a thousand miles over all kinds of ground, I felt that their story is deserving of a better telling than we are giving it. . . . The job now before us is to make the drama as vital as the real thing was.88

While his comments refer specifically to the graves of Mormon pioneers, they could equally apply to the graves of the Book of Mormon dead, or the dead at the time of Jesus. In fact, the very next year saw the inaugural production of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a production whose purpose was to make the drama of the Book of Mormon “as vital as the real thing was.” Indeed, Hinckley’s vision has been achieved by all four of the annual Mormon pageants; they are all performances whose job it is to make the past come alive again. Mormon participants resurrect the past as they perform the dead. A speaker explained the power of this performance in a Mesa Pageant devotional. He drew direct connections between pageant work and temple work. He explained that in the temple, “we do work for people who have passed away—we are acting in proxy for someone who was really there.”89 He then Page 176 →reminded the pageant cast of the LDS doctrine of premortal life, where all people live before coming to earth. In this conception of eternity, we were all conscious beings and witnesses to the past from our position as spirits before birth. He continued, “I would ask and I would pray that you transition into who you really are, what you really saw, what you really know. Because you were there! Whether it be in the role of a child or the role of an adult, maybe friend or foe. Brothers and Sisters, it is not a play, it is real. And you were there! .В .В .В The people who you are acting as proxy for saw the very things that you will. They witnessed with their own lives; their tears flowed freely, and so will yours.”90 His observation ties together the various means by which Mormon pageantry works for exaltation: the acts of devotion, the sincerity of belief, ritualized actions which strengthen testimony, and a relationship with the spirits on the other side of the veil. Mormon pageant participants stand in for these spirits in material and metaphorical ways. Proxy performance occurs when performers ritualize gesture through repeated actions in rehearsals and on stage. In so doing, they take on themselves and into themselves devotions that pull the past forward into the present. As those who were disciples of Christ knelt in his time, so too do his disciples today kneel before him. The act of kneeling, raising hands, and reaching for Christ puts into the body a way of knowing his disciples in the past and knowing him today. These acts of devotion that resurrect the past are performed by pageant participants in a performance style that foregrounds sincerity above all. The more earnestly pageant participants indicate their sincerity, the more connected they are to the testimonies they are trying to bear—testimonies that are identical to the testimonies of the characters they are playing. At the callbacks for the Young Performing Missionary (YPM) program in 2013, in addition to solo singing, group singing, and dancing, those called back were invited to share with the directors the reason that they were auditioning. In the session I attended, one young man (who was subsequently selected to be a YPM) said that he was applying because of an experience he had walking the “Trail of Hope” the year before. Sarah Studevant Leavitt, a character in the “Trail of Hope,” is his great-great-great-great-grandmother. He said that, as he walked the trail “in her name,” he realized that his ancestors were alive in him. He said, “I know my ancestors are pushing me to go [on a mission to Nauvoo]. They are real. They can’t do without us and we can’t do without them.”91 His use of the term “real” refers not just to the Page 177 →facts of their earlier existence but to their continued influence beyond on the grave in the lives of the faithful. Using the term “do” instantiates action in time. In Mormon pageantry, the dead and the living both share their witness of divine truths. These actors from both sides of the veil come together in a single, overlapping performance of testimony intended to influence those who watch. It is the fervent desire of faithful Mormons that performances will impact others, from their families and those they share the experience with to the historical characters who feel of their love and respect. However, it is

clear that performing the dead has the greatest impact on those who perform. As they act offstage in ways that mirror their onstage performances and open themselves to the influence of their kindred dead, they work toward their own exaltation and become saviors themselves.

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Chapter 5 Performing with the Dead Feeling the Spirit of Holy Ghosts If you have felt the Spirit, and we are trying our hardest to give our spirit and the spirit of those that went before us, then the audience sees our spirit and maybe even subconsciously, it gives them the faith to say, oh she has a spirit, maybe I can receive that myself. Then that is when the floodgates are opened for the Heavenly Father to pour out the Spirit on them and what they need. —A participant in the Nauvoo Pageant, 2013 The Nauvoo Pageant opens with Parley P. Pratt doing a double take when he realizes that there are spectators watching him walk across the stage. He turns and speaks directly to them in a very conversational way. Pratt explains his presence in front of modern-day spectators with the widely advertised tagline for the Nauvoo Pageant: “When you’re here, we’re here.”1 The implication is that the spectators, by their presence, have invoked the past in such a way that they have brought the dead Parley P. Pratt back to life. Pratt’s reanimated figure remembers “this very meadow” that the spectators are sitting on. He recalls walking through “this grove of trees over here” to hear the voice of his wife calling him.2 The spectators are made deeply aware that they are literally on land where Parley P. Pratt walked, and they are invited to see the actor playing Pratt as part of that authentic history. After Pratt has welcomed the spectators to Nauvoo, the stage directions describe the entrance of the rest of the core cast: “One by one the principal characters silently walk onto the stage, observing the audience in a warm and welcoming way.” Pratt’s opening monologue becomes more personal: “You see, when you’re here, we’re here also—Because we are in you. Some of what you are now is because of what we areВ .В .В . what we became—here, in this place—in this beautiful city called Nauvoo.”3 The script requires Page 180 →that this moment establish an intimate connection between performers and spectators. The audience (participants and spectators together) is invited, in a “warm and welcoming way,” to see themselves as part of the story of Nauvoo and to feel the presence of the characters in their hearts—“because we are in you.”4 Part of the effectiveness of the opening moment of the pageant when I attended in 2013 was the performance of the actor playing Parley P. Pratt. A very handsome actor in his finely wrought historical costume, complete with his own long hair and period-shaped beard, it was not hard to enter into the world he said the spectators have brought to life. The careful modulation of his voice, with rich tones and dramatic pauses, emphasized important moments of his narrative, and cued for the audience the fact that he is feeling something important. Pratt remembers that his wife used to call him home, and a female voiceover calls, “Parley!!!” He remembers his children running, and the audience hears children’s voices as the actor pantomimes gathering his children in for an embrace. The actor lingered in this moment—indicating to the spectators both his love for his children, a nostalgia for the past, and how the idea of family brings his emotions close to the surface. The actual bodies of Pratt’s family are not represented in the opening of the pageant because in 2013, they were already gone. He can only hear the echo of who might have been there in the past. Their ghostly presence reminds the spectators that Nauvoo is primarily a site, filled with ancestral spirits, that commemorates sacrifice and loss. It also serves as a literal means to encourage the audience to participate in the recreation of the past as they envision the family that is being evoked through sound and gesture. Only as the audience is present and engaged (“when you’re here”) can Pratt bring the dead to life again (“we’re here”), and the pageant stage can be flooded with performers from both sides of the veil.

The conduit for the imaginative relationship between participants and spectators is the Holy Spirit—the Spirit or the Holy Ghost. In Mormon pageantry, inviting the presence of the Holy Ghost is both a doctrinal injunction and a performance imperative. The Holy Ghost can only be one’s constant companion as one works to remain worthy of his presence through obedience both to God’s commandments and to the promptings that the Holy Ghost sends to encourage right action. Pageant participants and spectators seek the companionship of the Holy Ghost to inspire and fortify their experiences. They also create experiences for themselves where the Holy Ghost might be particularly welcome to provide that inspiration. As they Page 181 →open themselves to the influence of the Spirit, they also open themselves up for other ghostly visitations. Mormon pageantry is not just haunted by the Holy Ghost but also holy ghosts that pass through the veil to inspire and encourage individual performances. The feelings sent by God via the Spirit are described very clearly in the Doctrine and Covenants, the Mormon scripture collection of modern-day revelations. In one section, the Lord explains to Joseph Smith exactly how revelation works: “But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right. But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings.В .В .В .”5 This scripture, oft-cited in Mormon theology, suggests a number of unique doctrines. First, revelation is available to anyone who truly seeks answers from the divine. Second, revelation is a process that requires the effort of the believer to study out an issue, make a considered decision on it, then go to God for confirmation. Finally, God responds through the feelings of the believer—a “burning bosom” to indicate approbation and a “no such feelings” to indicate disapproval.6 In more recent Mormon discourse, this connection of feelings to inspiration has broadened to include any time the Holy Ghost witnesses to an individual. Dallin H. Oaks, a Mormon apostle, explained this principle in a sermon at a semi-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: [T]hat good feeling you have felt during the messages and music of this conference is a confirming witness of the Spirit, available to faithful members on a continuing basis. A member once asked me why he felt so good about the talks and music in a sacrament meeting, while a guest he had invited that day apparently experienced no such feeling. This is but one illustration of the contrast between one who has the gift of the Holy Ghost and is in tune with his promptings and one who has not, or is not.7 Oaks suggests that the “good feeling” is the spiritual witness that something is good, right, true, and of God. It is a necessary condition to achieve the four stated purposes of the Church: the Holy Ghost inspires members to better live the gospel of Jesus Christ; the Holy Ghost testifies of the truthfulness of the gospel to those who are investigating the Church to see if they Page 182 →might want to convert and join; the Holy Ghost motivates members to care for the poor and needy by revealing those who are in particular need; and finally, the Holy Ghost prompts members to seek out their kindred dead and redeem them through temple work. In this chapter, I explore how Mormon pageant participants and spectators perform with the dead when they feel the Spirit of the Holy Ghost and are moved upon by spirits. Feeling the Spirit resurrects the past because the Holy Ghost’s power to witness, testify, remind, and provide hope is what makes Mormon pageantry effective. Without the inspiration of the Holy Ghost and the influence of ghosts, Mormon pageantry is no more than spectacular religious theater. When Mormons perform with these spirits, however, they resurrect the past by strengthening the relationship between the living and the dead to prepare for exaltation. I begin by outlining how the Holy Ghost functions in Mormon theology, particularly the relationship between emotion and the Spirit. Then I discuss how Mormon pageantry invites the Holy Ghost through the creation of a unified, if imagined, community made up of both the participants and the spectators that is particularly open to feeling the Spirit. Next, I focus on two theatrical conventions of pageantry that are particularly successful in helping pageant participants and spectators feel the spirit. First, Mormon pageants use spectacle to inspire wonder and reverence, which, in turn, invites the Spirit. Second, Mormon pageantry encourages emotion through an elaborate use of music to encourage the presence of the Spirit.

I next explore how Mormon pageantry is performed at the behest of ghosts who inspire and promote performance. Finally, I examine how the live event of pageantry requires participants and spectators together to confront their own relationship to the future where they may meet the dead they have worked to redeem. The Holy Ghost aids in this spiritual process by prompting new knowledge and confirming received truths. When Mormons in and at pageants feel the Spirit, they fully engage in the redemption of the dead. This allows them to look forward to a future where they and their ancestors will live together forever.

There Is a Lot of Feeling the Spirit Pageant participants believe that being in a pageant opens them up to connect with God through the Holy Ghost and to feel the Spirit. If it is true, as Page 183 →I argue, that participants performing on Mormon pageant stages are doing real spiritual work that will help them achieve exaltation, it begs the question of how they know if the work is working. The method by which Mormons code their proximity to the truth and confirm their beliefs is in the way that they feel inside as inspired by the Holy Ghost. Mormons believe that the Holy Ghost can help them achieve their performance goals and will testify of the truthfulness of the religious message of the production. As a man playing a shepherd in the Mesa Easter Pageant explained, “There is a differenceВ .В .В . in previous years we’d be in the audience, and there’s a lot of feeling the Spirit in the audience. But then being in the pageant itself takes you to the next level of that Spirit that you feel because you really actually experience and see scene by scene what Christ went through. For me, it’s a bigger impact upon my testimony and the feelings that I have for my Savior.”8 This participant describes his experiences both as an audience member and a pageant participant in terms of the ability to feel the Spirit. In the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Holy Ghost is a spirit without flesh and bones. With God the Father and Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost is a member of the Godhead. Mormons believe these three are separate and distinct beings who are one in purpose and work together to bring to pass God’s plan for his children.9 The Holy Ghost is often referred to as the Spirit, the Spirit of the Lord, or the Comforter. His specific role in the Godhead is to be the presence of the Lord for an individual. By virtue of his incorporeality, he can enter into the heart or the soul to testify of truth, warn of danger, comfort sorrow, prompt righteous action, and reveal God’s will.10 Mormons believe that every human being is blessed with the light of Christ or the spirit of Christ, which is in all people and all things. It helps everyone discern right from wrong. The Book of Mormon explains: “For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God.”11 This spirit is a guiding light or inner compass that helps navigate moral choices. The Spirit of the Lord or the Holy Ghost, however, is different. It is not a sensitivity but an actual being who can inspire feelings. For Mormons, the presence of the Holy Ghost is a gift bestowed only upon those Mormons who have been baptized and confirmed a member of the Church of Jesus Page 184 →Christ of Latter-day Saints. Confirmation is a rite performed when worthy priesthood holders lay their hands on a newly baptized member’s head to present them with the Holy Ghost and give them a blessing. The member receives and can retain the constant presence of the Holy Ghost throughout their lives only if they are obedient to the commandments of God.12 Latter-day Saints must be worthy in order to have the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost. Mormon believers identify the presence of the Spirit through emotional cues. These are suggested both in scripture and through oral tradition. A central LDS scripture reveals the connection between feelings and the spirit. In a revelation to Joseph Smith, the Lord explains, “I will tell you in heart and in your mind by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.”13 The Spirit is identified variously and repetitively in Mormon scriptures, sermons, and curriculum as a “still small voice,” a peaceful, calm feeling, or a “burning in the bosom.”14 Negative promptings from the Holy Ghost are described in Mormon vernacular as a “stupor of thought.”15

The Holy Spirit’s presence is a primary aspect of Mormon pageantry. Feeling the Spirit is the means by which those experiencing Mormon pageants receive and interpret the performance they are attending. Mormon pageant audiences look for these emotional signs of the Spirit from their experience. It is clear from my observations at all of the Mormon pageants that both participants and spectators are emotionally moved during pageants. Audiences break into song with cast members, families hug each other during tender moments, and many, both onstage and watching the performance, weep. Understanding the reason for the emotional outpouring, however, is complicated. Do the spectators cry because they are feeling the Spirit, or cry because the production’s spectacle encourages tender emotions? I have observed that emotional responses to the Spirit are nearly indistinguishable from the affective response that accompanies emotional performance. Secular performance can also move audience members to laughter, terror, and tears through the careful manipulation of the elements of theater. Music, lighting, acting, story, and compositional choices all have the ability to evoke strong emotion. In Mormon pageantry, these elements are employed to create an atmosphere where audience members are open to either feel the Spirit or to have an emotional experience that can be read as spiritual. The phenomena of emotional outpourings as a sign of spiritual sensitivity is so pervasive that Mormon rhetoric at times reverses the cause and effect: congregants are advised (as in the Oaks quote above) that if they feel emotional Page 185 →in a spiritual setting, they must be feeling the Spirit.16 Mormon pageantry is built on the premise that the relationship between emotions and a spiritual witness are inexorably linked; feeling emotions is simultaneously a conduit to invite the Spirit and a sign of the Spirit’s presence. Joseph B. Wirthlin, a Mormon apostle, preached a sermon on the Holy Ghost entitled, “The Unspeakable Gift.” In it, he counseled: “When we are confirmed [given the gift of the Holy Ghost after baptism], we are given the right to the companionship of the Holy Ghost, but it is a right that we must continue to earn through obedience and worthiness. We cannot take this gift for granted.”17 Wirthlin clearly states a basic gospel principle guiding Mormon encounters with the Holy Spirit—the Spirit is not something that comes unbidden but is something that takes effort to maintain. In pageants, where the spiritual message is the full purpose, each element of the production is carefully crafted to provide an atmosphere where the Holy Spirit can participate. An assistant director to the Nauvoo Pageant, who also has performed as a core cast member, explained, “I was counting last night, I think I’ve watched or been in the show almost 200 times and so you know—it’s not a creative theater experience. It’s a reaffirming of the spiritual principles that are taught every night. That is what makes it incredible for the observer because you’re not having the theatrical experience as much as you are being taught the gospel by the Spirit, and that is refreshing each time.”18 Her observation here puts the focus on the theatrical labor to create an environment where spiritual principles can be taught through the elements of theater. Henry Bial argues that there is a range of theatrical elements that can be deployed to help audiences connect emotionally to a religious play. He suggests: “When spectators are conditioned by the play’s subject matter to expect a religious experience, this embodied response may be experienced as a distinctly spiritual moment of transcendence, wherein spectators feel connected to the divine.”19 In Mormon pageantry, much like the more traditional plays and musicals Bial discusses, a wide range of techniques, from audience participation to spectacle and music, are used to help audiences engage their belief and feel connected to the Spirit.

Where Two or Three Are Gathered in His Name One of the key features of Mormon pageantry is the immense crowds that pilgrimage to attend the performances. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands,Page 186 → of spectators gather together in metal folding chairs or on their own camp chairs or even blankets on the lawn each night to watch the show. As I detailed in chapter one, the Hill Cumorah Pageant averages about 4,500 spectators each night (the same as both the Clarkston and Castle Valley Pageants). The Nauvoo Pageant audience is the smallest at 1,700, then the Manti Pageant records roughly 9,400, and the Mesa Easter Pageant is attended by more than 11,000 each night. The awe-inspiring participation in this audience experience is another way that pageants work to help everyone feel the Spirit. Mormon pageantry is nothing if not excessive, and I maintain that the awe inspired by being part of this large-

scale audience has its own emotional charge that can bring the Holy Ghost. This charge is especially powerful the more closely the various spectators begin to see themselves as a unified audience, participating in the pageant experience with those around them and even those on stage. The audience at a pageant (spectators and participants combined) can be a unified community that allows individuals to participate in a shared experience, regardless of the unique encounter that they may have with a production. While audience members may have different affective responses and interpret a production differently, there is still pleasure and power in the sense of being there together. Common sense suggests that there is no such thing as a theatrical audience in the singular. Gay McAuley, in her seminal work on theater space, wryly notes that the “English language provides us with a collective noun audience but then rather confusingly tells us that an audience is made up of spectators, as though hearing were a communal act but seeing an individual one.”20 If theatrical meaning is dependent on a different affective response for each individual spectator in an audience, it seems ill-advised to discuss the audience as a singular presence. However, the shared sense of community created in large venues—rock concerts, rallies, public ceremonies, or pageants—allows participants to imagine that they are in contact with the entire group, potentially more people than they have ever connected with in their lives, even if realistically this is impossible. The result is an imagined community where each individual, as Benedict Anderson explains, “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”21 Anderson’s use of the word communion echoes biblical descriptions of the unity that comes from a community of Christians, working together with a shared faith toward a shared goal of exaltation. Famously, Paul describesPage 187 → this community in an epistle to the Ephesians: “Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of theВ householdВ of God.”22 Modern-day Mormon leaders urge a similar unity. In a recent sermon, Henry B. Eyring, the first counselor in the First Presidency of the LDS Church, reminded listeners: “The Lord’s prophets have always called for unity. The need for that gift to be granted to us and the challenge to maintain it will grow greater in the days ahead, in which we will be prepared as a people for our glorious destiny.”23 Both in the times of the Bible and today, a key element of the unification of the saints is how this unity is a crucible for an increase of the Spirit. As Paul explained, the strangers and foreigners who make up the fellowcitizens of saints are unified in Christ: “For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.”24 I saw this theology performed when the Nauvoo Young Performing Missionaries sang Invocation, the mission’s theme song: “Where two or three are gathered / In His name, in His name / There shall He be in the midst of them / The midst of them that love him.”25 Key for this message is the notion of groups and gathering. The promise of these missionaries was that if the audience loves Christ, he would send the Spirit to be with them. The missionaries, through their performance style, modeled for the audience that they too were a group that loved Christ; the implication was that therefore the Spirit was already with them. In this way, the song was intended to transcend from a scriptural homily to a literal invocation where the Holy Spirit was called into their midst.26 In the performances I witnessed, I could tell that the YPMs wanted me, and the others in the audience, to know how very much they believed these lyrics. The message was for us; we were being told that when a group was gathered in the name of Christ, just as we were in that meeting, he would be in the midst of them. The Spirit would testify of his presence through the mechanisms of emotion (a warmth in the chest, a beating heart, a feeling of peace). As I scanned the room, it usually seemed as if that had happened. Audience members were visibly moved by the performance, with flushed cheeks, constricted brows, or tears. These emotions were later coded as evidence that the Spirit had in fact joined us. This technique of gathering, inviting the spirit, and then building on the group dynamic to feel the spirit occurs in Mormon pageantry in a number of related ways. One way pageants create an extended community that can channel the Spirit is as audience members encounter each other throughout the day in Page 188 →adjacent Church history sites. As I discussed in chapter three, Nauvoo, Illinois, is very much a destination tourist site, as are Manti, Utah, and Palmyra, New York. One has to

make serious efforts to get to any of these pageant locations. In the case of Nauvoo, one must fly into one of the several closest airports then drive for hours, take an extended road trip, or participate in a commercially sponsored Church History Tour that takes busloads of tourists to Nauvoo. The audiences who attend these performances have spent considerable resources of time and money to be there. One does not just stumble onto Nauvoo. However, in the summer, the streets are full of tourists exploring Historic Nauvoo and attending all the theater on offer there. In the week I spent in Nauvoo, I was not alone in my planning and performance attendance. I started to recognize other audience members who were following the outlined schedule that I was in order to catch as many plays and vignettes as possible. I am a middle-aged, upper-middle class, white Mormon woman. In Nauvoo, I wore comfortable clothes and walking shoes, and carried a backpack equipped with a camera, brochures, a water bottle, sunscreen, and bug spray. The town seemed full of tourists or, in what I recorded in my field notes, people “just like me.”27 The Nauvoo performance schedule at its peak in July is complicated enough to require a detailed outline of when and where each performance starts so that visitors can plan their days accordingly. I found that it took two full days and some fast walking between venues to catch every show and still make it to the evening pageant. Production administrators publicly state that Nauvoo is not a “Mormon Branson,” but the tongue-in-cheek delivery of this pronouncement suggests that the comparison is not out of place. In my encounters with other visitors, audience communities formed as we waited in line before performances and made small talk, shared information about where we were from, and usually also shared our connections to Nauvoo. This kind of casual conversation between visitors happens in Palmyra as well, where pageant audiences will spend the day at the Smith Family Homestead, the Sacred Grove, and the Grandin Press Building before attending the pageant. In Manti, the community hosts special lectures and events, arts and crafts booths, and sidewalk sales for visitors before the pageant, and now has a new national heritage park where pageant spectators might meet throughout the day. As audience members move through these spaces together, they participate in both material and spiritual events that can serve as a basis for an imagined community. For example, in Nauvoo, at the Joseph Smith historic Page 189 →sites in upstate New York, or at any of the temple visitor’s centers, missionaries are on site to interpret the historical site. After giving historical presentations, missionaries are scripted to share their testimonies in the hope that the spectators will then feel the Spirit. The cumulative effect of these shared spiritual moments in sacred spaces helps bind audiences together, an experience that is enhanced in the evening as they attend a pageant set on location where they have spent the day. The sense of community formation in pageants is heightened by other experiences that immediately precede the pageant proper. Pageants don’t start until sunset, which in the summer is around 9:00 p.m., to make the most use of the night sky to help focus lights and contrast special effects.28 Frequently, families or other groups will plan to spend the evening at a pageant, for practical reasons—to find good parking and save seats—as much as anything else. As a result, those who are sitting next to each other by choice or chance have time together to talk, share experiences, and, importantly, to share a meal. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, many visitors will purchase food from the Rotary/Lions concessions tents set up outside of the pageant; salt potatoes, a regional recipe where new potatoes are boiled skin-on in heavily salted water, then served covered in melted butter, are a particular crowd favorite.29 Manti boasts a “world famous” barbequed turkey dinner at local churches for visitors. Nauvoo only has a total of five small restaurants, and large portions of the pageant audience head to Annie’s Frozen Custard, which stays open late in July to accommodate pageant visitors. Even at the Mesa Pageant, with its location in the heart of a large metropolitan area that makes the opportunity for chance encounters with pageant audiences unlikely, audiences come early to the pageant to walk the temple grounds, go through the visitor’s center, and eat before the pageant begins. My first night at the Mesa

Pageant, I sat on a blanket on the side of the audience and noticed that I was one of the only ones I could see near me without food. Audience members had pizza, picnic baskets, and coolers of soda and popsicles that they ate before and during the pageant. Sharing a meal is a primary means of cultural identification and community building. In her analysis of food practices and community self-identification, Andrea Wenzel argues: “Through our likes, dislikes, preferences, and practices, we signify and communicate through the food items themselves.В .В .В . At the same time, pathways for the production and consumption of food draw conglomerate communities into proximity, opening Page 190 →potential opportunities for interaction in вЂtranscultural spaces,’ if not necessarily understanding.”30 Sharing a meal at pageants provides an imagined space of unity for all spectators. For Mormons, it invokes other foodways like regular blessings over meals, congregational potlucks, or even perhaps, the weekly participation in the sacrament ritual where all members of the congregation eat from the same loaf of bread. Communities also form at pageants in accommodations where families or groups stay in one of the few hotels in the smaller towns or even (especially in Manti and Palmyra) camp overnight. Mormon pageant spectators meet, separate, and meet again. In every encounter, they strengthen the bond between themselves, those they are participating with, and everyone else in the audience. The smaller encounters allow pageant spectators to imagine a larger community that finally comes together with the thousands that attend the pageant together. Every Mormon pageant starts with a prayer. The spectators, largely made of Mormons for whom praying is an integral part of daily practice, easily conform to this pageant prologue. After all, Mormons pray at all Churchsponsored performances, at the beginning and end of each of the three church meetings attended every Sunday, and even at the start of BYU football games. They pray before every meal, each morning and night as families, and at least once a day in private contemplation. Pageant participants also pray privately before each pageant, both in their devotional services and again in their cast or family groups right before going on stage. The prayer at the beginning of a pageant is therefore neither remarkable nor out of place for most of those attending. Pageant prayers are not introduced other than to announce who will be saying them. Children are quieted and the normal preshow conversation hushes. For most pageants, this invocation signals the beginning of the pageant in much the same way the dimming of the lights might in an indoor theatrical production; the end of the prayer is the cue to begin the pageant. It is a unifying moment when thousands of people all bow their heads and fold their arms, without direction or coaching. It is also a moment for direct invitation for the Spirit to attend the pageant. Those who offer the prayers invariably ask God to send the Holy Ghost to touch the hearts and minds of those participating in and watching the pageant. Audiences, whether in their seats to watch or waiting backstage to perform, conclude the prayer until joining in with an audible and communal “amen” at the finish of the prayer. These community-building experiences of pageant audiences as they see Page 191 →each other around town, share activities in interpretive centers, and dine or lodge together create a sense of unity across all pageant participants. The invocation of this unity is strengthened by the group prayer that begins each pageant. As this invocation turns the thousands of individual voices into one, the imagined community formed through a variety of pageant events and the awe at its scope invites pageant audiences to feel the message of the past and be inspired by the Spirit to prepare for the future.

The Spirit of a George Lucas Techno-Dazzler The New York Times review of the new Hill Cumorah Pageant in 1988 ran with the title “Pageant Gets Real Fire and a Flying Jesus.” The article covered some of the major changes to the pageant from language usage to running time, but paid particular interest to the spectacle, calling it “a pageant performed with the spirit of a George Lucas techno-dazzler and the scope of a Cecil B. DeMille epic.” The article lists some of these “techno-dazzlers”: “Complementing the new script by Orson Scott Card, a science fiction writer, will be a battery of special effects devised by Keith Richins, who orchestrated the high-tech tricks in вЂRobocop,’

вЂRambo III’ and вЂRed Dawn.’ They include a nine-ton, hydraulically controlled ship, waterfalls, explosions, real fire and a flying Jesus.”31 Nearly twenty years later, another review of the pageant in the Times again focused on the spectacle, assuring readers, “The special effects were as remarkable as advertised: on the ocean voyage the sail was rent as if by lightning as a deluge of water soaked the stage, and prophets and heretics alike were burned at the stake with flames that reached as high as 10 or 15 feet.”32 Four years after that, the same thing: “With its cast of 700, 1,300 costumes, 10-level stage and thrill-a-minute special effects of earthquakes, floods, fireballs, airborne deities and burnings at the stake, the annual Hill Cumorah Pageant, one could argue, has more in common with the spectacle of вЂSpider-Man’ than with the merry snark of вЂThe Book of Mormon.’”33 The Hill Cumorah Pageant is not alone in its impressive use of special effects to wow audiences. The Mesa Pageant includes a host of live animals, as well as a fully enacted crucifixion, with its accompanying dramatic lighting storms and earthquakes. The Manti Pageant features casts of nine hundred, an exploding volcano, spirits floating in air, and an angel appearing suddenly on the top of the Manti Temple. The Nauvoo Pageant doesn’t Page 192 →employ technical special effects but does include spectacular scenes of the raising of the Nauvoo Temple as well as emotionally charged melodramatic tableaux. Spectators at the pageants are treated to animals, children, fire, flight, crowds, volcanoes, storms, battles, water curtains, visions, falling rocks, feathered headdresses, processionals, ghosts, miracles, shafts of light, resurrections, choirs of angels, and yes, a flying Jesus. Mormon pageantry is spectacular. In addition to wowing audiences, however, the great of use of spectacle in the annual pageants opens up an affective space for the Spirit to enter in. In Mormon pageantry, spectacular performance invites an emotional response, which in turn engages the Holy Spirit. In her award-winning work, Spectacles of Reform, Amy Hughes makes a compelling argument for the value of spectacle, not just to amuse, thrill, shock, titillate, or invigorate the audience but as a methodology to directly confront a society’s hidden ideologies. For Hughes, spectacle occurs when an event, an image, or a presentation of skill exceeds what is expected as possible for the space or time. Spectacle, she argues, “capitalizes on the sensational and the profane, embracing what is deliberately hidden or secretly imagined and giving it material form. In essence, it renders visible the invisible; it makes sensation seen.”34 In so doing, spectacle moves from decoration to provocation; spectators (and I would add participants, too) are inspired to reform themselves and society in what Hughes calls the “spectacular instant,” a “heightened, fleeting, and palpable moment in performance that captivates the spectator through multiple planes of engagement.”35 Hughes outlines the process of this captivation: reform is possible when affect from spectacle enters into bodies that feel. Affect, or “vibrant, sensorial, palpable response to external stimuli,” precedes the emotion, or how one feels. The body is both the sender and the receiver of the spectacular instant.36 In Mormon pageantry, the bodies of the participants are closely aligned with the bodies of the spectators as both share the fundamental belief that the things they feel are a primary indicator that God is with them. Mormon audiences believe that their feelings are a sign of the Holy Ghost. The emotions prompted by spectacle in Mormon pageantry are therefore caught up in an additional interpretive mechanism: reform is possible when affect from spectacle enters into bodies that feel by the power of the Holy Ghost. There are a myriad of spectacular moments in sensational scenes, emotional intensity, and stylistic excess. In the Manti Pageant, for example, the height of the wickedness of the people of the Book of Mormon is presented Page 193 →as an extended dance sequence meant to invoke the sacrifice of a virgin on the altars of a Mesoamerican temple. One dancer in white writhes in fear, running up and down the hill, while elaborately dressed dancers in red, with enormous feather headdresses, dance evocatively behind her. A volcano erupts with projected flames of light and billows of smoke. An actor appears on the very top of the Manti Temple with a trumpet, as if he were the Angel Moroni brought to life. In the Hill Cumorah Pageant, Jesus descends from above a crowd of 700 people to walk among them and bless their children. Also in this pageant, prophets are burned at the stake, and boats are overcome by ocean storms, complete with a deluge of real water. One of the loveliest scenes in any pageant is the vision that the prophet Lehi

has of the “tree of life” in the Hill Cumorah Pageant. The convention used to mark it as a vision is a huge curtain of water that shoots up into air, separating the real action from the dramatization of the vision. The lights that refract through the water lend the entire vision scene a heavenly glow. All religious pageantry has its fair share of entertaining spectacle, but it also features a significant amount of corrective spectacle, showing violent conflicts between good and evil and the punishments awarded to the wicked. In his analysis of Broadway productions of Bible narratives, Henry Bial suggests that sometimes the spectacle of religious subject matter set in wicked times past (Babylon or the Roman empire) is a “fig leaf,” or religious content that gives “theater and film producers license to appeal to the audience’s baser desire for sex, violence, and other forms of dramatic mayhem.”37 In commercial theater, this may certainly be true. But as Bial points out, even in commercial theater, the spectacle is never only for entertainment; it always brings with it the affective possibility that it would “generate a sense of reverence.”38 In Mormon pageantry, I suggest that spectacle functions in the opposite way. Pageants do not use religious narratives as a fig leaf to cover the spectacle of dramatic mayhem. Instead, pageants use gorgeous scenes of violence, destruction, and death as a way to focus audience attention on the religious narratives and doctrinal pedagogy. Pageants frame destructive spectacle as examples of the power of God. One of the most powerfully emotional moments I witnessed in the Mesa Easter Pageant was the reenactment of the crucifixion. The spectacle of this scene emerges in the realism of the violence against the actor playing Christ and the fully staged placement of Christ on the cross—a rare image in Mormon culture and art. The image of the cross or of Christ on a cross Page 194 →is not on display in Mormon chapels or temples, nor is it used by Mormons in personal items like scriptures, home decoration, or jewelry. The official Church position is that “because the Savior lives, we do not use the symbol of His death as the symbol of our faith.”39 The result is that depictions of the crucifixion are not very familiar to audiences. Additionally, while much of the Mesa Easter Pageant is realistic, much has also been highly theatrical. To literally hang a body from a cross exceeds the expectations of LDS audiences who are unused to seeing Christ on a cross and certainly not prepared to see the crucifixion live. The primary actor playing Jesus, after being condemned by Pontius Pilate, is given a crown of thorns and a red robe. The Romans mock him in exaggerated pantomime while a crowd jeers in the background. The actor is then tied between the columns stage right and whipped, with prerecorded strop noises coordinated with the action of the soldier who scourges Jesus. A neat costume trick has Christ’s robe shredding during the scourging, revealing a back covered with makeup stripes. The lights shift ominously to bathe the stage in red. The sound of nails being hammered into wood segues the narrative to Calvary, where a different actor portraying the crucified Christ and two other actors portraying the two thieves are suspended on crosses and raised up on the center of the proscenium stage. The sound and lighting effects make clear the terror of the moment for the audience, starting with faint noise coming from behind the crosses and building out into the audiences until the chairs rumble with the bass notes of the thunder. The scene ends in a terrible silence and blackout. Each night I saw this performance during the week I spent at the Mesa Pageant, I was keenly aware of the reverence this moment was accorded by audience members. While the rest of the pageant was accompanied by the sounds of crying babies, chatting, and the muffled laughter of teenagers, even the most aggressively uninterested spectators paid attention to the crucifixion. I observed the same thing backstage; the moment was given attention even from participants who could not see the action on stage. The spectacle of Christ’s death, which prompted awe and respect, clearly had an emotional impact. The impact, however, was in service of a more important feeling—the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, who testifies of truth. In this case, the spectacle opened up hearts to receive a witness that Christ really did die for the sins of the world. Alma, a Book of Mormon prophet, described the inspiration of the Page 195 →Holy Ghost as a “seed,” and the feelings of the Spirit as a “swelling motion” in the breast: Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good

seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.40

The phrase “swelling motion” is an apt descriptor for the impact of the bass rumblings of the thunder that accompanied Christ’s death, which provide literal vibrations in the audience. The pageant’s use of spectacle in this moment provides a visceral, palpable feeling. Clearly the violence associated with the crucifixion of Christ—the whipping of Christ, the placement of a crown of thorns on his head, the raising of live bodies on three crosses—is received in context of the importance of Christ’s death to the foundational claims of Christianity. The spectacle is not a cover for the audience’s desires for exciting violence; the violence is spectacle intended to reveal the audience’s emotional connection to their beliefs about Christ’s sacrifice. The other spectacles of death that abound in Mormon pageantry, particularly the battles of the Book of Mormon, are also both exciting and spiritually resonant. The sheer scope of the bodies that litter the stages of the Hill Cumorah Pageant or the Manti Pageant after battle scenes makes the scenes spectacular. The framing of these battles is yet another example of God’s power, this time to punish the wicked. These battles culminate in a tableau of death that is calculated to warn and inspire. Borrowing from melodramatic conventions, this spectacle rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Hughes argues: “Sensation scenes amuse and thrill, invigorating our senses and providing pleasant shocks of surprise and recognition. But entertainment is neither their only value nor their exclusive utility. In its classic form, the melodramatic sensation scene constitutes the best and worst moments in a character’s life; as such, it instructs spectators how to behave during the best and worst moments of their own lives.”41 As spectators at Mormon pageants are presented with spectacularPage 196 → scenes, their senses are invigorated and their emotions are tuned to receive the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Battle scenes, special effects, and all the other sensation scenes of Mormon pageantry are enhanced in their spectacle by the use of elaborate musical scores that indicate mood and welcome the spirit.

Hymns That Invite the Spirit of the Lord Mormons are counseled that Church-approved music is a strong vehicle for the Spirit. Mormon apostle Dallin H. Oaks gave a definitive sermon on music in 1994. In it he states, “We should be careful what music we use in settings where we desire to contribute to worship. Many musical numbers good for other wholesome settings are not appropriate for Church meetings. Our hymns have been chosen because they have been proven effective to invite the Spirit of the Lord.”42 Following the same belief as this discourse, music is infused in each of the pageant performances because it has been “proven effective to invite the Spirit.” Sometimes music is called for in the script and other times it is added to emotionally enhance a scene. While not all of the music in pageants would necessarily be appropriate for Sunday worship services, with its sweeping scores, elaborate orchestrations, and heavenly choirs, it is all devotional. Pageants certainly do not take the potential presence of the Spirit for granted, but instead construct every experience with participants to help them identify their pageant experience as being filled with the Spirit. In particular, Mormon pageantry makes use of emotive musical choices to help create emotional moments.43 The performance on stage is therefore perceived as simply an extension of the ongoing spiritual experience of the performers, which is then sent out to the believing audiences. In the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the “wall-to-wall music” was the inspiration of director Charles Metten, who headed the development of the new 1988 Orson Scott Card pageant and worked with Crawford Gates on the timing of the musical segments and the moods he hoped to create.44 Gates recounts the first time he was able to

perform his score for an audience. He was invited to Salt Lake City for his work to be adjudicated by a group of Church administrators and general authorities, including three members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Page 197 →When he arrived, he discovered that he had been provided with a vintage upright piano but had not been provided with a piano bench. Gates improvised, placing his briefcase at an angle on a low folding chair and balancing himself on top to reach the keyboard. He remembers: I took off at the keyboard as though I were playing my debut in Carnegie Hall. My performance was not perfect—I played a few wrong notes—but it had lots of heart. I played my soul out for the longest two and half minutes I can remember. I wondered if I would ever get to that last bar. When I did, the response was wonderful. I saw in the faces of those faithful servants of the Lord that they had heard and seen what was in my heart and soul. And they blessed me with their warm, enthusiastic approval.45 Gates draws a direct connection between what was in his heart and soul and what was received by his listening audience. The music he played was not just a product to be consumed or a communication going from performer to audience. If so, the quality of the piece, with its wrong notes, performed on a low-quality instrument, might have mattered more. Instead, Gates refers multiple times to “heart.” He had heart, and somehow his audience had seen into his heart. The method by which this heart to heart communication happens between performers and audience, scripture and script, or living and dead is the Holy Ghost. The spiritual power of music does not just play a supportive role, where music is a backdrop to a spiritual experience or a means of emotional enhancement. In LDS doctrine, music is its own spiritual event. Boyd K. Packer, an LDS apostle who focused on the power of music in sermons throughout his ministry, explained, “When music is reverently presented, it can be akin to revelation. At times, I think, it cannot be separated from the voice of the Lord, the quiet, still voice of the Spirit.”46 If, as Packer suggests, music is the voice of the Spirit, it explains the amount of time devoted to music in Sunday worship services and in the general conferences of the Church. These feature congregational singing, special musical numbers, and choir music. It also explains how music is deployed in Mormon pageants to intensify emotions and open a conduit for the Holy Spirit. The hymn “O My Father” is a beloved song by Eliza R. Snow, poet, suffragette,Page 198 → and early president of the Relief Society (the LDS women’s organization). Snow’s lyrics are a prayer to God that pleads for his guidance through this life and into the next. It is notable for including one of the few canonized references to both a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. Even without the lyrics, the melody, very familiar to Mormons, suggests a homecoming to a kind and loving heavenly family. In the Nauvoo Pageant, this song underscores a final scene with the character of King Follett before the news is brought that he has died in an accident. The song helps segue into a scene of the King Follett discourse, the funeral sermon where Joseph Smith introduces the doctrine of eternal families. The cast then sings the final refrain of the song: “Then, at length when I’ve completed / All you sent me forth to do / With your mutual approbation / Let me come and dwell with you.”47 Musicologist Jeanette Bicknell argues, “listeners have little trouble judging the emotional expression of music from their own cultures. Indeed, the emotional expression of music is usually transparently immediate to listeners.”48 Additionally, familiar songs serve as semiotic interventions to celebrate a particular topic, worship in an especially moving way, or expand or clarify the message of the scene on stage. The song “O My Father” is not a traditional funeral hymn, but its placement at King Follett’s funeral expands the meaning of the scene for Mormon audiences. While the entirety of the King Follett sermon is not preached on stage as it is in the King Follett Discourse vignette, the doctrinal implications of what is introduced in the pageant can be expanded through the overlay of the lyrics of the hymn. The combination of song and action preaches a particular gospel message—families can be together again after this life—which prompts an emotional audience response, and opens up the space to feel the Spirit. This technique is used to great effect throughout the Nauvoo Pageant. In another example, the hymn “Praise to

the Man” is sung triumphantly as an accompaniment to the on-stage completion of the Nauvoo Temple. Again, the use of a song which honors the prophetic work, martyrdom, and eternal reward of the prophet Joseph Smith is not an obvious fit to a celebratory scene where the Nauvoo Temple is “built” using a beautifully embroidered backdrop. The cast sings as they work to construct the framework, attach the backdrop onto a wooden framework in the shape of the front of the actual temple, and reveal the completed work—a highly theatrical moment that resurrects the past with the fabric temple mirroring the actual temple Page 199 →in sight on the hill above the stage. The lyrics of the song enhance the construction of the temple, however, by drawing direct connections between the temple and the theology of the redemption of the dead preached by the prophet Joseph Smith. The extensive use of music in pageants is not limited to hymns. There are trumpet fanfares, leitmotifs that help identify key characters, processional marches, and celebratory dance music. Music is used not only as underscoring but to create a mood, heighten tension, and invoke the divine. Pioneering music psychologist John Sloboda’s research into the physical responses to music has identified key musical features that prompt the strongest emotional responses: music that is familiar, music with long-running crescendos and grace notes, music with dramatic dynamics, music that moves between soloist and orchestra, and music with piercing tones that emerge from a minimal background.49 The music of pageants manipulates a number of these key features to evoke emotional responses that can be read by audiences as an invitation for the Spirit or as the very presence of the Spirit. One of the most famous refrains in Mormon pageantry is the elaborate trumpet fanfare that opens both the Hill Cumorah and Mesa Easter Pageants. Its bright sounds pierce through pageant grounds, silencing any remaining preshow chatter and hopefully evoking a thrill of emotion. Sloboda points out that thrills are a common musical sensation, sometimes felt as tingles or shivers. He argues that although “these physical manifestations are only part of a complex experience, they have the benefit of being stereotypical, memorable, clearly differentiated from one another, and easily identifiable. It is hard to be mistaken about whether one is or is not having one of these experiences, and it seems that they are experienced at one time or another by most people.”50 Sloboda could be describing Mormon encounters with the Spirit, which are also stereotypic, memorable, and easily identifiable. The intersection of musical emotion and spiritual emotion that thrills during the opening trumpet fanfares of some pageants is enhanced by choirs of angels holding aloft long, bronze trumpets moving in time to the music. I found it to be a particularly affective and effective use of music to invoke emotion and inspire the Spirit. The tune is also catchy and can stay with pageant audiences long after the pageant is over, which may remind them of the emotional moment and may even inspire a return of the Spirit connected to the memory. In another example from the Mesa Easter Pageant, the performer playingPage 200 → Mary sings and dances a lullaby to the newborn baby Jesus after the shepherds have come to visit their family. The song, “Mary’s Lullaby,” is sung with rich emotion by pageant director Jenee Wright Prince, a professional singer and greatgranddaughter of Bertha K. Kleinman, who wrote the lyrics. Wright sings with a full orchestra, heavy with strings and a harp. It includes swelling dynamics, long-running crescendos that descant above the vocals, and music that moves between the soloist and the orchestra. This scene revels in an excess of sentimentality embedded in the song and its accompanying dance, which emphasizes the love of a mother for her child with lyrical movements, close embraces, and sincere gestures. The image of the pageant participant singing a song, gracefully dancing, and cradling a live baby in her arms summons an emotional connection and hopefully the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Figure 8. Trumpeters signal the opening of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Photo by M. Christine Gibson. Following her interview with David Warner, the head of the new Nauvoo Pageant’s writing team and thendirector of the Church’s Music and Cultural Arts Division, Martha LoMonaco reports that “he commissioned the pageant musicВ .В .В . enlisting seven composers from across the country to procure period music and to integrate it into a newly fashioned musicalPage 201 → score, which, in the style of nineteenthcentury melodrama, underscores the entire show to suggest mood and heighten emotion.”51 The music is such

an integral part of the production that Warner additionally created an hour-long presentation for family casts that describes each of the songs, their historical importance, the meaning of their lyrics, and their particular placement in the work so that cast members can understand how the music functions to serve the script and the Spirit. Regardless of whether audience members at Mormon pageants are touched by the Holy Spirit or are touched by emotional intensification, pageant participants and spectators alike code their emotional responses to music as feeling the Spirit. One participant in the Hill Cumorah Pageant reported a clear connection between music, the Spirit, and personal change: One thing that I think has really helped us a lot in our family that has changed us as we go back from pageant is just really being able to clearly recognize the Spirit. So two years ago I asked my elevenyear-old who is now thirteen, what was the time in the pageant when he felt like he felt the Spirit the strongest, and he said it was singing the song of Cumorah in the study shelter afterward, which is always really a great spiritual moment for the cast to do together. And he remembered that very clearly. And so hopefully that will help him to recognize the Spirit in other aspects of his life.52 The experience of the boy in this anecdote outlines the process of resurrecting the past. As his father relates, the boy felt a very real connection with the Spirit in the past (the pageant that happened two years earlier) that he remembers in the present. His father hopes that he will then be able to recognize the Spirit into the future. Importantly, music was the vehicle for this process. Raymond Knapp, in his work on American musical theater and national identity, suggests that “the effect of adding music to a dramatic scene that might otherwise play naturalistically serves to exaggerate its content, adding a dimension of artificiality at the same time that it often also strives to tap into a deeper kind of reality, one accessible only through music.”53 In Mormon pageantry, this deeper kind of reality that Knapp proposes is engaged when audiences believe that music will help them feel the Spirit. As one YPM performing in the Nauvoo Brass Band reported in her mission blog: “Our days are long and sometimes exhausting, but performing Page 202 →and seeing people feel the joy good music brings and seeing people feel the spirit through the music we play makes it all worth it.”54 Mormon pageantry is curated to prompt emotional responses in audiences, which in turn opens up the possibility of a witness of the Holy Ghost and also invites the presence of other spirits—those being performed by live actors on stage.

Maybe They Are Watching Us That theater is haunted—by the past, by the memory of the audience, by the résumé of the actor, by space or place—is well-traveled scholarship. There is research on ghosts as characters on stage and screen due to the long tradition of the ghost character in plays. The ghost of Hamlet’s father is preeminent but certainly not the first. Modern drama is replete with ghost characters, from nineteenth-century phantasmagorias to Our Town (Wilder) to Ghost Trio (Beckett) to The America Play (Parks) to Proof (Auburn). A single title, re-performed across time, will carry with it some of the echoes of past performances. Bodies, too, haunt the past as performers are haunted by roles they have previously played, previous times they have played the same role, and by their own celebrity. Theaters are haunted, and not just by the literal ghosts that remain behind on certain stages but also by the memories of past performances and audiences. Playing spaces bring with them both the memories of past performances and also of the other meanings associated with the space. Mormon pageantry is haunted in most of these ways, but this ghosting is additionally complicated by faith. In her work The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor explains that ghosting is “that visualization that continues to act politically even after it exceeds the live.”55 Her analysis is both physical and metaphysical. Ghosting is a grand metaphor that speaks to people and power. Her description, however, also relates to the spirits themselves, who continue to act beyond their earthly lives. Ancestors, in Mormon cultural imagination, are real ghosts who visit the living, generally to see a task completed or to encourage a task requisite for salvation. Taylor continues: “Performance makes visible (for an instant, live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life. The specters, made manifest

through performance, alter future phantoms, future fantasies.”56 Spirits, made manifest in Mormon pageantry, resurrect the past. Mormon doctrine confirms the existence of an afterlife and of the possibilityPage 203 → of connection to that afterlife through dreams or visitations. Mormon pageantry is built on the belief that pageant participants can access their ancestors through religious ritual. Rather than make-believe, impersonation, or homage, pageantry is an actual engagement with the past. Ancestors of the past are an intimate part of Mormon pageantry. Pageant participants connect in very real ways to the presence of the past, not only from the inspiration of the Holy Ghost but also in the form of holy ghosts from the other side of the veil, who have agency and can intervene in human life. Pageant participants perform with the dead when they encounter the literal spirits that they are enacting. As the spirits of ancient scripture and the early Church influence and inspire pageant performers, pageant participants resurrect that past and contribute to the exaltation not only of themselves but of those who have gone before. Every character being represented on stage in Mormon pageantry was once a living person who is being brought back to life through performance. For some, these characters are well-known figures from Mormon and American history whose lives (and deaths) are extensively recorded. Other spirits whose stories are featured in Mormon pageants are believed to have lived and died, and the records of their lives are captured in holy scripture. Sometimes there are composite characters, based on named historical figures, like John and Mary Henshaw in the Manti Pageant or the Lairds in the Nauvoo Pageant. Also, there are the nameless characters that populate the rest of the story and the stage. These historical characters in pageants are simply “unbelievers,” or “pioneers,” or “converts.” Even unnamed characters, however, still represent actual and specific historical people who lived and did things that are now being represented on stage. When pageant performers take on these roles, they are, in literal ways, performing spirits, as I discussed in the last chapter. However, for Mormons, these spirits are not lost to history. A fundamental aspect of the plan of salvation is a belief in life after death, and life after death suggests a parallel existence with those who have already passed and those who are now living. Holy visitations form the basis of a number of expanded worship practices; Mormons report encounters with spirits, usually loved ones, who offer advice, bring important messages, or comfort and strengthen the living. Mormon doctrine calls these beings variously ghosts, spirits, or angels. Unlike other Christian traditions where angels are a particular class of beings separate and outside humanity, Mormon angels are simply glorified spirits of humans who now work with God in the afterlife. It is not a surprise then, Page 204 →that pageant participants don’t just perform spirits, they also perform with spirits—those who have died and are being resurrected through performance on pageant stages. The narratives of all four of the annual Mormon pageants also include ghosts, spirits, and angels who meet and mingle with the living characters being portrayed on stage. At one devotional I attended at the Mesa Easter Pageant, a speaker made clear the relationship between past and present when he suggested that the performers needed to focus on bringing the real people of Christ’s time to life again on the stage. He asked the performers to consider that they were not left alone to simply invent these characters but that “maybe [the real people] are looking down upon us and seeing how we are delivering what they did when they walked this earth with Christ.В .В .В . Maybe, just maybe, they are watching us and praying for us.”57 This speaker’s comments reflect a fundamental principle of Mormon doctrine: every human being on earth lived with God before this life and will live forever. As such, ghosts can intervene in life and on the Mormon pageant stages. For some, being inspired by the actual characters being represented on stage is part of the process of inhabiting a role. For example, Ward Wright is the former “battle master” for the Hill Cumorah Pageant who returned after thirteen years on the directing staff to participate with his entire family in the cast before being called once again as a director. In the pageant, he was cast in the role of Mormon, the titular prophet of the Book of Mormon, and a great warrior. The role required Wright to pass the records he had abridged (the text of the Book of Mormon) to his son Moroni before being overwhelmed in a battle where he is killed. Wright compared the two experiences of directing and acting and concluded, “I [got] much more meaning out

of it when I actually play[ed] the role.” He continued: When I died, once the spotlights were off on me, I’d be sitting up there looking at the stars. It was clear every night, I was totally in the dark, and it really wasВ .В .В . a moment to think about what he [Mormon] must have gone through—what he must have gone through most of his life. And you think, what did he go through, and how did he keep the faith? How did he keep the faith? And how did he get Moroni to keep the faith? I mean, his son, in that environment. Worse than probably anything that we know. I know that the General Authorities say that it’s bad nowВ .В .В . I thought a lot about that.58 Page 205 → Wright’s comments reveal the intimate connection he felt to the dead. As he performed with the dead, he also looked up to the night sky, the immensity of heaven. He was inspired to consider the connection back between himself and Mormon and forward to the future when he might meet him. Wright mentions leaders of the Church today, and his sense of the wickedness of the world today: “I know that the General Authorities say that it’s bad nowВ .В .В .”59 Here, he is making a direct comparison between being Mormon (the character) and being Mormon (a current-day member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints). Wright may not have been haunted by Mormon, but he was certainly inspired by him, an inspiration that is shaped by belief that he was real, and that he continues to live on in a spirit world. However, other spirits being played onstage involve themselves in pageant performance in more literal ways. Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer explained, “They who have preceded us in this work and our forebears there, on occasion, are very close to us. I have a testimony of this work; it is a supernal work in the Church. I am a witness that those who go beyond the veil yet live and minister here, to the end that this work might be completed.”60 Mormon pageant participants likewise witness that they have been supported, influenced, and contacted by those dead who they are performing. A man who played a Roman soldier in the Mesa Easter Pageant described to me that the spirits of the people being enacted in the pageant “are up on stage with us. This yearВ .В .В . one of the themes has been that every single person in the pageant represents someone that was alive at the time. I’m one fourth Italian, so I don’t know what some of my ancestors were doing at the time, [but] some of them may have been involved in some of these eventsВ .В .В .”61 This comment reveals the ease with which pageant participants are able to perform with the dead—connecting their characters to possible ancestors in terms of genealogical lines. Craig Camp, one of the directors of Nauvoo Theatrical Productions, gave the Young Performing Missionaries the promise of angelic help to achieve their goals of sharing the gospel through performance. One Young Performing Missionary had this promise fulfilled. This YPM played Mormon leader Eliza R. Snow in the 2013 “Trail of Hope,” a vignette of the exodus of Mormons out of Nauvoo. Her vignette was simply singing a hymn written by Snow, entitled “Though Deepening Trials.” She was struggling with her voice that summer; a prolonged illness made it difficult to maintain the extensive singing requirements of her assigned roles. Page 206 →One evening, she was panicked to discover that she had entirely lost her voice. She recounts that she started to sing, but at first, nothing came out. Then she heard a “buzzing” in her ear and her voice got stronger. She thought the buzzing was a side effect of her congestion, but: I paid closer attention and there was somebody kind of singing along with me—kind of the harmonies to it—and all of this happened in, like, a split second—when I was singing—and my voice was stronger than it had ever been. I felt really connected to [Snow] and [knew] that this song has been a story of my Trail of Hope here in Nauvoo: deepening trialsВ .В .В . await us here, the tribulations rage abroad, and we have no idea where we are going. It is okay becauseВ .В .В . Christ is coming, and through him we can find peace and joy. I tried to feel like Eliza R. Snow every day, and have that faith that she had. It was her—I know, I had this overwhelming feeling that “she is

here.”62

This YPM realized that she was being visited by Eliza R. Snow, who was coming to testify of the message of the song to her and even to sing with her to strengthen her voice. Mormon pageant participants perform with the dead when they are inspired by the very spirits they are playing on stage. Pageant participants not only perform with the dead as they act in role as those who have really lived before, but they also literally act as ghosts on stage. In every Mormon pageant, characters who were once dead come back to the stage as figures from the afterlife. Even more powerfully, pageants imagine living characters as they will be in the future, after they have died and moved into their next life. The character of the resurrected Christ is an obvious way that spirits are performed, but in several of the pageants, other characters who have died on stage are also brought back. In the Nauvoo Pageant, the ghosts of everyone who had passed away during the course of the production up to that point return to the funeral service of a beloved character who has died. These spirits, including the man whose life is being memorialized, join the rest of the cast in singing a hymn at the funeral. Their presence is marked as otherworldly by their white costumes and intense blue lighting that makes them appear luminescent. This lighting effective is enhanced by the wider spectrum of amber light of colors of light on the “living” actors standing down stage, which makes them seem more vibrant in contrast. Since the scene is of a funeral, the return of characters as spirits from the next world is connected to the plot of the pageant. Page 207 →The characters sing a funeral hymn that celebrates the possibility of life eternal for participants and spectators alike: “When I leave this frail existence / When I lay this moral by, / Father, Mother, may I meet you / In your royal courts on high? ”63 The climax of the Nauvoo Pageant comes, as I discussed in the last chapter, with the completion of the temple, which allows the entire cast to be sealed as eternal families. The pageant concludes with a reunion of all the stage characters, now including Joseph and Hyrum Smith, with the others who have died throughout the narrative. The entire cast, including two sets of family casts, fills the stage all dressed in light colors and bathed in heavenly sidelights. As described earlier, the crowd parts to reveal Becky and Robert Laird with their new baby girl downstage right. They turn upstage and a little boy—their dead child—runs across the stage into their arms as music swells. The introduction of this child reunited with his family signals for the spectators that the entire pageant has moved forward in time to a hopeful celestial heaven, where the families who have made covenants in Mormon temples will be together with their families forever. The light costumes evoke both traditional representations of angels and also the exclusively white clothing worn in LDS temples. The same effect is echoed in the Manti Pageant when Mary and John Henshaw appear in glowing white to run up the hill of the temple and up the temple stairs to join an entire choir of angels who line the temple walls. In Mormon pageantry, ghosts are characters in the narrative and they perform alongside the participants who take on their personas. Ghosts urge participants to connect in real ways to the past that can then be translated into richer performances on stage in the present. The Holy Ghost additionally helps in this process by witnessing to the participants of the truth of life after death and by inspiring participants to seek after the dead and prepare for the future.

We Look Forward to the Day When Christ’s Peace Shall Rule the Earth In the Mormon vision of the eternal life of the human soul, death is not an obstacle to progression but merely a passage from one state to another; knowledge, intention, and good works are all preserved from this period of Page 208 →life to the next. Mormon theology teaches of a very practical heaven, one that is not that much unlike life. Joseph Smith explained heaven as this life, only better: “When the Savior shall appear we shall see him as he is. We shall see that he is a man like ourselves. And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.”64 Mormon

pageant audiences (participants and spectators alike) come to the productions with this view of the afterlife. When they see representations of ghosts on stage, there is no need to create special ghost costumes or to use makeup to alter the appearance of the ghost. Instead, Mormon pageant ghosts look like living Mormons—wearing the same outfits, hairstyles, and make-up and appearing in family units that mirror the living families being represented on stage. The one concession to differentiating between living and dead is the use of lighter colors (whites, creams, tans) in costumes to juxtapose the two groups and by separating out the dead with simple lighting effects to create a heavenly glow. When ghosts are staged in Mormon pageants, the dead of the past are embodied in the present. However, Mormon pageants also engage a third time period—the future, when all pageant audiences will themselves have died and will have the opportunity to meet those that went before them. The resurrection of the past in Mormon pageantry is grounded at the intersection of the three temporalities of past, present, and future. Live bodies of the present enact the past to bring it forward into the here and now. As the past encounters the present, the representations of doctrine, faith, and obedience are embodied by present performers, on behalf of the dead. The Holy Ghost then stands as a witness to these events and confirms their reality. This witness can do nothing but point to the future when past and present will come together. Diane Taylor, in her work on how performance transmits cultural memory and identity, wrestles with the connection between place, language, and time. She suggests that in performance, “there is a continuum between inner and outer, much as there is between the live present and the living past, and a notion (or act of imagination, perhaps) that individuals and groups share commonalities in both the here/now and there/then, made evident through embodied experience.”65 Taylor’s focus here on the “live present” and the “living past” suggests how Mormons perform with the dead in pageants—by the real-time, embodied experience of seeing the past performed live in the present. Certainly, the experience of live performance in front of a live audience is Page 209 →different than spectating media in a large group or watching a small screen alone on one’s couch. One of the primary assumptions that underpins the reason for the difference is connected to the temporality of live performance. As Peggy Phelan foundationally argued, “Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterwards.”66 In his work After Live, Daniel Aaron Sack complicates Phelan’s claim.67 Sack suggests that the traditional understanding of live performance as a relationship between that past and the present, with particular focus on the present, ignores the future. Sack argues that each articulation of the live on stage must deal with possibility (the knowable future that can be gleaned from the present performance) and potentiality (the multiple futures that are suggested by an unstable present).68 With few exceptions, as in the Roman soldiers who mock or whip Jesus in the Mesa Easter Pageant or the wicked priests of King Noah’s court in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the characters that inhabit the world of Mormon pageantry have been selected for representation for the same reason they have survived the historical record: they were apostles called by Christ, faithful disciples, believers who were healed, or sinners who were forgiven. These characters’ lived reality as historical figures of exceptional spirituality requires the present-day Mormons that perform them to try and emulate this exceptional spirituality. In so doing, they put their own present-day faith into practice. However, Mormons don’t only believe in the present. To use Sack’s terms, the live performance of pageants also holds within itself possibility. Possibility is the future that seems likely given similar past experiences as they have turned out in the present. The possibility of the future as imagined in Mormon pageantry is connected specifically to Christ’s first resurrection and his promised second coming to earth. It is built into the promises of exaltation for the faithful. All of the pageants that dramatize Christ on stage are constructed to primarily testify of him. The mechanisms of pageantry invite the Holy Ghost to add his witness of the possible future as well. At the Mesa Easter Pageant, the narrative technique of the Roman Centurion who asks two disciples to tell him

more about Jesus Christ provides a didactic way to share the Jesus story. In this way, the Centurion represents the audience on stage, asking to be told the story. Each vignette confirms the divinity of Jesus Christ and/or prophesies of his eventual death and resurrection. The audience follows this through the eyes of the Centurion, who Page 210 →reemerges periodically to reassert his spectatorship. Christ’s resurrection is staged as part of the narrative as it occurs in the New Testament, with Mary Magdalene finding an empty tomb and then encountering the resurrected Christ in the garden. In the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants, audiences are presented with the additional scene of the resurrected Christ appearing to minister to the faithful who lived on the American continent. The resurrection of Christ as staged in Mormon pageants therefore fulfills all the prophecies that have come before. Prophets of the past indicated a particular path that comes to pass in the present on a pageant stage. This becomes a future possibility when the prophecies in the narrative shift to proclaiming that Christ lives and will return to earth one day. As pageants make entirely clear, the prophecies about Christ came to be. Old Testament prophets said he would come. He came. He explained to his apostles that he would rise again three days after his death. He did. And in the Mormon pageantry, he does. Therefore, when pageant participants testify to audiences that Christ will come again, this prophecy takes shape as a real possibility for the future. Pageant audiences understand that they may be the spirits of the future that will help proclaim his return. The spectacular endings to the pageants, replete with evocative music and special effects, prompt the emotions that open a space for the Holy Ghost to also testify that Christ will come again. Each pageant ends with the promise of Christ’s return. In the Hill Cumorah Pageant, Joseph Smith intones, “The Savior will return. Soon, he will be here!” In the Manti Pageant, the narrator explains: The Mormon miracle secures the knowledge that was lost in the confusion of the dark ages that no matter what the suffering or tragedy of this life might bring, nothing is lost. For all human experience moves forward to the glorious triumph of the resurrection. The reuniting of the spirit with the physical body.В .В .В . We look forward to the day when the restored gospel of Jesus Christ rules all nations of all peoples until peace, Christ’s peace, shall fill the whole earth. And all men will come to the realization that they are truly brothers and sons of the living God.69 At the Mesa Pageant and the Nauvoo Pageant, the final lines emphasize the reality of Christ’s resurrection. In the Nauvoo Pageant, Joseph Smith concludes with his testimony: “And now, after the many testimonies which have Page 211 →been given of him, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, this is the testimony, last of all, which we give of him: that he lives!”70 The pageant participants’ invocations of their testimony that “he lives” becomes a reality for the audience. More importantly, the future of his second coming also becomes a reality, although it hasn’t yet happened. The Mesa Easter and Hill Cumorah Pageants give vision to this possible future, as they actually conclude with the image of the resurrected Christ rising above the audience and the stage, surrounded by angels with trumpets proclaiming his glory. This glorious spectacle can be read simultaneously as the chronological ascension of Christ into heaven as recorded in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon and as the return of the resurrected Christ to the earth in the future. The thrilling emotions stirred by the spectacle allow the Holy Ghost to testify of this possibility to pageant participants and spectators who are open to his prompting. However, pageants do not only preach that which will be. They also preach what may be, as the performance of Christ in Mormon pageantry engages a limited potentiality. For Sack, potentiality “breaks with the expected orders of past and present to perform an indeterminate future without rational end or function.”71 This temporality foregrounds how live performance doesn’t always indicate a possible future but instead purposefully holds open a space of uncertainty, requiring the audience to engage with what they don’t know and can’t predict. Sack argues that live performance always brings with it a sense of the potential for multiple futures—every time an actor stumbles or misses a cue, or a prop is broken, or the lights fade early, the audience is immediately aware that one cannot, in fact, predict the future.

Moments such as these are rife in pageants, which feature large groups of people, including children, on enormous stages, outdoors, at night, and sometimes with live animals. One trope that runs through all pageants is the connection between the weather and God’s favor. Clearly, a heavy rainfall or a thunderstorm with lightning will shut down a performance; pageant producers are anxious to avoid this at all costs. The only means of avoidance, however, are spiritual ones; there is no alternate indoor venue for these pageants. Much prayer, both communal and personal, is exerted on behalf of asking for good weather. Every pageant boasts a score of miracles connected to the weather—storms that cleared up just as audiences began arriving, only to begin again as the lights fade; dangerously hot weather that cools before harming cast members; winds that shift direction to blow forest fire smoke away from a pageant site. Page 212 →The Mesa Pageant is actually unique in this regard; April in Arizona is temperate and dry. Instead, the moments of theatrical potentiality come with the unpredictability of the animals featured throughout the pageant. Two of the greatest concerns of the pageant are connected to the animals featured onstage. The first is that the production calls for a pure-white baby lamb to be used in early scenes of sacrifice as a sign of Jesus Christ. Each spring there is a nervousness and anticipation during birthing season; each lamb that is born spotted, or grey, or with one dark ear is one less possible candidate for the necessary white lamb. As the director of the pageant shared with me, this concern has been alleviated each year with the birth of a pure-white lamb just in time to be used in the pageant. While she doesn’t read this as a miracle, she also doesn’t discount the possibility of divine intervention into the practical realities of staging a pageant.72 More central to the pageant, however, is the temperament of Christ’s donkey. One of the most engaging scenes of the pageant is Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where, as according to prophecy, he was to ride a donkey to proclaim his position as the King of Peace.73 The Gospels describe the jubilation of the crowds at his entrance, and how they laid down cloaks before him and waved palm fronds toward him. Dramatizing this scene provides one of the few opportunities to fill the stage with the entire cast, and gives the audience a vision of color and sound before the more somber events of the Passion Week. The actor playing Christ enters on a donkey and works his way across the stage, down a ramp, and back up a ramp before dismounting in front of the crowds. The practicality of finding a donkey sedate enough to move through crowds of boisterous actors, waving leaves in its face is unsurprisingly difficult. In 2013, the Mesa Pageant donkey was cranky. Sometimes, the actor playing Jesus would make it partway onto the stage or even as far as the ramp before the donkey would resist continuing on. While a costumed, professional animal wrangler is in charge of leading the donkey, the narrative of the triumphant entrance dictates that s/he cannot wrangle too much. In any event, no amount of tugging can really shift an animal intent on staying in place, even if such concerted efforts were appropriate to the scene. As this entrance is “triumphant,” it also disallows playing off the recalcitrance of the donkey as frustrating or comic. Instead, the actors were required to move through the staging by ignoring the donkey’s resistance. Generally, this meant that when the donkey stopped moving and dug in his heels, the participantPage 213 → playing Jesus would use that moment to dismount and move into the crowds to finish his triumphal entry on foot. Figure 9. Jesus Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem in the Mesa Easter Pageant. Photo by Tim Hacker. One evening, however, the donkey didn’t just stop in place, but instead started to buck. The man playing Jesus was entirely unprepared and untrained in how to deal with a bucking animal. Impressively, he was able to maintain his seat while being tossed about long enough for some disciples to help him dismount without being thrown to the ground. This was a potentiality that reminded everyone involved with the live performance that the future is deeply uncertain. No one could predict that this would happen; it hadn’t happened yet with that particular donkey, nor did it happen again during the run of the pageant. Even writing about this incident reminds me of the potential for humor in the moment—a man dressed as Jesus, arms akimbo, white skirts flying, being bucked about by an unhappy donkey. Instead, however, this was one of the most fraught moments in the production. Clearly the pageant participants on stage were on alert, concerned for those in the proximity of the donkey’s hooves. They worked quickly and carefully to salvage the scene and Page 214 →stay in character. The spectators were equally alert. There was no audible laughter at the sight but,

instead, a palpable sense of shock and concern that radiated toward the stage.74 This donkey incident at the Mesa Easter Pageant reveals how many anxieties connected to the surprises of live performance do not develop into unresolved potentialities but are, in fact, assuaged by the actors’ craft. As Sack argues, in the end, we trust that actors will be professional enough to go on with their lines, turn the broken prop into a stage business or continue through in the dark as though nothing were wrong. Sack points out that we actually value these moments of recovered potential as a mark of the “professionality” of the actor.75 However, there are also potentialities that are not coverable or recoverable but, instead, leave open a space of unknowing. In Mormon pageantry, the potentiality of the live performance is connected to the choice of the audience to accept the message being preached. In other words, while the possibility of the second coming is established and looked for by believers, the ability of a believer to be there at that moment is entirely unknown. A believer can pray to receive a witness of the truthfulness of Jesus’s message from the Holy Ghost, make life choices to follow Jesus’s example as shown in the pageant, and hope to be numbered with the righteous at the last days, but this outcome simply cannot be guaranteed. Ideally, of course, the stumbling blocks to a smooth retelling of the past—like a cranky donkey—would never occur if pageant producers could control away the potentiality for disaster. But this very potential has power as it affirms the engaged belief of audiences who understand that the future might, in fact, hold disaster. In the Hill Cumorah and the Mesa Easter Pageants, there is not a costume change for the cast to come back on stage as heavenly beings as in the Nauvoo and Manti Pageants. Instead, in these two plays, the focus is centered on the image of the resurrected Christ. In both of these pageants, the entire cast comes back onto stage for a final, triumphant musical number. The stage is then filled with the entire cast in whatever costumes they wore throughout the pageant. This means that there is a wide range of time periods and cultures represented, from ancient Jerusalem before the birth of Christ to 1840s America. After this last line, however, the promised “soon” becomes “now” as one of the Christ characters is raised high above the very top level of the stage and then out slightly toward the audience. In the darkness of the night, the harness and lift system is invisible and the effect makes Page 215 →it seem as if Christ is literally suspended above all. The past, present, and future all collapse into a single moment. A nearly identical effect is used at the end of the Mesa Pageant, where again all the characters of the pageant return to stage to testify of Christ to sing “He Lives.” The future envisioned on stage is further enhanced with the image of Christ rising above both the stage and a host of dancing angels to reach his arms out to everyone. This invitation, as with all the implicit and explicit invitations at the ends of pageants, strategically makes clear the possibility that all can return to live with Christ and their families again after this life, just as He will return at the end of time to rule triumphantly over the earth. The audience—spectators and participants together—is invited to see themselves in this group through the mechanisms of the spectacular staging and the promptings of the Holy Ghost invited by that spectacle. While these spectacular endings present pageant audiences with the potentiality of exaltation, the nature of the live event of pageants also holds out its opposite. The assumption of eternal glory promised by the triumphant finales of the four annual Mormon pageants is haunted by the knowledge that many audience members may not be righteous enough to stand with Christ at His second coming. Mormon pageantry also features a number of moments that disrupt the viewer’s complacency in the narrative by making central some slippages from the possible future of reunion with Christ. These cautionary moments are also rife with emotion and can invite the Holy Ghost to warn of the dangers of faithlessness. One potentiality of failure occurs in the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants’ dramatization of the cycle of wickedness in the Book of Mormon. The prophet Nephi is the initial hero of the story. His righteousness, fortitude, and faithfulness dominate a large part of the Book of Mormon narrative told on stage. However, his people are the ones who fall the furthest away from God’s way. The battle masters of the Hill Cumorah Pageants try to make this staging clear in how they choreograph how the battle moves between the righteous and the unrighteous. In the first battle between the Nephites and the Lamanites, the Nephites are righteous and the

Lamanites are wicked. So, the Nephites fight clean, and the Lamanites are allowed to fight dirty and “bloodthirsty.”76 However, once the Nephites have become more wicked than the Lamanites, the fights shift to everyone fighting dirty: those playing Nephites Page 216 →abandon their sense of honor in the fight and instead utilize combat tactics like their enemies before being overwhelmed by a “tsunami” of Lamanite warriors who sweep over the stage in time to a rising music refrain. They leave behind them the bodies of the entire Nephite nation. The potentiality of the uncertain future of the audience with regard to their own salvation is a powerful aspect of Mormon pageantry. Similar moments of slippage come in the Mesa Easter Pageant as part of the narrative itself as two beloved apostles—Judas and Peter—reject and deny Jesus. The staging of both the betrayal of Jesus by Judas and the denial of Jesus by Peter are central moments in the voice-over narrative. Additionally, careful composition, lighting, and extra stage business put focus on these moments for the spectators. For example, in the narration at the last supper, Jesus explains to his disciples that the man who will betray him will be known because “He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it.”77 The character of Judas is seated at the very end of the table stage left, so, in order to complete the stage action, Jesus leaves the table and crosses all the way over to Judas and hands him the bread. Judas then takes the bread and slinks offstage, presumably to contact the Roman soldiers to arrest Jesus. While this staging follows the narrative of the Bible exactly, it makes the action neither nuanced nor subtle. This staging makes it so very clear that Judas was the betrayer that I wondered at each performance why all the other apostles didn’t simply follow Judas and stop him. By the same token, Peter’s denial of Christ was enhanced through obvious staging. His three denials occur one after another as Peter moves across the stage through different crowds of people who accuse him of being one of Jesus’s companions. By the end of his last denial, he is just stage left of center in front of two columns that divide the stages. At the exact same time of the final denial, a bound Jesus is brought on stage between two Roman soldiers who are transporting him to trial. Timed correctly, the cock crows when Jesus hits his mark center stage between the two columns. The action on the stage pauses, and a spotlight focuses on the two men. Jesus turns to look mournfully at Peter, who then reacts with shame at the Savior’s reproach before the stage action comes back to life. This melodramatic moment is an invention of the Pageant; there is no indication in the Bible story that Jesus and Peter see each other in this moment. The two men playing Peter and Jesus are therefore reliant on exaggerated actions and facial expressions to show the sorrow, regret, and the shame of the moment. Page 217 →In so clearly pointing up these two moments of betrayal, the audience is forced to remember that no one is exempt from temptation, and even the greatest believers may fall. The possibility of salvation is overtly countered by the potentiality of damnation. The hightened staging of these betrayals is affective and may open a space for the Holy Ghost to additionally testify of the need for believers to endure to the end. The need for faithfulness throughout one’s life and the uncertainty of a heavenly reward is made most clearly in the parable of the ten virgins that sits at the center of the Mesa Easter Pageant’s narrative. In terms of all the parables of the Bible that could be selected for staging, this is an interesting one to choose. It features no miracles, nor does it further the story line in any measurable way. Instead, it breaks the narrative both in content—by interrupting Jesus’s ministry—and in form—by shifting from Jesus telling stories to staging one of the stories being told. The parable is additionally unique as it is told entirely through dance, the form used throughout the pageant for moments of heightened emotion. This parable’s importance is revealed, however, in the context of potentiality. The key feature of the parable of the ten virgins is that half of them are totally unprepared for the coming of the bridegroom and are therefore not allowed to attend the wedding. They cannot borrow oil from their prepared friends, because then there will not be enough for anyone. They cannot purchase the oil because the vendors are all closed in their own preparations for the wedding. Traditionally interpreted as a parable of the second coming, the warning is clear: of all those who

claim to wait for Christ, only half are personally prepared through righteousness and the other half will be denied salvation. The lyric dancing hauntingly brings this point forward as five women are left alone on stage in fading lights to mourn their loss. I found it to be one of the most powerful images of the pageant. Practically, the inclusion of this dance piece probably traces its history back to an enthusiastic choreographer. Stylistically, having this extended contemporary dance in the middle of the pageant balances out the two solo dances of Mother Mary at the birth of Jesus and Mary Magdalene at his resurrection. The reasons for its inclusion, however, do not take away from the loss presented by the disturbing statistic that half of the believers are not welcomed by Christ on his arrival. There is, of course, the possibility that the audience only sees itself in the group of the wise virgins. But there is also, always, the potential of a future as a foolish virgin—a potentiality that is as terrifying as the promises of exaltation are glorious. Page 218 →

The Warm Fuzzy Early in my research, I was invited by some students to attend a recruitment meeting for the Young Performing Missionary program. At the recruitment meeting, the directors of the Nauvoo Theatrical Productions told the crowd that the Lord knows how powerful dancing, theater, and music are. Director Craig Camp explained what he sees as the relationship between performance, emotion, and the spirit: Your calling is to use your God-given talents in your performance to touch people in a way that they can in no other way be touched. That they use music and performance, dance, acting, that is to me profoundly powerful. And there are people who have concrete barriers around their heart, and the only way they will feel it is through performance and you introduce them to the Spirit.В .В .В . That’s your whole purpose here, is to introduce people to that feeling—I call it the warm fuzzy—that spiritual feeling that will in the end introduce people to what the Spirit can do and what it is.78 The idea that performance—music, dance, and acting—is a unique and powerful means to introduce people to the Spirit is a theme that runs throughout Mormon pageantry. Pageant participants talk about the special place of performance in the work they are doing and witness that they feel their talents are dedicated for spiritual purposes. Audience members report how they have been moved and acted upon by the Spirit during pageants. The affect created through expert theatrical conventions, well performed, are inseparable from the emotional manifestation that could be read through Mormon rhetoric as having felt the Spirit. It is impossible to tell if audiences are moved emotionally because they are feeling the Spirit or if they are feeling the Spirit because they are moved emotionally, but determining the direction of the relationship between spirit and emotion is perhaps beside the point. What is key in Mormon pageantry is that the affect prompted by spectacle can open up a believer to the witness of the Holy Ghost. Assuming that in Mormon Pageantry either emotions are manipulated through theatrics or the Holy Ghost attends and touches the hearts of participants and audience members also ignores the possibility that both are happening at the same time. One Nauvoo Young Performing Missionary (YPM) compared the difference between traditional proselyting and the Page 219 →work of a performing missionary, particularly singing in the street. He said, “I have had a very strong connection to feeling the Spirit through music, and I know that for a lot of other people in the world, that is something that really helps them to feel the SpiritВ .В .В . I think that is something that we do here every day that just is not done on a proselyting mission. You typically do not knock on someone’s door and then start singing a song to themВ .В .В . [but] that’s just something that we get to do here.”79 This missionary’s assessment that performance is one of the most powerful ways of “inviting people to feel the Spirit” is echoed by most pageant producers and participants. It is also a prophetic theme. In 1967, Mormon apostle Spencer W. Kimball (later the twelfth president of the Church) gave a speech at Brigham Young University entitled “Education for Eternity.” In the speech, he focused considerable time

on discussing the relationship between religion and art, an excerpt now known as “The Gospel Vision of the Arts.” His vision was simple: “In our world, there have risen brilliant stars in drama, music, literature, sculpture, painting, science, and all the graces. For long years I have had a vision of members of the Church greatly increasing their already strong positions of excellence till the eyes of all the world will be upon us.”80 In other words, Mormons, by virtue of their virtue, should be the greatest artists of all time. Kimball explained that the reason his vision is possible is the unique connection between faithful members of the Church and the sustaining Spirit of the Holy Ghost: “Members of the Church should be peers or superiors to any others in natural ability, extended training, plus the Holy Spirit which should bring them light and truth. With hundreds of вЂmen of God’ and their associates so blessed, we have the base for an increasingly efficient and worthy corps of talent.”81 Participants in Mormon pageantry are the fulfillment of this vision. They are members of the Church who engage their talents with the help of the Holy Spirit, to testify of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the plan of salvation, and the responsibility to save both the living and the dead. Spectators who witness the spectacle of Mormon pageantry are primed to also feel the Spirit and work toward their own future salvation. The past is resurrected as the audience looks forward to a potential and possible future when they, too, would be gathered with Christ and their families forever.

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Conclusion A Great Time to Be Alive The work is moving forward quickly and there’s such a joy that comes with knowing we are all a small part! —A participant in the 2017 British Pageant in England In a recent sermon to the general membership of the Church, Mormon apostle Quentin L. Cook celebrated the ability and responsibility that Mormons have in the twenty-first century to work toward the exaltation of all humanity: “What a great time to be alive. This is the last dispensation, and we can feel the hastening of the work of salvation in every area where a saving ordinance is involved.В .В .В . We finally have the doctrine, the temples, and the technology for families to accomplish this glorious work of salvation.В .В .В . Don’t underestimate the influence of the deceased in assisting your efforts and the joy of ultimately meeting those you serve. The eternally significant blessing of uniting our own families is almost beyond comprehension.”1 Cook expresses how the Church today is being pressed with increasing urgency to participate in the “glorious work of salvation,” a call to action he describes as “hastening the work of salvation.” This phrase is not new—it is based on a scripture received by Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants: “Behold, I will hasten my work in its time.”2 However, the phrase reemerged in 2013 as part of a worldwide training program to help the Church make best use of the great influx of missionaries that came following a 2012 announcement lowering the age requirement for missionaries. The number of missionaries serving globally jumped over fifty percent from 58,000 to 89,000 missionaries in the years immediately following the announcement.3 The program to hasten the work Page 222 →of salvation was prompted by increased missionary work but included expanded efforts in personal commitment, family history, and temple service. In 2015, the Church focused on the importance of dedicated Sabbath day worship. In a question-and-answer meeting to explain the reason for this initiative, Mormon apostle M. Russell Ballard explained, “I believe that [in] the world we’re now living in, the most important thing that parents can do is to fortify their children and extended family members, even those that are singleВ .В .В . to fortify each other spiritually so that we will remain true and faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”4 Recommitting to Sabbath day observances is one way for families and congregations to better live the gospel of Jesus Christ. Encouraged Sunday activities include those that are directly related to serving the poor, sharing the gospel, and redeeming the dead. In another program, the Youth Temple Challenge, Mormon teenagers are encouraged to use their computer skills to contribute to genealogical research and family history work, which helps youth strengthen their own testimonies and also provides direct assistance to the goal of enabling the salvation of the dead.5 Most recently, the Church has rolled out an aggressive self-reliance program to help members “learn and put into practice principles of faith, education, hard work, and trust in the Lord.”6 This program is a directly targeted way to care for the poor and the needy and to help members live the gospel. The reasoning behind the linked efforts of missionary work, family history work, and temple work was explained by then-prophet and president Thomas S. Monson. He explained, “The Lord has never, to my knowledge, indicated that His work is confined to mortality. Rather, His work embraces eternity. I believe He is hastening His work in the spirit world. I also believe that the Lord, through His servants there, is preparing many spirits to receive the gospel. Our job is to search out our dead and then go to the temple and perform the sacred ordinances that will bring to those beyond the veil the same opportunities we have.”7 All of these (and other) recent programs evidence the intersection between religious work done in the present and how that work extends back into the past and forward into the future. The phrase “hastening the work” has become a rallying cry to urge members of the Church to recommit to the work of sharing the gospel to the living and the dead.

I believe the call of Mormon prophets and apostles for LDS members today to hasten the work of the Lord must be put into the context of a number of trends of participation in the Church. As with other religions, the Page 223 →Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is seeing rising difficulties in retention of members. For all its missionary efforts, the Pew Research Center’s most recent demographic look at religions in America found a slight decline in membership between 2007 and 2014.8 For the same period, the Church reported growth of about two million members coming from the baptism of converts and children of current members.9 For these numbers to be consistent, over two million members of the Church have become disaffiliated during this same period of growth. Conversion is not keeping up with attrition. It is no wonder then that the Church is aggressively engaged in efforts to strengthen member commitment and to expand missionary work for the living and the dead. Nowhere in these new programs or in the training sessions or sermons that have accompanied them has any Church leader mentioned Mormon pageantry as a way to help Latter-day Saints hasten the work of salvation. This makes sense. The Church is interested in a devotional change in its entire membership, and Mormon pageantry is an exclusive practice. The Church is extending its gospel message to members worldwide, but the regularly performed Mormon pageants are American.10 Improving dedication to Sabbath day observances or being a better member missionary are things all members can do, but pageants are a limited experience for those who are accepted to participate. (In 2016, for example, over 2,000 people applied to participate in the Hill Cumorah Pageant and fewer than 750 were selected.11) Almost any teenager with access to the internet can find the names of ancestors to take to the temple, but pageant participants and spectators must have considerable time and means to attend. Pageants may not the best program to encourage all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to prepare for exaltation. However, as I have argued throughout this book, those Mormons who do participate in and attend pageants are engaged in a spiritual environment that replicates the necessary phenomena of the redemption of the dead. I suggest that resurrecting the dead on stage—with all its attendant affective and embodied experiences—may even provide a deeper and more significant commitment to hastening the work than those of other Church programs. In chapters two, three, and four, I examined three intersections between the living and the dead that are present in Mormon pageantry that might contribute to helping participants and spectators prepare for exaltation. First, pageants are built near the dead on holy ground. For Mormons, holy ground includes historic sites where the dead once lived, temples where the Page 224 →dead can commune with the living, and America as a promised land, worth defending to the death. Pageants also perform the dead when pageant actors proxy for those who are being reenacted on the stage. This proxy performance is materialized through daily acts of devotion in which actors focus on being better people in real life. Rather than just creating a character that approximates the historical past, pageant participants take their spiritual self-improvement onto the stage. Proxy performance is expressed in a particular acting style that foregrounds sincerity of belief and is embodied through repeated ritual gestures that encode faith on the bodies of the participants, both living and dead. Finally, Mormon pageant audiences perform with the dead as they engage the aid of the Holy Ghost to help discern truth and bear witness of it to others. Pageant audiences feel the Spirit through the spectacle of pageantry. They also are inspired by the spirits of the dead who are engaged in working toward their own redemption. However useful these divisions may have been in organizing a book, they are still artificial categories. Performing near the dead, performing the dead, and performing with the dead are not three distinct threads but are strands of an inextricably woven theological performance practice that has the potential to increase the religious commitment of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to spread the gospel to those not of the faith, and to work for the salvation of the dead. To tease out this potential, I turn to the three pageants I have not yet discussed—the Castle Valley Pageant, the Martin Harris Pageant, and the British Pageant. These three pageants each evidence additional ways of resurrecting the past that I believe can further enhance the power of pageants to answer the Church’s urgent call for members to work more diligently in bringing all God’s children toward exaltation.

The Past Is the Present

The Castle Valley Pageant (1978) traces the settlement of what is now Emery County, Utah, by early pioneers who were called by Brigham Young to move into the valley. Spectators are introduced first to Castle Valley, whose geography and landscape is a primary feature of the pageant. Even the Castle Valley Pageant set is built directly into the landscape; the pageant is held in a natural amphitheater that sits up in the foothills of the MantiLa Sal Page 225 →National Forest mountains. To reach “The Hill,” visitors must either hike the steep, paved trail to the amphitheater or wait for a shuttle ride. At the top, bleachers have been set up to look down in to the playing space, which is laid out like a miniature frontier. In the upper stage right corner are two large teepees and a canvas tent. Downstage center is a homestead and an outhouse structure that can be used alternately as a blacksmith shop, a barn, or an additional homestead. Behind these is a dugout home. A huge watering hole completes the set, which is landscaped with indigenous trees and shrubs as well as some additional fences to mask exits and entrances. All of these structures are permanent to the site. Before each evening’s performance of the pageant, there is a Pioneer Village with activities that happen all over the actual pageant set. One can learn to spin cotton in the homestead, visit a “daily life scene” in the dugout, or try to milk a cow in the outhouse. A blacksmith area is set up by the outhouse to pound horseshoe nails into “prairie diamond rings.” Other activities include pony rides, butter churning, quilting, and pioneer games and toys for children. Pageant volunteers lead all of these activities, which end before sunset to give participants time to ready the stage for the pageant. The pageant participants in evidence before, during, and after the show reflect a level of engagement that comes from the years of community involvement in the pageant. The opening of the pageant makes great use of the natural landscape with a wagon train lit by lanterns coming into the playing space from nearly a mile away. The track for these wagons was constructed to allow the audience to view the train wending along the top of a mountain ridge until it reaches the playing space—a breathtaking image made more powerful by the verisimilitude of the real wagons and real horses. After an elaborate rodeoinspired preshow, the audience is introduced to the characters whose intersecting lives serve as the backbone for the story. The Boulden family is poor but humble and faithful. John and Clara are a wealthier couple that struggles with their commitment to the Mormon Church and to frontier life. Finally, Neva and Abe are a young couple unsure of the best way to get married—quickly and locally, or eternally in a distant Mormon temple. All of these pioneers journey over the mountain pass from Sanpete country into Castle Valley. On their way, the Boulden’s infant son dies, which prompts all the characters to question their obedience to the Lord in the face of such sacrifice. Fever takes the life of the Boulden parents. Their children are left orphanedPage 226 → but are adopted by the bishop of the settlement who assures the children that their parents’ sacrifice was part of God’s plan. Even more importantly, he testifies that their parents are now reunited with the little brother they lost on the journey and that someday the entire family will be together again. Compared to the war spectacle of the Hill Cumorah and Manti Pageants, the death toll in the Castle Valley Pageant is low, but it is especially poignant because all of those that die are central characters in the pageant. In the face of all of this death, the promise is that death really doesn’t matter because the temple sealing ordinance means that the entire family will be united forever after death. This message is preached rhetorically, as the characters themselves testify of the vital importance of temple work to the plan of salvation. Abe and Neva, the young engaged couple, have to sort through where they will get married. Abe wants to get married and head straight to Castle Valley. Neva wants to take the long journey to Manti to be sealed in the temple instead. Her explanation reflects current vernacular and emphasis on a temple wedding. She tells Abe to: “Marry the right person, in the right place, by the right authority.”12 The ongoing conversation between the two, including a letter from Neva to Abe with a modern interpretation of scripture and a love song about the importance of temple marriage, firmly establishes the idea of a modern temple marriage as the dream of a pioneer couple. The characters’ description of the importance of temple ordinances and eternal families is clearly and sincerely staged. Of most interest to me was how descriptions of temple work in the pageant were not as temple

work was understood in the time when the pageant is set but as it is understood today. Certainly, this is not the only pageant that features contemporary interpretations of the scriptures, stories, and doctrine dramatized in the historical epic. One need look no further than the elaborate lyric dance solos in the Mesa Easter Pageant or the Hill Cumorah Pageant’s references to taxes to see that pageants slip between past and present. In the Castle Valley Pageant, however, the differentiation between history, historical fiction, and contemporary interventions are nearly indistinguishable. The past is literally the present. One reading of the time manipulation is that the Castle Valley Pageant has an amateur script that doesn’t pay attention to accuracy or nuance. This is not untrue. Even the author of the script, Montell Seely, notes in his history of the pageant that “the scriptВ .В .В . doesn’t amount to much. It wasn’t written by a professional playwright, that’s for sure.”13 In a dramaturgically Page 227 →sound historical pageant, ideas from the present in the mouths of pioneers of the past might be strangely out of place. However, in the context of a religious pageant where the participants are embodying the faith and testimony of the characters by using their own testimonies, the imposition of modern doctrine onto past action evidences a belief in the concept of modern-day revelation. It also suggests a model of doctrinal interpretation that is vital to hastening the work. One of the most often quoted scriptures in Mormon culture is a revelation from God to Joseph Smith concerning the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In it, God tells Smith that this Church is “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased, speaking unto the church collectively and not individually.”14 Mormons generally shorten this scripture to a testimony that Christ’s Church restored by Joseph Smith is the “only true Church.” However, it is a mistake to omit the second half of the descriptive clause. The Lord says that this is the “only true and living” Church upon the earth. One of the most fundamental LDS gospel principles is that God the Father continues to speak to his children through prophets. Continued revelation is a hallmark of Mormon belief and practice. Mormons believe God can and does reveal new doctrine to his Church. Clarifying that the Church is living provides a doctrinal grounding for the resurrection of the past in the Castle Valley Pageant. The pioneers in the Castle Valley Pageant are as much present-day Mormons of Castle Dale, Utah, as they are the historical figures they are reanimating on stage. As a result, of course the pioneers know about new revelations that have been received and adopted by the Church long after the pioneers of the late nineteenth century would have died. In a living Church, where new revelations overlap on old ones in a palimpsest of belief, pageant performance holds past, present, and future in one. The Castle Valley Pageant presents this overlap not just through language but also composition and costuming. At the end of the Castle Valley Pageant, the deceased Boulden family returns to the stage in a foretold reunion in heaven. As the father enters the spirit world after his death, he is greeted by his own parents, his wife, and the infant who died while crossing the mountain pass and has now grown to be a toddler. The casting of a toddler for this heavenly reunion is a materialization of the plan of salvation that teaches that life continues on the other side of the veil. Even one of the covered wagons is brought on stage, Page 228 →remade into heavenly glory with a shining white cover over the wagon and the horses. Brigham Young appears and preaches directly to the audience that they are the descendants of the characters in the show.15 His remarks can be read as literal; many of those that participate in and attend the pageant are quite possibly direct descendants of the first families to settle Castle Valley. His remarks can also be read as metaphorical since everyone, participant and spectator alike, are invited to see themselves as part of the Castle Valley community for the time of the pageant. All those who died in the course of the pageant are dressed in shimmery white—contemporary suits and ties for the men, and long, shapeless dresses for the women. The color of these costumes suggests that all the characters have died, been resurrected, and are now fully participating in the redemption of the dead from the other side of the veil. Unlike the period costumes of the families reunited after death in the Nauvoo Pageant, however, the costumes worn by the characters in the afterlife in the Castle Valley Pageant are clothes that might be appropriate in any Mormon temple today. This emphasizes the connection between past and present in a visceral way that also

imagines a particularly Mormon aesthetic to the eternities. Eventually, those who have died during the narrative are joined by the rest of the primary characters from the show. The final image of the pageant is of a resurrected Jesus Christ standing above everyone. His arms are outstretched and his robes flutter in the wind from his perch atop a tower behind the campfire area. The tower platform on which Christ stands is masked by evergreen branches, to give the impression of Christ in the heavens. The whole structure overlooks the pioneer village below. This final image reaffirms the total time of past, present, and future. Pageant audiences in the present witness the Christ at his Second Coming, gloriously standing on top of living past. In the Castle Valley Pageant, the past is resurrected in the collapse of time into eternity in notable ways. Characters from the historical past preach doctrinal concepts drawn far more from the present than their own time. The amateur presentation style of the pageant does not detract from the collapse but instead eases the slippage from one time to another. The rough edges of the production mask the shift between times as pioneers speak and act as if they were from the future, while the doctrine they preach is being retroactively applied to the past. As Mormon Pageantry gathers present faith and future hopes into its historical narratives, it prepares audiencesPage 229 → to gain a testimony of the Church as both true and living. A firm understanding of this principle, engrained in pageant audiences through rhetorical strategies and embodied practice, is one way that pageants can prepare Mormons to hasten the work of salvation. Figure 10. Families reunite in heaven after death in the Castle Valley Pageant, 2014. Photo by Dusty Butler.

Speaking for the Dead Clarkston, Utah, is a small farming town of less than 700 people nestled in the hills to the northwest of Cache Valley, five miles from the Idaho border. It is remarkable only for being the final resting place of Martin Harris. Harris was a controversial early member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a close companion of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church. In 1830, he mortgaged his successful farm in Palmyra, New York, to pay for the first publication of the Book of Mormon, a book Smith translated from golden plates he had unearthed from a nearby hill. To Mormons, Harris is known primarily as a scribe for and a witness to the Book of Mormon. As Smith’s scribe, his responsibility was to write Page 230 →down the English translation of the Book of Mormon that Joseph Smith dictated to him. Infamously, Harris obtained and subsequently lost a first manuscript of the partially translated Book of Mormon and was replaced as scribe. As a later witness, he and two other men testified that an angel showed them the golden plates and the engravings on the plates. They testified also that the voice of God told them that these plates had been translated correctly into the Book of Mormon and that they were commanded to “bear record that these things are true.”16 Harris went through several periods of conflict with the Church, during which he was excommunicated from the faith, but according to tradition, he never denied his witness of the Book of Mormon.17 When he died in Clarkston in 1875, at the age of ninety-two, Harris was again a member of the LDS Church in full fellowship. The remains of Martin Harris are an integral aspect of the Clarkston community, its history, and its current identity. Control over his remains was contested for years, with leaders of other surrounding communities arguing for a removal of Martin Harris to larger, more prosperous cities. The citizens of Clarkston, however, maintained their claim on his bones, his memory, and their privileged places as the keepers and disseminators of his angelic visitation. The permanent erection of a suitable monument in 1925 for the fiftieth anniversary of Harris’s death literally cemented the memory of Martin Harris into the heart of the Clarkston City Cemetery. This architectural memorial—an enormous granite obelisk—might be a sufficient archive of the past; visitors to the gravesite can stand over his remains and encounter his testimony of the Book of Mormon without any interpretive intervention other than that which they bring themselves. However, the retelling of Martin Harris’s testimony by those who had known him or have descended from those who knew him became an

intrinsic part of pilgrimages to his grave. For example, William Pilkington was hired by Martin Harris Jr. to care for Martin Harris before his death. Pilkington was only fifteen years old when Harris died in 1875, but he records in his autobiography that Martin Harris asked him a number of times to spread Harris’s testimony to any who would hear it.18 Requests to hear Harris’s testimony from Pilkington, who had heard it from Harris, were so frequent that it interrupted his ability to attend worship services. Instead, Pilkington spent much of the rest of his life retelling the history of Martin Harris from his own perspective and re-testifying on Harris’s behalf.19 For years, the cemetery memorial of Martin Harris was the site of annualPage 231 → celebrations of the restoration of the priesthood. Prophets and apostles would attend these celebrations and bear witness to Harris’s witness. While he was still alive, Pilkington would speak at these commemorations to provide a firsthand witness to the witness.20 Retelling Harris’s story, then testifying of the truthfulness of Harris’s witness to the Book of Mormon in this way made Harris’s story true both in the past and the present. It also established the value of “being there” and “knowing” in visceral ways. The oral dissemination of testimony in Clarkston over the past century relies on an embodied connection from the dead to the speaker to the spectators. In a discourse early in his ministry, President Thomas S. Monson remembered attending one of these commemorations: “While surrounding the beautiful granite shaft which marks the grave, a high councilor would present background concerning the life of Martin Harris, read from the Book of Mormon his testimony, and then bear his own witness to the truth. The young men listened with rapt attention, touched the granite marker, and pondered the words they had heard and the feelings they had felt.”21 Monson’s anecdote reaffirms the important pattern of speaking, re-telling, listening, and feeling that is present in the Martin Harris Pageant. The Martin Harris Pageant is inspired by the long history connected with speaking for and in behalf of Harris in Clarkston, and models a fruitful engagement with spoken testimony. The construction of the Martin Harris Memorial Theatre at the cemetery lends evidence to the town’s desire to provide an ongoing oral tradition where Martin Harris’s testimony can be shared in person. The importance of bearing of testimony, or witnessing, is at the heart of the Martin Harris Pageant. Understanding the affective power of such witnessing, live and in person, and mobilizing that power for conversion is another key way that Mormons can hasten the work. This kind of urgent witnessing that turns to the past and mobilizes it for the future is perhaps best understood in evangelical terms. As John Fletcher argues in his work on the performance of evangelical activism, what sets evangelical missionary work apart from other missionary work is that proselyting in an evangelical context “means at least—and perhaps exclusively—the presentation of the gospel and invitation to convert. For evangelicals, the question isn’t whether one should вЂdo good works’ like helping the needy or evangelize by spreading the Gospel. Rather, evangelicals argue that the ultimate good that anyone could do is to share the gospel and perhaps be a vessel through which the Holy Spirit inspires a conversion.”22 The pageant builds on years of this type of good works by the citizens of Clarkston, who Page 232 →shared direct and clear testimonies of the witness of Martin Harris to the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. The testimonies have all the more impact for being spoken live; the Clarkston Pageant is the only pageant other than the Nauvoo and British Pageants to be performed live, with actors speaking their lines rather than pantomiming to a pre-recorded sountrack. In the very first scene of the Clarkston Pageant Martin Harris, The Man Who Knew (1983), three actors step onto the stage to enact the testimony of the three witnesses who are mentioned on the memorial and who are revered in Mormon history as the three men who were shown the gold plates by an angel of God. Their testimony is featured at the beginning of the published Book of Mormon as well as the opening of this pageant, and stands as “a record that these things”—the Book of Mormon and the events of the pageant—are true.23 Following this scene, Martin Harris alone becomes the focus of the pageant. The story jumps back to his introduction to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He and his wife Lucy are conflicted about the rumors concerning Joseph Smith and gold plates. Unlike other community members who deride Smith, Martin and Lucy sincerely

want to know if what he is saying is true. After meeting and speaking with the young Joseph Smith, Martin Harris becomes convinced of the truthfulness of Mormonism. The pageant follows Harris’s conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through his friendship with Smith. The main action of the pageant centers on Harris’s decision to help finance the publication of the Book of Mormon—a new book of scripture Smith has translated from an ancient record written on rumored gold plates—despite the lack of support of the town, his friends, and his own wife. Even after he loses a significant portion of the manuscript for the Book of Mormon and is reprimanded by God himself, Harris continues to support its publication, mortgaging his farm for the necessary funds. Eventually, Harris returns to God’s favor and is granted the privilege of being one of the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon by being shown the golden plates by an angel. The pageant concludes with Martin Harris on his deathbed in Clarkston, Utah, restating his testimony for all to hear—both those onstage and those sitting in the bleachers. The climax of the pageant occurs after Martin Harris has fully embraced his belief in the Book of Mormon and is preaching on the street corner in his hometown. A group of citizens (marked as villains by their long hair and muscular builds) begin to taunt Harris. The taunts turn into an assault. The stage is entirely washed with bright red light and dramatic music, with rumblingPage 233 → bass notes, crashing cymbals, and ominous tones to underscore the violence. It is an arresting moment, if only for the radical change in lighting. Then a spotlight hits Martin Harris, washing him clean of the red lights and cueing his song, “I Know It Is True.” After the actor playing Harris sings one verse, most of the cast joins him on stage in character as townspeople who have been converted by Harris’s message. As the stage lightens and brightens and the music sweetens, the cast turns out and sings past the fourth wall, focusing on the imagined heavens above the heads of the spectators. The framing of this number as a moment of conversion for the town makes the choreography a convention; the converted characters stand full front and perform directly to the spectators because it is a powerful stage picture that helps show the importance of conversion in the lives of the early members of the Church. A different tactic is in effect at the end of the pageant. The same song is repeated, but this time by the entire cast, even the long-haired bad guys. The lights are not manipulative as before but instead simply light up the stage for visibility. As the cast fills the stage, it is clear that they are no longer entirely in character. They remain in period costumes, but in the performance I saw, they did not enter in role as townspeople. Instead, they organize themselves casually across the stage in couples and families—not the stage families they had been portraying, it seemed, but in their actual families. One woman came on stage with a toddler that she and her husband held between them. Another woman entered with the addition of a newborn wrapped to her chest. Small children who had participated in the pageant stood together in groups or by their parents. Every member of the cast, from children to adults, made direct eye contact with the audience. Again they sang, “I Know It Is True.” At the end of almost every pageant, the participants break the fourth wall to talk directly to the spectators. In the Mesa Easter Pageant, the cast also sings out “He Lives!” at the end of the pageant, while in both the Hill Cumorah Pageant and the Nauvoo Pageant, the final words belong to the character of Joseph Smith. In these cases, where the narration or a particular stage direction focuses directly on the spectators, however, the past is resurrected as the pageant participants invest their living testimonies into the testimonies of the dead they represent onstage. The shift at the end of the Martin Harris Pageant stands out as a moment when actors seem to have dropped their characters and are now appearing as themselves on stage. It is a powerful and important difference that contributes a theatrical and theological effect exclusive to the Martin Harris Pageant. Page 234 →The participants of the Martin Harris Pageant turn to the spectators because they are testifying on their own behalf as contemporary members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who have been converted to the message of the Book of Mormon. They want to share that message with the audience, both by speaking for the dead and for themselves. In the Martin Harris Pageant, participants revive the past of their community and even their own kindred dead, and also remake that past through the addition of their own living testimonies. It is a powerful moment that builds on the performance of live testimony to invite audiences—participants and spectators alike—to recommit to their own testimonies with force and urgency.

Serving the Spectators The British Pageant premiered in 2013 on the grounds of the Preston England Temple, in Chorley, Lancashire. It was created following the model of the Nauvoo Pageant, with a team of writers, a script based on primary source documents, music as an integral part of the script, and a cast of core performers and rotating family casts who performed the script live. The British Pageant in England features thirty-three core cast members who perform the show live for two weeks with two different family casts of 150 people each. It also boasts a 150-voice choir and the hundreds of volunteers always necessary to produce a pageant.24 The pageant is performed in a temporary indoor theater that is constructed to hold a large proscenium stage, a full complement of sound and lighting instruments, and a 1,500-seat house. The creative connections with the Nauvoo Pageant are strong; there was an overlap of the writing team and producers between the two shows, and many involved in the British Pageant had earlier performed in or directed the Nauvoo Pageant. It is unsurprising, then, that in the absence of repeat performance dates in England after the premiere in 2013, that the British Pageant was moved to Nauvoo to play in repertoire with the Nauvoo Pageant. The pairing of these two pageants was made simpler by the fact that much of the story of the British Pageant overlaps with the story of the Nauvoo Pageant. In the Nauvoo Pageant, Joseph Smith calls the first international missionaries to travel to England and introduce the world to the Book of Mormon and the gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The action of the British Pageant recounts the success of those missionary Page 235 →efforts in Preston, England, where some 1,600 converts were baptized within the first eight months.25 Most of these, and many thousands more that were converted across Great Britain, emigrated to the United States. The story of these immigrants is picked up again in the Nauvoo Pageant, where the Saints in Nauvoo welcome newly arrived converts from Great Britain. In Nauvoo, both the Nauvoo and British Pageants were reworked to emphasize the overlap between those who left to Nauvoo and then arrived in England to preach. Characters were renamed to appear in both pageants, repeat information was excised, and some narrative bridges were created. The same actors play the same characters in both pageants, and audiences who see both are given the opportunity to trace the lives of the British Saints and the American missionaries in both countries. The British Pageant (which plays Wednesday and Friday nights) closes with the ocean voyage of British converts bound for America. The Nauvoo Pageant (which plays Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings) opens with the arrival of the same converts in Nauvoo. The productions have become inseparably connected dramatizations of the potency of missionary work and the importance of temple work. The British Pageant tells the story of the conversion of early Mormons in British Isles from the perspective of those converts. It features vignettes of persecuted reformers, such as William Tyndale, Ann Askew, and Hugh Latimer, who laid a foundation of religious freedoms before the narrative turns to Preston, England, the location of the pageant in England. The main action of the pageant begins with the arrival of Mormon apostle Heber C. Kimball from Nauvoo to Preston. The pageant tells the sweeping story of conversion by focusing on a few converts: a widowed father whose children are baptized but who is unprepared to accept the new religion even though he is willing to emigrate with his family to Nauvoo; a cockney couple who provides comic relief and religious homilies; and the Laird family, who are the central characters in the Nauvoo Pageant. The British Pageant follows the new Mormons on their voyage across the Atlantic during which the widowed father is converted, much to the joy of his children, but the Laird family’s baby boy dies, a loss that serves as a primary conflict in the Nauvoo Pageant. In England, the pageant concludes with the dramatic arrival of contemporary Mormon missionaries filling the aisles of the theater from the auditorium to join the cast on stage in the triumphant Mormon missionary anthem, “Called to Serve.”26 The creation of this international pageant was a turning point in MormonPage 236 → pageant production. The Church Music and Cultural Arts pageant development model was shown to be replicable. Similar communities of cast participants were created and the pageant recorded high numbers of visitors from all over Europe. The great press about the event both in England and in America seemed to suggest that the pageant had been a success.

However, the Church did not plan for an immediate second production. It wasn’t until 2016 that the Church announced that in addition to the production of the British Pageant in Nauvoo, the British Pageant would also return to Preston, England, in the summer of 2017. When the British Pageant plays in England, the event is so widely advertised that it creates an entirely unique relationship between pageant producers, participants, and spectators. No other pageant has such an extensive online presence. There are promotional videos, excerpts from the show, entire production numbers, testimonial videos, and extensive interviews with participants, spectators, and the creative team. One can also download the entire pageant soundtrack. The result is a widely disseminated and unified story about the pageant that reveals how participating in the British Pageant is an act of service to the community. One pageant participant urged others to join the pageant for this very devotional experience: “I would say to anybody who’s thinking, should I get involved in the pageant, do I have the time, what’s the commitment? .В .В .В that whatever challenges you are facing, being in the pageant is an opportunity to just set those things aside for a while and really feel the joy that comes from serving others.”27 This call to serve others sets the British Pageant apart and suggests another way that pageants can prepare Mormons to hasten the work. My experiences in rehearsals and devotionals, my work as a director, and the hours of conversation I had with pageant participants revealed that pageant participants are mainly invited to serve each other. The rhetorical connections between pageants and home; the framing of pageants as a family-centered, testimony-building event; and even the devotional rehearsal process are all focused on helping the participants have a good experience in their own families and with the pageant casts. Even when pageant participants act as missionaries, circulating among the spectators before and after a performance, that labor is often contextualized by showing how being a missionary will strengthen one’s testimony of missionary work. The British Pageant in England is unique in how it frames the relationship between participants and spectators. Page 237 →The 2017 video invitation to join the British Pageant makes this focus clear: “We are asking for members, including our youth, with a growing conviction of the gospel and a willingness to serve—to share their time and talents, to help our fellow Latter-day Saints and our friends who are not of our faith to discover or renew their faith and rejoice in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”28 The British Pageant’s emphasis does not seem to be happenstance but rather an intentional devotional focus. This is not to say that other pageants are entirely self-serving; the division between internal and external religious work is not a clean binary. To be a missionary of necessity requires a focus on the people with whom are you sharing the gospel. To perform on stage requires an awareness of the spectators who are coming to see the show. Additionally, pageant participants on the whole are selflessly offering up their time and talents as a service not just for themselves but for God. As pageant participants focus on their audiences, they will, also, grow in their testimonies of the gospel. I maintain, however, that at the British Pageant in England, the pageant experience is particularly effective in encouraging participants to perform for the spectators as an act of service. One member of the creative team of the British Pageant explained it to me this way: The outward focus is so important, because every night, guaranteed, with an audience that big, every night there’s someone in that audience who has lost their child, there’s someone in that audience who has lost their spouse. Most fundamentally, the act of the atonement was an act of perception. Christ received our grief, he received our sorrows. He received our pain and he received our suffering. And in like manner I suppose I just really encourage the core cast to get outside of themselves, open up to the reality of this experience that people have traveled thousands of miles to come and see. And if we let that in somehow, if we plead for the Lord’s help to let that into us, to open us up to their experience, then real things would start to come from that.29 The encouragement to open up one’s self to the experiences of the spectators reverses the notion of traditional acting where the actor creates a role and then projects it out for the audience to accept. Instead, British Pageant participants are trained to open themselves to the spirits of the characters they are portraying and then open themselves up to the Spirit so that he can Page 238 →bring them the questions, pains, and sorrows of the

audience. The result is an increase of faith as pageant participants are better able to live the gospel of Jesus Christ as they follow his example to love others. This performance philosophy especially engages the redemption of the dead as it requires pageant participants to rehearse the redemption of the dead. Joseph Smith explained, “But how are they to become saviors on Mount Zion? By building their temples, .В .В .В and receiving all the ordinances, .В .В .В ordinations and sealing powers upon their [own] heads, [and] in behalf of all their progenitors who are dead, and redeem them that they may come forth in the first resurrection and be exalted to thrones of glory with them; and herein is the chain that binds the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers.”30 As pageant participants work to become saviors with Jesus Christ, they are even better prepared to hasten the work of the Lord. Another way that the British pageant puts spectators at the forefront is by expanding the reach of pageant storytelling outside the bounds of the America. The British Pageant administrators are keenly aware that they are the only international pageant produced by the Church. Stephen Kerr, the British Pageant president in 2013, revealed the importance of this when he explained how the Mormon Church was actually less American in its foundations and more British: “At the heart of [our] story is a message that may surprise many people.В .В .В . That is, that this Church is very British and Irish. If you look at its roots in this story, those missionaries that came here in 1837 came from a fledgling church, a small church in Ohio in the United States, and when they came here they had such success that very quickly, the majority of the members of Church were British. When the immigration started, those people became the bedrock of the Church that we have today: the international, global Church of Jesus Christ.”31 Kerr’s comment is not just for Mormons in Great Britain but indeed for all Mormons: that the history of the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the foundation of an international church that thinks beyond national borders. The mere fact of staging a pageant outside the United States is an advocacy for perceiving the Church as international in its scope. And if the Preston Temple grounds in Hartwood Green, Chorley, Lancashire, look very much like other temple grounds in America, the enormous British flag that is erected to fly at the entrance to the pageant stage makes the national location clear. Another way Great Britain is foregrounded in the pageant is through the use not only of originalPage 239 → music and Mormon hymns but also favorite British folk tunes like “Suo GГўn,” sung in Welsh, and the English anthem, “Jerusalem.” The British Pageant features folk dancing representative of all the British Isles, too. In some ways, the more British the pageant can be, the more the British Pageant can reframe the conversation about what it means to be Mormon in the twenty-first century—away from America and toward the reality of the international Church. This model of participation, where all involved in a pageant refocus on purposefully serving others through their participation is a key way that pageants can better prepare Mormons to hasten the work. Historian Amy Harris calls this way of thinking and being “genealogical consciousness,” and much like the organizers of the British Pageant, calls on Mormons to think beyond their ancestors as ways of discovering individual identity. She points out that “if we focus solely on our own identity it is easy to myopically think only our ancestors matter.В .В .В . A genealogical understanding based solely on personal identity inevitably leads to excluding others’ identities, whether they are based in race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, DNA, nationality, or any other category.”32 Instead, Harris champions genealogical consciousness that reaches out to others, living and dead, to “completely dissolve the destructive boundaries between us and them. To starkly remind that there is no them, there is only us. To pull people together despite differences.”33 In Mormon pageants, missionary work can be built on the concept of preaching the gospel to all the world. The British Pageant models how pageant participants can think beyond one’s individual identity and to reconceive the self as part of a larger global network of saints.

What a Glorious Principle In an interview about the Mormon faith, literary scholar Harold Bloom argued, “Religion rises inevitably from

our apprehension of our own death. To give meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of all religion. When death becomes the center of our consciousness, then religion authentically begins. Of all religions that I know, the one that most vehemently and persuasively defies and denies the reality of death is the original Mormonism of the prophet, seer and revelator Joseph Smith.”34 The seven Mormon pageants are elaborate evidence of Bloom’s assessment. Page 240 →It is fascinating to note that there is not a single moment in any of the seven Mormon pageants where the present is represented on stage. Instead, Mormon pageants resurrect the past to preach a message in the present while dramaturgy and composition overtly cue that participants know that they are speaking to an audience. The present is the live “now” of the pageant each night it is performed, and the future is the imagined possibility of eternal life. The mode for producing this resurrection of the past in Mormon pageantry is the doctrine of the redemption of the dead, which requires Latter-day Saints to seek after their dead with urgency. In so doing, they participate in the act of salvation and prepare themselves and their loved ones for exaltation. Beloved prophet and president of the Church Gordon B. Hinckley once preached, “I think that vicarious work for the dead more nearly approaches the vicarious sacrifice of the Savior Himself than any other work of which I know. It is given with love, without hope of compensation, or repayment or anything of the kind. What a glorious principle.”35 In theater that stages the past for contemporary audiences, there is always a slippage between the past intended on stage and the necessary adjustments to make that past viable for audiences of the present. These are coded via anachronism, careful dramaturgical work, acting choices, and other interventions that keep the past distant while bringing it into the present. The ghosts of the actual past haunt these negotiations, past performances haunt the present performance, and the audience’s own memories haunt their encounter with both. In his exceptional work The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson argues that theater, with its use and reuse of similar narratives, actors, props, gestures, and building designs, is haunted by the memories of what came before. While all art forms recycle ideas, themes, and trends, Carlson suggests that the memory of individual spectators in theater audiences makes the haunting of theater worlds, bodies, and spaces unique.36 In Mormon pageantry, however, the dead are resurrected into life on stage by the righteous spirits of the performers and by the Holy Spirit that invests their dramatization of the past with immediacy. In Mormon pageantry, traditional tools of theater are put in the service of eliciting the necessary emotions. Pageant producers are quite skilled in their use of theatrical elements. However, the efficacy of religious performance doesn’t necessarily (or even ever) include questions about the skill of the acting, the polish of the script, or the professionalism of the design. SeveralPage 241 → of the Mormon pageants, if considered from the perspective of professional or even community theater in a traditional mode, might be dismissed for overearnest acting, melodramatic musical scores, dated soundtracks, ritualized gestures, and more. However, Mormon pageants knowledgably and expertly manipulate theater conventions in service of the emotional response that is intimately linked to their performance. Considering the performances from the position of faith and with the inspiration of the Spirit transforms what is being produced into something more than the aesthetic appeal of the production. Pageant participants put care into crafting acting styles, composition, music selection, and set and costume design that open a space to feel the Spirit. The pageants shape and share the past, evidence the ineffable in the present, and promise great things for the future for audiences on both sides of the veil. When participants in Mormon pageants take on a role, they are haunted not just by the audience’s belief in the lived reality of the characters being played (i.e., Jesus really lived, Joseph Smith really did see Jesus and Heavenly Father, Mormon pioneers really did pull handcarts across the Rocky Mountains) but also by the belief that anyone who has died is still alive in a spirit world. This aspect of the plan of salvation allows Mormon audiences to read the performance of scriptural stories or early Mormon history through the lens of reality that goes beyond generic or design considerations.

As a former artistic director at the Hill Cumorah Pageant points out, pageants bring the past to life for the participants as they take on roles from the past: “Their testimonies about those people from the Book of Mormon and the Savior are made immediately present in their eyes.В .В .В . Participants creatively and imaginatively live those lives. They relate directly to someone playing the Savior.”37 In turn, pageant participants feel their performances are a testimony as well, that can be strengthened through pageant experience and can be shared with other participants and spectators. I asked dozens of pageant participants what the most powerful moment of their pageant experience was. One young man’s comment is representative of many others. He explained: I felt the presence of those that were in the Book of Mormon. I think that they enjoy it just as much as we do, to come and to watch and to see and to laugh and see how funny we look in our clothing. I really have felt that as I’ve been here and gone and studied my scriptures in different Page 242 →places, and being in the Pageant, really felt almost watched and patted on the back at times. You know, to say, “Thanks for doing this, thanks for representing us, and thanks for letting us live again,” in a sense.38 When pageant participants take on a role, they believe that spirit was once real, has form and movement, and can inspire them in the present. They also believe that they can meet their dead again after this life. In Nauvoo, I walked the “Trail of Hope,” to encounter the pageant vignettes of the pioneers who were forced to leave in the winter of 1846. I was particularly struck by the reenactment of a letter from Sarah Randall, a convert from New Hampshire who was one of the last to leave town. The Young Performing Missionary portraying Randall recited a portion of Randall’s journal: Nauvoo, June 1, 1846. Dear Family, The temple is finished and dedicated to the Lord, it is a most splendid building.В .В .В . The mobs are threatening continually to come upon us.В .В .В . We have to make a great sacrifice [in order to get away.]В .В .В . We expect to start in a few days for the West, and we go as Abraham went, not knowing whither we go. But the Lord will go before us and he will be our front and our rearward.39 As the missionary referenced the “most splendid building” of the temple, she turned to look over her shoulder. We all followed her gaze up to the perfectly visible reconstructed Nauvoo Mormon temple. And I felt something. I was inspired by that carefully performed moment to remember that I was sealed through Mormon temple practices to ancestors who had also made covenants in a temple that looked just like the one I could see. I was standing on the road they had walked when they left Nauvoo behind. I was overwhelmed with awe at the journey they would take. I felt, as a believer gathered with other believers, that their spirits, or at least the Spirit, was with me. I recorded my experience by sending a text to my husband, a moment of sharing that strengthened our commitment to each other, to our shared past, and to the future we hope to have with our family in the eternities. Page 243 →My experience as a believer in this moment lends insight into the power of religious performance for those who believe what is being presented on stage. I felt something, that feeling reaffirmed my faith, and then I acted upon my feeling. Resurrecting the past in religious theater relies on a theological understanding of death, dying, the dead, spirits, and the Spirit. Without the faith of the Mormon participants and spectators, Mormon pageantry is at best a quaint artifact of a forgotten American theatrical practice and at worst overacted community theater, high on sincerity and low in aesthetic quality. With faith and by the power of the Spirits and spirits, however, contemporary Mormon pageantry reveals itself to be a powerfully efficacious form of American religious theater that takes for its goal nothing less than the exaltation of the living and the dead.

Page 244 →Page 245 →

Notes Chapter One 1. Joseph Knight Sr., “22 Sept. 1827,” Manuscript of the Early History of Joseph Smith finding of plates, &c. &c, unpublished manuscript, Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2–3. 2. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are commonly referred to as Mormon by those within and without the organization. Mormons also referred to themselves as Latter-day Saints or, especially in the nineteenth century, just Saints. I use the term Mormon throughout this work to describe both a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the culture associated with the LDS Church in America. In referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an organization, I will abbreviate to the LDS Church, the Mormon Church, or just the Church (with capitalization). 3. From 1964–2007, there was a fifth Mormon pageant, the Oakland Temple Pageant, And It Came to Pass. It was performed in the auditorium of the East Bay Interstake Center on the grounds of the Oakland California Temple. It was a majestic indoor production in three acts, performed live with a full orchestra, several hundred on-stage performers, and over 400 “balcony singers.” The pageant’s first act dramatized Christ’s ministry, his prophecies about an apostasy, and the restoration of his Church by Joseph Smith. The second act picked up the story of the settlement of Utah by Mormon pioneers. The third act took the story into the present day to show how the Church is still the same, and is still as important, as it was in the time of Christ. For more information, see Jeane Wolfenden, “Songs Sung Backstage and in Balconies,” New Era (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). For a recording of the 1998 pageant, see Chris Collins, “Oaklland [sic] Temple Pageant Presentation,” filmed 1998, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=024qEVxZ_08. 4. I use the term “Christian” here to denote any religion that claims the birth, death, Page 246 →and resurrection of Jesus Christ as central to their tenets, which therefore includes Mormonism. I am aware that other Christian religions disagree with this fundamental designation of Mormonism as a Christian religion. For more on that debate, see Matthew Bowman, Christian: The Politics of a Word in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 5. Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, [1924] 2006), 121. 6. 1 Corinthians 15:51–53. 7. Phillipians 3:20–21. 8. Alma 11:42–44. 9. Jill Stevenson, Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 40. 10. “Shakespeare’s Birthplace: This Is Where the Story Began,” Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/visit/shakespeares-birthplace/. 11. Rachel Lee Rudin, Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 34. 12. “Play On! 36 Playwrights Translate Shakespeare,” Oregon Shakespeare Festival, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.osfashland.org/experience-osf/upcoming/play-on.aspx. 13. Sarah Bachelard, Resurrection and Moral Imagination (London: Routledge, 2016), 38. 14. 1 Corinthians 15:20–22. 15. Lance Gharavi, “Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith (New York: Routledge, 2011), 3. 16. See Jill Stevenson, Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-first Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Ann Pellegrini and Janet R. Jacobsen, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Henry Bial, Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).

17. “Our Story,” Sight and Sound Theatres, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.sight-sound.com /story. 18. M. Russell Ballard, “Filling the World with Goodness and Truth,” Ensign (July 1996): 10. 19. Robert K. SarlГіs, “Performance Reconstruction,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 202. 20. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 14. 21. Marvin Carlson, “The Theatre Journal Auto Archive: Marvin Carlson,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 1 (2003): 211. Page 247 →22. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 6. 23. Ibid., 10. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Ann Pellegrini, “Feeling Secular,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2009): 205. 26. Stevenson, 23. 27. Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17, no. 1 (2009): 71. 28. David Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 214. 29. Ibid., 214–15. 30. Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 1. 31. Anonymous pageant director, in an interview with the author, July 2, 2013. 32. “Clarkston Pageant Tells Story of Martin Harris,” Church News (July–August 2011). 33. Jennie Christiansen, “Clarkston Readies for 30th Anniversary of Martin Harris Pageant,” Cache Valley Daily, July 16, 2013, http://www.cachevalleydaily.com/news/local/article_20dbf332-ee3d-11e2-b2ff001a4bcf6878.html. 34. Sharon Haddock, “Castle Valley Pageant a Community Classic,” Deseret News (August 1, 2012). 35. “Volunteer Army of over 3,500 to Help Produce Church Summer Pageants,” Mormon News Room (May 25, 2011). 36. Trent Toone, “Manti’s Mormon Miracle Pageant Hits 50-Year Mark,” Deseret News (June 9, 2016). 37. Lindsay Ivins, “Mormon Church to Present Annual Easter Pageant,” azcentral, March 28, 2012, http://www.azcentral.com/. 38. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Volunteer Army of over 3,500 to Help Produce Church Summer Pageants,” Mormon News Room (May 25, 2011); “Nauvoo Pageant Bellows Pumpers,” Meridian Magazine, September 23, 2013, http://www.ldsmag.com/article/1/13304. 39. Madylyn Thorn, “Hill Cumorah Pageant Holds a Different Meaning for Volunteers,” The Digital Universe (July 19, 2013), http://universe.byu.edu/2013/07/19/1hill-cumorah-pageant-holds-differentmeaning-for-volunteers/; Joseph Walker, “Hill Cumorah Pageant Attendance Down Despite National Media Attention,” Deseret News (July 21, 2011). 40. Samuel M. Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 24. 41. I will use first names for clarity throughout this section as I am talking about different members of the Smith family. I will refer to Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism, as Joseph and will refer to his father, Joseph Smith Sr., by his full name. Page 248 →42. Joseph actually recorded this vision a number of times throughout his life, and each record describes the visitation differently. I have chosen to represent the story as it has been canonized in Mormon scripture as the official version. For more information on the various accounts, see Steven C. Harper, Joseph Smith’s First Vision: A Guide to the Historical Accounts (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012). 43. Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996–2004),

469, 576, 578. 44. Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith Papers Journals Volume 2: December 1841–April 1843, eds. Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson (Salt Lake City: Church Historians Press, 2011), 57. 45. Lucy Mack Smith, Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir, ed. Lavinia Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), 352–53. 46. Douglas J. Davies, The Mormon Culture of Salvation (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000), 88–89. 47. Brown, 17. 48. The Mormon priesthood is divided into two orders, each with three offices: deacon, teacher, and priest in the Aaronic Priesthood and Elder, Seventy, and High Priest in the Melchizedek Priesthood. Worthy boys aged twelve are ordained to the priesthood as deacons, and men move through the ranks of ordination according to their age and responsibilities. Priesthood power is passed on physically, by the laying of hands on heads; men in the Church can trace their priesthood lineage back to Joseph Smith and therefore directly to God. For an extensive look at how priesthood functions in the LDS Church, see Gregory Prince, Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1995). The ability for all men to hold the priesthood, regardless of race, remains one of the most complicated histories of the Church. While early black members were ordained by Joseph Smith, his successor Brigham Young established a policy banning black men from the priesthood, now interpreted by Church officials as a product of a “a highly contentious racial culture in which whites were afforded great privilege.” See “Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood. It wasn’t until 1978 that the President of the Church, Spencer W. Kimball, announced that a revelation from God had lifted this policy and that the priesthood was immediately available to all worthy men “without regard for race or color.” See Doctrine and Covenants, Official Declaration 2. Additionally, the restriction of priesthood power, and therefore any binding authority in the Church, to men only has recently become a national conversation, headed by the advocacy work of Mormon feminist groups like Feminist Mormon Housewives, Ordain Women, and LDS WAVE (Women Advocating for Voice and Equality). 49. Doctrine and Covenants 1:30. Page 249 →50. Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012), 30. 51. Brown, 19. 52. William Smith, interview by E. C. Briggs and J. W. Peterson (Oct. or Nov. 1893), originally published in Zion’s Ensign (13 January 1894), reprinted in Deseret Evening News (20 January 1894) and in the Millennial Star (February 26, 1894). 53. Brown, 57. 54. Davies, The Mormon Culture of Salvation, 91. 55. Joseph Smith, The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, [1924] 2006), 179–80. 56. Joseph Smith, “The Judge Higbee Funeral Speech,” Scriptural Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, comp. Joseph Fielding Smith and the Historians Office of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1935, ed. by Richard C. Gailbraith (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1993), 319–21. 57. Joseph Smith, Scriptural Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 324. 58. Joseph Smith, “King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text,” ed. Stan Larson, BYU Studies 18, no. 2 (1978): 205. 59. Amy Harris, essay draft accepted for publication in Ensign, February 2015, paragraph 2. In publication, the editors significantly altered her text to remove her description of how members can be “a savior with Him”: “Engaging in family history research teaches us of the vastness and grand scope of God’s creation and underscores the individual and merciful reach of Christ’s Atonement. The Lord has taught that though the worlds He has created for His children are “innumerableВ .В .В . unto man; .В .В .В all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them” (Moses 1:35). Family history and temple work offer us an opportunity to join in Jesus Christ’s work of salvation. Doing so can help us learn how to love and be merciful to our families, to our neighbors, to everyone we meet, for they are all our brothers and sisters.” Harris, “How Family History Changes Our Hearts and Minds,” Ensign (February 2015): 65.

60. This vision of the redemption of the dead, recorded by Joseph F. Smith, was not part of the standard works until 1976. During the April general conference of that year, the Church voted to accept this vision and Joseph Smith Jr.’s vision of the celestial kingdom as scripture. The revelations were originally placed in the Pearl of Great Price but were later moved to the new edition of the Doctrine and Covenants as sections 137 (celestial kingdom) and 138 (redemption of the dead). See Spencer W. Kimball, Church News (June 2, 1979). 61. Doctrine and Covenants 138:57. 62. Doctrine and Covenants 138:58–60. 63. Douglas J. Davies, Joseph Smith, Jesus, and Satanic Opposition: Atonement, Evil and the Mormon Vision (Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), 104. 64. Ibid. Page 250 →65. Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith Papers Journals Volume 2 (December 1841–April 1843), eds. Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson (Salt Lake City: Church Historians Press, 2011), 57. 66. Doctrine and Covenants 137:5. 67. Doctrine and Covenants 137:6. 68. Doctrine and Covenants 137:7–9. 69. Boyd K. Packer, “Covenants,” Ensign (May 1987): 25. 70. Although the LDS Church directs its members to only submit names of ancestors for proxy baptism and other ordinances, this practice is controversial when members overstep their bounds to do work for other groups. Particularly troubling is the baptism of some Holocaust victims. The Church has worked to address these concerns while still balancing what they see as a theological imperative. For example, see the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, “Church Statement on Jewish Names Entered in Geneological Database,” Mormon Newsroom (February 14, 2012). 71. See Doctrine and Covenants 76 for the entire revelation to Joseph Smith describing the three degrees of glory. 72. Russell M. Nelson, “Salvation and Exaltation,” Ensign (May 2008): 8. 73. Howard W. Hunter, “A Temple Motivated People,” Ensign (February 1995): 4–5. 74. Brown, 204. 75. Ibid. 76. Claudia Bushman, Contemporary Mormonism (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), ix–x. 77. Ibid., x. 78. John Fletcher, Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 10. 79. Anonymous pageant participant, in a Facebook Messenger conversation with the author, September 25, 2013. 80. Donnalee Dox, Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 25. 81. Bowman, The Mormon People, 256. 82. B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Century I in Six Volumes (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, [1902–1912] 1965), 312–13. 83. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” from William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage International, 2012), 73.

Chapter Two 1. Brigham Young, “Propriety of Theatrical Amusements: Instructions Relative to Them,” Journal of Discourses (1862): 242–45.Page 251 → 2. Megan Sanborn Jones, “Mormons and Melodrama,” in Mormons and American Popular Culture, ed. Michael Hunter (New York: ABC-CLIO Praeger, 2012). 3. Davis Bitton, ed., The Ritualization of Mormon History and Other Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 173.

4. Kathleen Lubeck, “Get That Show on the Road: How to Stage a Roadshow,” Ensign (August 1984): 44–49. 5. There are smaller LDS pageants that are produced by local congregations without official sponsorship of the LDS Church, which means that the ecclesiastic oversight is held at the local area and the congregation shoulders full responsibility for the production and its costs. Examples of these types of pageants include The Mormon Handcart Pageant in Nephi, Utah, which was started with the help of Manti Pageant organizers in 2001 (“The Mormon Handcart Pageant Event Page,” The Mormon Handcart Pageant, accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.handcartpageant.com/index.shtml). The Kirtland Pageant, “This Is Kirtland,” was started in 2003 and is featured as a part of the events available at the LDS historic sites in Kirtland, Ohio (Sunny McClellan Morton, “The Pageant That Isn’t,” Meridian Magazine, July 7, 2005, http://ldsmag.com/ldsmag/travel/070705kirkland.html). The New Market Ward Nativity Pageant in Ontario, Canada, has been performing annually since 1987 and estimates that each year between 7,000–10,000 people attend (Ken Sisler, “26th Year of Nativity Pageant, Building Bridges in Canadian Community,” Deseret News [15 December 2013]). 6. Two examples include the Kyiv Ukraine Temple Cultural Celebration (2010) that featured about 500 youth from Armenia, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia, and Moldova in a folk dance and music performance, and the Gilbert Arizona Temple Cultural Celebration, entitled True to the Faith (2014). In Arizona, 12,000 teenagers performed scenes, songs, and dances from the Old Testament through history of the establishment of the Mormon Church in Arizona to the present. 7. They are both performed in December in the LDS Conference Center, which features a main 21,010-seat auditorium and a smaller state-of-the-art theater that seats 850. 8. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 44. 9. Ibid., 101. 10. Ibid. 11. All information about this pageant is drawn from Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry. 12. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 13. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2011). Page 252 →14. LDS missions are organized geographically and generally take their names from the location of the mission headquarters, usually a specific city. The geographical area a mission actually covers may be often much larger than the name indicates. (For example, I served my mission in the Canada Montreal Mission, which included all of Quebec province and Ottowa.) In the early days of the Church, missionaries would be called to serve for years in entire countries, primarily in the United States, England, or in some Polynesian Islands. By the early twentieth century, most areas of the world had been divided up into more discreet missions, like the Eastern States Mission, which at the time of the creation of the Hill Cumorah Pageant ran the length of the east coast from South Carolina to upstate New York, in addition to all of Ontario, Canada. 15. Argetsinger, “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: A Historical Perspective,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13, no.1–2 (2004): 59. 16. “History,” Oberammergau Passion Play, accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.passionplayoberammergau.com/index.php?id=126/. 17. Jill Stevenson, “Affect, Medievalism and Temporal Drag: Oberammergau’s Passion Play Event” in The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics, ed. Stanley D. Brunn (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2015), 2494. E-book. 18. Quoted in Ibid., 2491. 19. Valerie Johnson, “Manti Celebrates 50th Season of Mormon Miracle Pageant,” Church News (June 29, 2016). 20. Tracy A. Harris (Hill Cumorah Pageant participant), in a Facebook Messenger conversation with the author, September 17, 2009. 21. In his extensive archival research on the history of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, Gerald Argetsinger has traced the complicated genealogy of artistic directors, directors, producers, etc. who each contributed to the

pageant. Argetsinger has found that the sheer length of Harold Hansen’s forty-year career at the pageant has overshadowed some of the contributions of other important figures. In singling out Hansen as an important contributor here, I am attempting to trace a large picture development of the pageant rather than outline a detailed history. See Gerald Argetsinger, “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: A Historical Perspective,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 13, no. 1–2 (2004): 58–69. 22. Ibid., 66. 23. Crawford Gates, “The Delights of Making Cumorah’s Music,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13 (2004): 74. 24. This history of the Hill Cumorah Pageant has been well documented, and its impact on all other Mormon pageants and on Mormon arts generally is significant. It has been the primary subject of over a half dozen dissertations: Charles Walker Whitman, “Dramatic Development of the Text of America’s Witness for Christ: A History of the Hill Cumorah Pageant 1937–1964” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1967); Walter Everett Boyden Jr., “The Road to Hill Cumorah” (PhD diss., Brigham Young University,Page 253 → 1982); Michael H. Madsen, “Mormon Meccas: The Spiritual Transformation of Mormon Historical Sites from Points of Interest to Sacred Space” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2003); James A. Bell, “Performing Mormonism: вЂThe Hill Cumorah Pageant’ as Transformational Theatrical Ritual” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2006); Airen Hall, “Experiencing Zion: Contemporary Pilgrimage in the Latter-day Saint tradition” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2012). It has also been the subject of a number of critical articles: Harold I. Hansen, “Hill Cumorah Mormon Pageant,” New York Folklore Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1960): 25–27; Ellen E. McHale, “Witnessing for Christ: The Hill Cumorah Pageant of Palmyra, New York,” Western Folklore 44, no. 1 (1985): 34–40; Richard Armstrong and Gerald Argetsinger, “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: Religious Pageantry as Persuasive Form,” Text and Performance Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1989): 153; Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 69–83. It also has wide coverage in popular culture: Paul Moakley, “The Living Book of Mormon,” Time (July 20, 2012); Peter Applebome, “A Mormon Spectacle, Way Off Broadway,” The New York Times (July 13, 2011); Sarah Taddeo, “Annual Pageant at Fount of Mormon Faith,” USA Today (12 July 2015). Most recently, a parody of the pageant appears in the wildly popular The Book of Mormon musical. Gerald Argetsinger, a long-time director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, recognizes his blocking in this parody scene and sees his wife’s costumes referenced throughout the musical in their Mormon history vignettes. He also identifies musical refrains from the pageant in songs from the musical, and argues that the pageant and the musical perform an unexpected artistic relationship: (Gerald Argetsinger, “The Musical and the Cumorah Experience,” Singing and Dancing to “The Book of Mormon”: Critical Essays on the Broadway Musical [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016]). 25. “Manti Mormon Miracle Pageant,” Facebook, April 12, 2016, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/MantiPageant/posts/1002528366461084/. 26. Linnie M. Findlay, “The Mormon Miracle at Manti,” Ensign (July 1982): 42. 27. “History,” The Mormon Miracle Pageant, accessed August 12, 2017, http://mantipageant.org /history. 28. Ibid. 29. One could argue that all of the pageants are historical fiction, if one takes scripture as literature rather than history or holy writ.В A central tenet of Mormonism is that “we believe the Bible to be the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly.В We also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God”(Articles of Faith 1:8.). As such, I am positioning scripts drawn directly from scripture and historical documents (journals, letters, official memo, etc.) as primary source documents. 30. The pageant’s narrative selects some of the most spectacular moments of the Mormon pioneer period and collapses them into a single story. The mustering of the Mormon Battalion in 1846 is celebrated as the longest infantry march recorded in U.S. Army history. While the Mormon Battalion never saw battle, the salaries drawn by the enlisted men paid for most of their families to make the trek west to the Salt Lake Valley.Page 254 → Additional funds came from some of the discharged volunteers who stayed to work in California at Sutter’s Mill. Their discovery of gold there prompted the gold rush and additionally helped defray the cost of the Mormon exodus. For more, see Norma B. Rickets, The Mormon Battalion:

U.S. Army of the West, 1846–1848 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996). The Martin and Willie handcart companies were famously unprepared for their journey and caught in an unseasonably harsh Wyoming winter. Records suggest over 200 pioneers died before their rescue in the 1856. For more, see Rebecca Bartholomew and Leonard Arrington, Rescue of the 1856 Handcart Companies (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1981). Sanpete County had been settled by Mormons much earlier in 1849. 31. “Mormon Miracle Pageant,” Manti City, accessed August 12, 2017, http://mantiutah.org /mormon-miracle.html. 32. Sue Hennifer, “75 Years and Going Strong: Palmyra’s Hill Cumorah Pageant,” Life in the Finger Lakes, http://www.lifeinthefingerlakes.com/75-years-going-strong-palmyras-hill-cumorah-pageant/. 33. Kate O’Connell, “Mormon Pilgrims Bring Tourism Dollars to Palmyra, NY,” North County Public Radio, July 23, 2013, http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/22406/20130723 /mormon-pilgrims-bring-tourism-dollars-to-palmyra-ny/. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established almost immediately after Smith’s death on the belief that Smith had anointed his son, Joseph Smith III to be the next prophet. Members of the RLDS faith stayed in Illinois rather than follow Brigham Young and the majority of the early Mormon converts on their journey west. For more information on the earliest RLDS presence in Nauvoo (people, congregations, buildings, theologies), see Roger D. Launius, Joseph Smith III: Pragmatic Prophet (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995). As the founding members of the RLDS Church included members of Joseph Smith’s immediate family, the notable properties that had belonged to Joseph Smith—his Homestead, Mansion House, Red Brick Store, Nauvoo House, and the Smith Family Cemetery—stayed in the ownership of the RLDS Church. The LDS Church began acquiring other lots in Nauvoo in the early twentieth century, culminating in the purchase of the temple lot where a reconstructed Nauvoo Temple was built and dedicated for worship in 2002. 37. As early as 1980, senior missionary couples began performing short skits during a few summer weekends. These were successful but not consistently maintained. In 1987, Maynard and Nonie Sorenson were issued a mission call from Salt Lake City to bring “show business to Nauvoo.” Nonie Sorenson created Rendezvous in Old Nauvoo in 1988 for performance by senior missionaries in the restored Cultural Hall and wrote a full-length historical musical, Nauvoo Adventure, to be performed in the 245-seat visitors’ center theater. Under pressure to find a cast, leaders suggested advertising to find Page 255 →performers from BYU who could be called to serve a summer mission to perform in the show, and the Young Performing Missionary Program was founded. Under the direction of subsequent Nauvoo Theatrical Productions directors, the YPM program was expanded from four to twenty young performers and a brass band of sixteen additional YPMs was created. Two more shows were added to the YPM repertoire and Nauvoo Adventure was replaced by a new musical, High Hopes and River Boats. The history of the YPM program is recorded in Maynard Sorenson, “Our First Ten Years in Nauvoo,” unpublished manuscript, June 13, 1995. Additional information from Heidi Camp (executive director of Nauvoo Theatrical Productions), in an email to the author, December 7, 2013, and Noni Sorenson, in an email to the author, December 23, 2013. 38. Each day of the summer, the YPMs present High Hopes and River Boats, a traditional musical theater production set in old Nauvoo and performed in the large visitors’ center theater and Just Plain Ann Amanda, a play and puppet show for young audiences, staged in the Cultural Hall. The senior missionaries perform in Rendezvous at Old Nauvoo, a musical comedy variety also shown in the Cultural Hall. Sunset by the Mississippi is a variety show featuring music, dancing, stories, and sketch comedy and is performed by both YPMs and senior missionaries on the Nauvoo Outdoor Stage (not to be confused with the Pageant Stage, also outdoors). Additionally, the YPMs perform two site-specific vignettes. Youth in Zion is staged on the street corner across from the Print Shop on Main Street. Trail of Hope is a pilgrimage journey down Parley Street, where visitors are invited to stop and listen to stories of those who fled Nauvoo in the 1840s. 39. The vignettes performed in Nauvoo are drawn from extra material created in the writing of the Nauvoo Pageant. King Follett Discourse is a portrayal of a funeral speech by the actor portraying Joseph Smith. Women of Nauvoo stages stories from early women in the Church performed in the Relief Society Memorial

Gardens. Letters of Joseph and Emma is based on actual letters between Joseph Smith and his wife Emma while they lived in Nauvoo. Go Ye into All the World tells missionary stories from early Church leaders and is staged in the reconstructed Seventies Hall. When they are in town, the core cast also takes over The Trail of Hope from the YPMs. The core cast plays their same characters both in the pageant and in this vignette. 40. Deborah Gertz Husar, “Nauvoo Pageant Cast to Use New Rehearsal Space When It Arrives Next Week,” Herald Whig, June 19, 2015, http://www.whig.com/story/29365427/nauvoo-pageant-cast-to-usenew-rehearsal-space-when-it-arrives-next-week. Unlike Manti City and the Village of Palmyra, which credit Mormon tourism and the pageants as foundational aspects for their local economies, the City of Nauvoo doesn’t even list the pageant as one of its featured “Events” but merely lists it on its calendar as an activity in June, unlike some of the year-round LDS Historic activities, which are featured. 41. Quoted in James A. Faust, “You Are All Heaven Sent,” Ensign (November 2002): 113. 42. The use of Nauvoo as a metaphor for present-day lessons in faith, obedience, and Page 256 →sacrifice is a trope that runs across LDS General Conference Addresses of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Key sermons that utilize the trope include: L. Tom Perry, “Nauvoo—A Demonstration of Faith,” Ensign (May 1980): 74–76; Cheiko N. Okazaki, “Rejoice in Every Good Thing,” Ensign (November 1991): 89–91; Joseph B. Wirthlin, “Faith of Our Fathers,” Ensign (May 1996): 32–34; M. Russell Ballard, “Faith in Every Footstep,” Ensign (November 1996): 23–25; Dallin H. Oaks, “Following the Pioneers,” Ensign (November 1997): 72–74. 43. “The North American Central Area Presidency Donald L. Staheli, Donald L. Hallstrom, William W. Parmley to Stake, Mission, and Temple Presidents Chicago Nauvoo, St. Louis, and Winter Quarters Temple Districts” (letter, 8 January 2004), R. Don Oscarson, City of Joseph Papers, 1954–2004, Box 1, Notebook 3, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. 44. There are no official explanations in circulation for the change in the pageants; even Oscarson recorded that “it has never been explained to me why City of Joseph was cancelled or who was involved in the decision” (Oscarson, Notebook 1, “Ending,” 4). 45. Barbara Renouf and Catherine Renouf Gute, “вЂCity of Joseph’ Pageant Concludes Its 29 Year Run,” Church News (August 14, 2004). 46. Carrie A. Moore, “Producers Finish Up with New Nauvoo Pageant,” Deseret News (June 11, 2005). 47. “Scripts,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.lds.org/callings/music/savior-of-the-world/scripts. 48. Ray Robison (director of the LDS Division of Music and Cultural Arts) and Cynthia Collier (member of the Nauvoo Pageant writing team), in conversation with the author, June 18, 2013. 49. Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17, no. 1 (2009): 74. 50. David T. Warner, in an interview with Martha S. LoMonaco, August 8, 2007. 51. I track the inception of any given pageant as the first year when it was performed with a script. Several of the pageants developed out of other performances—from historical tableaux to patriotic presentations to choir concerts—that had been on site for years before a script was developed. This explains why the Mesa Easter Pageant claims that it started in 1928 (when choir concerts were first performed in Mesa for Easter), while the Hill Cumorah Pageant is largely accepted as the “oldest” pageant. The Mesa Pageant wasn’t scripted until 1977, while the Hill Cumorah Pageant was first performed with a script in 1937. 52. “Frequently Asked Questions,” Mesa Easter Pageant, accessed August 12, 2017, http://easterpageant.org/?page_id=9558. 53. Mosiah 18:9. 54. Exact information about the beginnings of the Arizona pageant varies from source to source and is mostly provided in newspaper interviews with local pageant participants. Some information about the history of the pageant repeats across interviews and Page 257 →other stories appear only in certain places. Even when information is corroborated, there are differences in dates and the names of people involved. In my reporting of the Mesa Pageant’s history, I have tried to piece together the sources to find the most accurate series of events possible. These sources include: D. L. Turner and Catherine H. Ellis, Latter-day Saints in Mesa (Images of America) (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009), 103–6; Cecily Markland, “Mesa Arizona Easter Pageant Tradition Turns 75,” Deseret News (March 12, 2013);

Heather Wrigley, “Mesa Easter Pageant Teaches of Christ,” Church News (April 22, 2011); Jill B. Adair, “For the Love of Savior: Mesa Easter Pageant,” Church News (March 15, 2008). 55. Jill B. Adair, “Annual Pageant Tells the Easter Story,” Church News (March 26, 2005). 56. Ibid. 57. Jill B. Adair, “For Love of Savior: Mesa Easter Pageant,” Church News (March 15, 2008). 58. Matthew 27:54. 59. Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 8. 60. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, vol. 13 (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, [1870] 1998), 335. 61. “Editorial Department: A Call to the Women of the Church,” Young Woman’s Journal 28, no. 1 (January 1917): 41. 62. Ibid. 63. Thomas S. Monson, Teachings of Thomas S. Monson, compiled by Lynne F. Cannegieter (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2011), 59. 64. For the Strength of the Youth (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2011), 11. 65. President Ezra Taft Benson first provided specific council against the immorality of media in a general conference discourse: “Movies, television programs, and video recordings that are both suggestive and lewd. Magazines and books that are obscene and pornographic. We counsel you, young men, not to pollute your minds with such degrading matter, for the mind through which this filth passes is never the same afterwards. Don’t see R-rated movies or vulgar videos or participate in any entertainment that is immoral, suggestive, or pornographic. Don’t listen to music that is degrading” (Ezra Taft Benson, “To the вЂYouth of a Noble Birthright,’” Ensign [May, 1986]: 43). His injunctions here have been repeated frequently since then, with additional council in the intervening years against the viewing of pornography. 66. Travis T. Anderson, “Seeking after the Good in Art, Drama, Film, and Literature,” BYU Studies 46, no. 2 (2007): 234. 67. Moroni 7:16. 68. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, Nauvoo Production Version, unpublished script (Salt Lake City, 2006), 70. Page 258 →69. Making pageant presidencies a priesthood calling has the benefit of providing pageants with a well-known and already-functioning hierarchy of reporting and decision-making. It also means that the day-to-day production of pageants is a gendered responsibility because priesthood callings are reserved only for men. While women can serve as artistic directors (although currently, only the directors of the Mesa Easter Pageant and the British Pageant are women), “leadership” of pageants remains almost exclusively male. The gendered politics of Mormon performance remains an area that merits further study. 70. Gerald Argetsinger, “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: A Historical Perspective,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 13, no. 1–2 (2004): 64. 71. Dwight Schwendiman (Hill Cumorah Pageant president), in an interview with the author, July 5, 2010. 72. Dallin H. Oaks (member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints), in a memo to Robert L. Backman, “Subject: Hill Cumorah Script” (1987), from the personal files of Gerald Agetsinger. 73. Sherman M. Crump in a memo to Steve (December 2, 1987), from the personal files of Gerald Agetsinger. 74. Anonymous young woman (in the role of Lamanite dancer), in a conversation with the author, June 30, 2013. 75. Crawford Gates, “The Delights of Making Cumorah’s Music,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13 (2004): 76. 76. In 1996, the script and music were first recorded in Spanish, and Spanish-language versions of the productions are now performed at least once during the run of the pageant. Performing the pageant in both of these languages is a reflection of the local area. The Spanish performances function to simultaneously promote the ecumenical focus of the production and to target a potential market for missionary work. Most of the performers are not bilingual, so they learn their lines phonetically to better maintain the illusion that they are speaking the lines as they lip sync.

77. Jenee Wright Prince (director of the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 21, 2013. 78. Stephanie Foster Breinholt (Mesa Easter Pageant voice-over actress), in an interview with the author, September 24, 2015. 79. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 69. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. 1 Nephi 19:23. 83. Leslie K. Arnovick, “It’s a Sign of the Times: Uses of Anachronism in Medieval Drama and the Postmodern Novel,” Studia Neophilologica 65 (1993): 157. 84. “The 13th Annual Nauvoo Pageant—A Tribute to Joseph Smith,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, accessed August 17, 2017, http://www.nauvoopageant.org/; “The Mormon Miracle Pageant: Manti, Utah,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Page 259 →Day Saints, accessed August 17, 2017, http://mantipageant.org/; “Mesa Arizona Easter Pageant: Jesus the Christ,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, accessed August 17, 2017, http://easterpageant.org/; “Hill Cumorah, ” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, accessed August 17, 2017, http://www.hillcumorah.org/pageant_welcome.php. 85. “The Purpose of the Church,” Handbook 2, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (secure website). 86. Ibid. 87. John D. Bell, “Ritualized Theater: The Performing Pilgrim’s Process at the Hill Cumorah Pageant,” in Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon, vol. 1, ed. J. Michael Hunter (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), 171. 88. Ibid., 177. 89. Anonymous pageant director, in an interview with the author, July 2, 2013. 90. Hilary Masell Oswald, “The Pageantry of Faith: Thousands Flock to the Sacred Hill Cumorah for Annual Spectacle,” News21, August 23, 2007, http://news21.com/story/2007/08/23 /the_pageantry_of_faith. 91. Corey Camp, “N.Y Family Experiences Unique Theater through the Hill Cumorah Pageant,” Deseret News (July 17, 2013). 92. Jenee Wright Prince (director of the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 21, 2013. 93. Emily Wadley (Nauvoo Pageant associate director), in an interview with the author, July 26, 2013. 94. Young missionaries have no input into where they are assigned. Senior couples have more involvement in their assignments and are at times even able to select where they will serve based on published lists of areas in need. For more information on this process from an LDS perspective, see Ronald A. Rasband, “The Divine Call of a Missionary,” Ensign (May 2010): 51–53. 95. The fundamental claim setting the Mormon Church apart from other millennial Christian religions is that God’s priesthood authority was restored to the earth following a period of apostasy after the death of Christ’s apostles. Mormons therefore consider their church to be not a new religion but a restoration of Christ’s church upon the earth. 96. John Fletcher, Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 2.

Chapter Three 1. Gerald S. Argetsinger, “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: A Historical Perspective,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13, no. 1–2 (2004): 58. 2. Eric Fielding (Hill Cumorah Pageant set designer), in an email to the author, November 11, 2015. 3. Joseph Smith History 1:23–24. Page 260 →4. Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, [1958] 1966), 175. 5. On the subject of a Mesoamerican Cumorah, apostle Joseph Fielding Smith wrote in 1956: “It is

known that the Hill Cumorah where the Nephites were destroyed is the hill where the Jaredites were also destroyed.В .В .В . It must be conceded that this description fits perfectly the land of Cumorah in New York” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation 3, ed. Bruce R. McConkie [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954], 233–34). Apostles Mark E. Petersen and Marion G. Romney have also stated a belief that the hill in New York is the same hill spoken of in the Book of Mormon. For other references, see “123rd Annual Conference of the LDS Church,” Ensign (April 1953): 83–84; Marion G. Romney, “America’s Destiny,” Ensign (November 1975): 35–37. 6. “A Looked for Exposure: Secrets of the Original Mormon Bible,” The New York Times, February 26, 1888. 7. A. P. Kesler, “Mormon Hill,” Young Woman’s Journal 9 (February 1898): 73. 8. For a good review of the various opinions on the location of the Hill Cumorah in New York and Cumorah of the Book of Mormon, see William J. Hamblin, “Basic Methodological Problems with the AntiMormon Approach to the Geography and Archaeology of the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 2, no. 1 (1993): 161–97. 9. Eric Fielding (Hill Cumorah Pageant set designer), in an email to the author, November 11, 2015. 10. Unlike some church buildings in other Christian denominations, Mormon Church buildings are not open for community events, for charity purposes, or for rent.В When not in use by official Church business, they are kept locked.В Only certain leaders in a congregation will even have keys to access the building; members cannot even use the building without express permission and approval.В See “Policies on Using Church Buildings and Other Properties,” Handbook 2, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (secure website). 11. W. Boyd Jensen, “Visitor’s Center Dedicated вЂWhere Moroni Walked,’” Church News (July 6, 2002). 12. Ibid. 13. Lindsay Adamson Livingston, “вЂThis Is the Place’: Performance and the Production of Space in Mormon Cultural Memory,” in Enacting History, eds. Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 31. 14. Field notes of the author, January–July 2012. 15. Camp continued, “I’m not just saying it is sacred. The brethren who have been there have, too, including President Hinckley. Because of the sacrifice that was there, it is sacred ground no less so than the temple.” Field notes of the author, October 28, 2012. 16. In The Sacred and the Profane (1959), Mircea Eliade suggested that a site is revealed as sacred when it irrupts with power into the known world, an event Eliade calls a hierophany (from the Greek, hieros “sacred” and phainein “show”).В For Eliade, the essence of a Page 261 →sacred space is that it is removed from the surrounding geography and is made qualitatively different.В Contact with the divine that sets space apart as sacred can originate from God, like Moses’s encounter with the burning bush, or can be provoked by his people, like invoking the Holy Spirit via prayer. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, [1959] 1987), 11. 17. Joseph actually recorded this vision a number of times throughout his life, and each record describes the visitation differently. I have chosen to represent the story as it has been canonized in Mormon scripture as the official version. For more information on the various accounts, see Steven C. Harper, Joseph Smith’s First Vision: A Guide to the Historical Accounts (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012). 18. See “Early Sites of the Restoration: New York and Pennsylvania,” Church History, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, https://history.lds.org/subsection/historicsites/early-sites-of-the-restoration and “Historic Sites in Ohio,” Church History, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, https://history.lds.org/subsection/historic-sites/ohio. 19. Rowland A. Sherrill, “American Sacred Space and the Contest of History,” in American Sacred Space, eds. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 325. 20. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 149. 21. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, Nauvoo Production Version, unpublished script (Salt Lake City, 2006), 1. 22. Field notes of the author, July 23, 2013.

23. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 3. 24. Mormon, the prophet after whom the Book of Mormon was named, describes burying all the records of his people in a hill called Cumorah (Mormon 6:6.) Later, his son Moroni retrieves some of these plates and completes the records. When Moroni appears to Joseph Smith, Smith described that, “there was a book deposited” that Joseph would be asked to retrieve, using the passive voice rather than the first person (Joseph Smith History 1:34, Pearl of Great Price). This suggests that the plates held by Moroni at some time were deposited by divine intervention in the hill by the Smith Family Farm, which Smith later dubbed Cumorah, perhaps in reference to the Book of Mormon hill. 25. Field notes of the author, June 20, and 29–30, 2012. 26. The legend of Moroni’s dedication comes from an oral report from Moses F. Farnsworth, the temple recorder for the Manti Temple. In his record of the Manti Temple dedication published in the 13 August 1888 edition of the English Millenial Star, Farnsworth includes a conversation between Brigham Young and Warren S. Snow. Young allegedly told Snow that, “here is the spot where the Prophet Moroni stood and dedicated this piece of land for a Temple site” (Moses F. Farnsworth, “Spiritual Manifestations in the Manti Temple,” Millennial Star (August 13, 1888). The account of this conversation Page 262 →took hold and was repeated as fact in publications as wide ranging as Orson F. Whitney’s 1888 biography of the apostle Heber C. Kimball (Orson F. Whitney, The Life of Heber C. Kimball [Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, (1888) 2007], 436) to a 1978 article about the Manti Temple in the official Church magazine (“The Manti Temple,” Ensign [March 1978]: 80) to a 1995 companion to the Book of Mormon from BYU’s Religious Studies Center (H. Donl Peterson, “Moroni, the Last of the Nephite Prophets,” in Fourth Nephi, From Zion to Destruction, eds. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. [Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1995], 244). For an outstanding review of the myth, its origins, and impact, see Ardis E. Parshall, “Moroni’s Purported Rambles,” Keepapitchinin (blog), November 18, 2010, http://www.keepapitchinin.org/2010/11/18/moronis-purported-rambles/. 27. “Placement of Moroni Statue Sees Controversy,” The Pyramid, August 2, 2012. 28. As CUPHA reported in a blog post comment: “Lengthy, repeated discussions with the church [history department], local church leadersВ .В .В . among others, hundreds of hours of research, gaining access to many, many records and reading all the for and against websites, for more than a year led the owners of the statue to the same conclusion and hence its removal, relocation and storage in 2012” (CUPHA, December 19, 2014, 2:23 p.m., comment on Ardis E. Parshall, “Moroni’s Purported Rambles,” Keepapitchinin [blog], November 18, 2010, http://www.keepapitchinin.org/2010/11/18 /moronis-purported-rambles/). 29. Belden Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 11–33. 30. Sherrill, 324. 31. Lloyd E. Hudman and Richard H. Jackson, “Mormon Pilgrimage and Tourism,” Annals of Tourism 19, no. 1 (1992): 109. 32. James A. Bell, “Ritualized Theatre: The Performing Pilgrim’s Process at the Hill Cumorah Pageant” in Mormons and Popular Culture, vol. 1, ed. J. Michael Hunter (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 175. 33. Heidi Diane Lewis, “Speaking Out of the Dust: Religious Reenactments with the Specific Iconic Identity of Place” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2006), 85. 34. Livingston, 23. 35. In 1963, temples outside the United States had been constructed in Cardston, Alberta, Canada; London, England; and Hamilton, New Zealand. See Rick Satterfield, “Temples Chronology,” Temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.ldschurchtemples.com /chronological/. 36. Quentin L. Cook, “Roots and Branches,” Ensign (April 2014): 46. 37. “The Purpose of the Church,” Handbook 2, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (secure website). 38. For extensive records of heavenly visitations in the temple, see Joseph Heinerman, Temple Manifestations (Salt Lake City: Joseph Lyon and Associates, Inc., 1974).

39. Quentin L. Cook, “See Yourself in the Temple,” Ensign (May 2016): 99–100. Page 263 →40. Allan F. Packer, “The Book,” Ensign (November 2014): 100. 41. Livingston, 26. 42. Field notes of the author, June 20, and 29–30, 2012. 43. From this point forward, until the narrative returns to Joseph Smith, the lights remain on the characters of Smith and Oliver Cowdery, who are onstage in a house, frozen in the act of translating.В While action is entirely focused on stories from the Book of Mormon, there are brief returns to Joseph to remind viewers that they are watching a translation in action. 44. Of the 159 temples constructed (and counting), only 9 don’t have statues of Moroni on top: St. George Utah, Logan Utah, Manti Utah, Laie Hawaii, Cardston Alberta, Mesa Arizona, Hamilton New Zealand, Oakland California, and Paris France. A number of temples were originally constructed without a statue but have since had one added. Ever since 1980, only the Freiburg Germany Temple has been constructed without a statue, and in 2001, a statue was added to this one as well. For more information, see Rick Satterfield, “Articles: Interesting Facts,” Temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/articles/facts/. 45. Revelations 14:6–7. 46. Field notes of the author, June 20, and 29–30, 2012. 47. Ibid., 65. 48. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 66–67. 49. Ron Middlebrook (Roman soldier in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 23, 2013. 50. Heather Wrigley, “Mesa Easter Pageant Teaches of Christ,” Church News (April 22, 2011). 51. Jenee Wright Prince (director of the Mesa Easter Pageant), in a devotional talk, March 21, 2013. 52. Jenee Wright Prince (director of the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 21, 2013. 53. Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 54. David H. Yarn Jr., “Temple Sealing,” and Ronald E. Poelman “Cancelation of Sealings,” The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1289–90. 55. Russell M. Nelson, “Celestial Marriage,” Ensign (November 2008): 92. 56. Ezra Taft Benson, “To the Single Adult Sisters of the Church,” Ensign (November 1988): 97. 57. Divorced families are considered complete with the primary-custody parent at the head of the family. 58. Rodger Sorensen, “Opening Remarks to Cast,” speech presented to the Hill Cumorah Pageant Cast, Palmyra, New York (July 2, 2004), from the personal files of Rodger Sorensen. Page 264 →59. Field notes of the author, June 3, 2010. 60. “Extra! Extra! Late-Breaking News from the World of Entertainment,” New York Daily News (July 9, 1997). 61. For an example, see Ellis Nassour, “Donny Osmond Sheds Dreamcoat to Star in Mormon Pageant, ” Playbill.com, July 12, 1997, http://www.playbill.com/news/article/donny-osmond-sheds-dreamcoat-tostar-in-mormon-pageant-july-11-19-70957. 62. Kit Poole, “Hill Cumorah Pageant a Family Affair,” Church News (July 19, 1997). 63. Orson Scott Card, America’s Witness for Christ, unpublished script (Salt Lake City, 1988), 30. 64. Field notes of the author, June 20, 29–30, 2012. 65. “Gentile,” Bible Dictionary, 2013 ed. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 2013), 679–80. 66. For detailed analyses of the nativist movement in America, see Brian N. Fry, Nativism and Immigration: Regulating the American Dream (New York: LFB Scholary Publications, 2007) and Peter Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 67. Benjamin Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone (New York: Ballantine Books, 2012), 54. 68. Ibid., 55. 69. 1 Nephi 13:10–19 is a record of Nephi’s vision of the discovery of the American continents by European explorers. 70. For a detailed discussion of American and Mormon visions of America, see Richard Vetterli,

Mormonism, Americanism, and Politics (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1961). Of particular interest is his chapter on “An American Religion,” in which he argues that, “Americanism, Constitutionalism, and Mormonism are, to them, divinely inspired, epoch-making, direct dispensations for the hand of an all-seeing God for the temporal and spiritual salvation of a world in chaos” (9). 71. Patrick Q. Mason, “God and the People: Theodemocracy in Nineteenth-Century Mormonism,” Journal of Church and State 53 (2011): 350–52. 72. Doctrine and Covenants 101:76–80. 73. The shedding of blood could refer to a number of different things: the Book of Mormon is full of accounts of wars where the righteous were forced to defend themselves against the wicked; early Mormon theology preached the necessity of blood atonement for sinners who did not fully accept Jesus and his Church; or it could refer to wars like the Revolutionary War or even the Civil War in the United States.В For more on the implications of this in the twentieth century, see Martin R. Gardner, “Mormonism and Capital Punishment: A Doctrinal Perspective, Past and Present,” Dialogue 12, no. 1 (1979): 9–26. 74. D. G. Hart, That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 88. 75. Card, 31. Page 265 →76. 2 Nephi 1:9. 77. 2 Nephi 1:11. 78. Megan Sanborn Jones, Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 2009), 83–89. 79. John G. Cawelti, “Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture,” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 3 (March 1975): 524–25. 80. William C. Culberson, Vigilantism: Political History of Private Power in America (New York: Praeger, 1990), 9. 81. Indeed, for over forty years, the Manti Pageant purposefully skipped over what most Mormons would consider the most important event in the Book of Mormon, when the resurrected Christ appears to the people of the Americas to preach to them as he preached to those in biblical lands. As the pageant narrator explained, “The greatest event of the book we do not show you because of its scope and magnitude. It is saved for you to experience individually as you read it and re-read it for it tells of the coming of the resurrected Christ to this land” (Field notes of the author, June 20 and 29–30, 2012). In 2012, and to great fanfare, this segment was dramatized for the first time. Now the narration omits saying that it won’t reveal this most sacred moment, and a character playing Jesus enters into the playing space from a large set structure built like a Mayan temple. He has no lines, but blesses the people in the short time available before the pageant’s soundtrack moves on to the next episode. 82. Field notes of the author, June 29, 2012. 83. Ibid. 84. Field notes of the author, July 2010. 85. Kent R. Bean, “Policing the Borders of Identity at the Mormon Miracle Pageant” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 2005), 6. 86. The Battleman roles are clearly sought after by the young men in the cast. The young women cast in the battle dancers were also thrilled with their assignments, although I noted equal enthusiasm from teenage girls and women cast in other dancing roles that also required more complicated choreography. For the women, it seemed that being a dancer was a mark of success. However, I observed that young men not cast to fight frequently struggled for the rest of the pageant experience as they feel left out of the action and the opportunity to do battle. In not being selected to fight, they were differentiated for physical failings (not tall enough for the costumes or strong enough to hold the weapons, or agile enough to learn the choreography) and were additionally segregated by being placed in scenes outside of their primary peer group. 87. Phillip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 31. 88. Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 13. 89. Robert Eberwein, The Hollywood War Film (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 43. Page 266 →90. This is true of the Hill Cumorah Pageant as a whole—there are very few main or featured

roles for women—but it is particularly true in the battle scenes. Women don’t actually fight, although they do participate in the introductory battle dance that leads into the actual fight choreography. In many ways, their presence is necessary: there are always many more women to cast than men and far fewer roles. Casting women for the battle dance provides a few more important roles for young women. It also makes use of the talent of women dancers, which is helpful for the difficult choreography. It is interesting to note, however, that while the male and female dancers perform identical choreography, all wearing costumes that make their gender indistinguishable, the men are cast as Frontline Nephite or Lamanite Battlemen, while the women are simply called Nephite and Lamanite Dancers. 91. Ward Wright (Hill Cumorah Pageant battle master, actor, and director), in an interview with the author, October 4, 2010. 92. Card, 34. 93. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 20–21. 94. For some examples, see 1 Nephi 2:20, 2 Nephi 4:4, Mosiah 25:24, Alma 48:15, Alma 62:48, and Ether 7:10. 95. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 27. 96. David Glassberg points out that in the early American pageantry, the trend in representing key leaders of the past expanded beyond the pageant stage into other memorial activities, such as costume balls or evenings of tableaux vivants where figures from local and national history could be brought back to life by their own descendants. See David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 38. 97. The Nauvoo Expositor only published one edition, which detailed Smith’s practice of polygamy and accused him of plotting to set himself up as a theocratic king. See Dallin H. Oaks, “The Suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor,” Utah Law Review 9 (1965): 862–903 for the most detailed analysis of the legal issues surrounding the suppression of Nauvoo Expositor. For more on Smith’s theocracy, see Patrick Q. Mason, “God and the People: Theodemocracy in Nineteenth-Century Mormonism,” Journal of Church and State, 53, no. 3 (January 2011):В 349–75. For an alternative look at the political motivation for Smith’s arrest, see Marvin S. Hill, “Carthage Conspiracy Reconsidered: A Second Look at the Murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (Summer 2005): 107–34. 98. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 62. 99. Ibid., 63. 100. Ibid., 62. 101. I am grateful to Sister Nidey, a missionary at the Carthage Jail, who, when I called, took the time to run outside to look at the sculpture and confirm that it does not have a title. Small replicas of the statue are generally titled “Brothers.” For an example, see “JosephPage 267 → Smith Statues,” Latterday Statues (online store), accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.latterdaystatues.com/categories/JosephSmith-Statues/. 102. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 63. 103. The Mormon Battalion is noted in American history for the longest infantry march, a journey that led from Council Bluffs, Iowa, nearly 2,000 miles to San Diego, California. While the Mormon Battalion never saw battle, the salaries drawn by the enlisted men paid for most of their families to make the trek west to the Salt Lake Valley. Additional funds came from some of the discharged volunteers who stayed to work in California at Sutter’s Mill. Their discovery of gold there prompted the gold rush and additionally helped defray the cost of the Mormon exodus. For more on the participation of Mormons at the Sutter’s Mill Gold Rush, see Kenneth N. Owens, Gold Rush Saints: California Mormons and the Great Rush for Riches (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). 104. Field notes of the author, June 20, and 29–30, 2012. 105. Saskia Tielens, “вЂIt’s Hokey and Didactic but It Works’: On the Mormon Miracle Pageant in Manti, Utah,” The Juvenile Instructor: Organ for Young Latter-day Scholars (blog), July 8, 2014, http://juvenileinstructor.org/its-hokey-and-didactic-but-it-works-on-the-mormon-miracle-pageant-inmanti-utah/. 106. The phrase “Title of Liberty” has lately been appropriated by ultra-right-wing conservative Mormons as a political slogan connected to defending American liberties, celebrating the American flag,

and defending the Constitution.В For examples of this rhetoric, see The Title of Liberty, A Non-Profit Organization, accessed August 12, 2017, http://thetitleofliberty.org/; My Title of Liberty (blog), accessed August 12, 2017, http://mytitleofliberty.blogspot.com/; LDS Conservative, “The Title of Liberty,” Latter-day Conservative, July 29, 2009, http://www.latterdayconservative.com/about/. 107. Field notes of the author, June 20, and 29–30, 2012. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. “Articles of Faith,” Pearl of Great Price, article 12. 111. There is one additional visitor to Brigham Young in the Manti Pageant, a stereotypical Native American chief who prays to the Great Spirit to make his people “good keepers of America so that when life fades as the rising sunset, our spirits may come to thee without shame” (Field notes of the author, June 20, and 29–30, 2012.) Unlike all the other figures in the vision, this character has no name and his quote is entirely invented. This Native American is but one example of the representation of race in Mormon Pageantry, which is complicated and frequently troubling. As my interest in this study is the relationship between pageants and the theology of the redemption of the dead, I have bracketed any discussion of race but acknowledge that it is a site of inquiry that deserves extended critical attention. 112. The lines are based on Mormon 8:35–38. Page 268 →113. Field notes of the author, June 20, 2012. 114. Field notes of the author, March 21, 2013. 115. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 71.

Chapter Four 1. There are no documents that confirm exactly where the Church was formally organized and legally founded. Two competing sites are Fayette, New York, about thirty miles southwest of Palmyra, and Manchester, New York, which is located six miles from Palmyra down the road that passes the Hill Cumorah. For an analysis of this historical question, see John K. Carmack, “Fayette: The Place the Church Was Organized,” Ensign (February 1980): 32–34. 2. Vicki Bean Zimmerman, “Willard Bean: Palmyra’s вЂFighting Parson,’” Ensign (June 1985): 26. 3. David F. Boone, “Palmyra Revisited: The New York Mission of Willard W. and Rebecca P. Bean, 1915–1939,” in Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: New York-Pennsylvania, eds. Alexander L. Baugh and Andrew H. Hedges (Provo, UT: Department of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, 2002), 128–31. 4. Ibid., 127, 132, 135–36. 5. Willard Washington Bean, Autobiography of William Washington Bean: Exploits of the Fighting Parson: 1868–1949, ed. V. B. Topliff (Orem, UT: V. B. Topliff, 2003), 233–34. 6. Ibid., 235. 7. Steve Bean (Palmyra Smith Family Farm missionary), in email correspondence with the author, June 2, 2016. 8. The Hill Cumorah Pageant, “Keeping it in the Family,” Facebook, July 18, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/HillCumorahPageant/photos/a.10150305827881214.387049.377930361213 /10153523343536214/?type=3&theater. 9. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 129. 10. Ibid., 42. 11. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 36. 12. Joseph Roach, “History, Memory, Necrophilia,” in The Ends of Performance, eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 23–24. 13. Ibid., 121. 14. Dallin H. Oaks, “Resurrection,” Ensign (May 2000): 16.

15. Boyd K. Packer, “Covenants,” Ensign (May 1987): 25. 16. Russel M. Nelson, “The Doors of Death,” Ensign (May 1992): 74. 17. Field notes of the author, March 23, 2013. 18. Mosiah 8:19. Page 269 →19. Doctrine and Covenants 122: 5–7, 9. 20. Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17, no. 1 (2009): 74–75. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Jill Stevenson, Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 59. 24. Tara Jensen (Mary Magdalene in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 23, 2013. 25. Ibid. 26. Matthew 5:48. 27. Tyler Maxson (main Christ in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 22, 2013. 28. Alex DeBurke (Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo Pageant), in an interview with the author, July 27, 2013. 29. Field notes of the author, March 21, 2013. 30. Field notes of the author, July 25, 2013. 31. Karol Jean Kasteler Miller, “The Nauvoo Temple: One Stitch at a Time,” Ensign (March 2006): 51. 32. John A. Widstoe, “The Worth of Souls,” The Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine (October 1934): 189. 33. Michael Kirby, “On Acting and Not-Acting,” The Drama Review 16, no. 1 (March 1972): 7. He continues, “This does not mean that the speaker is false or does not believe what he is saying. It merely means that he is selecting and projecting an element of character—i.e., emotion—to the audience.” 34. Ibid., 11. 35. Carter Thompson, “Re-enacting Belief:В Performance at the Intersection of Mormon History and Theology,” unpublished paper (2012), 2. 36. Field notes of the author, October 28, 2012. 37. Field notes of the author, June 6, 2013. 38. Henry Bial, Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 29. 39. Ibid. 40. Robert Allen (Peter in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 22, 2013. 41. See Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Receiving a Testimony of Light and Truth,” Ensign (November 2014): 20–23. 42. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1. 43. Ibid., 36. 44. John Potts, A History of Charisma (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5. 45. П‡О±ПЃОЇПѓОјО±П„О± (charisma) first appears in Romans 11:29 where its use denotes “extraordinaryPage 270 → powers, distinguishing certain Christians and enabling them to serve the church of Christ, the reception of which is due to the power of divine grace operating in their souls by the Holy Spirit.” Other references include Romans 12:6; 1 Corinthians 1:7; 1 Corinthians 12:4, 31; and 1 Peter 4:10. From Thayers Greek Lexicon based on Strong’s New Testament Concordance 5486: П‡О¬ПЃО№ПѓОјО±. 46. Carter Thompson, “Something Funny,” High Hopes and River Boats (blog), June 25, 2012, http://highhopesandriverboats.wordpress.com/2012/06/. 47. Field notes of the author, Palmyra, New York, July 2010. 48. Alex DeBurke (Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo Pageant), in an interview with the author, July 27, 2013. 49. Field notes of the author, June 6, 2013. 50. Field notes of the author, July 7, 2013.

51. Field notes of the author, June 20, and 29–30, 2012. 52. Ibid. 53. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. Walter Herries Pollock (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), 13. 54. Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts, [1936] 1952). 55. Elly A. Konjin, Acting Emotions, trans. Barbara Leach and David Chambers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 100. 56. Jill Peterfeso, “From Testimony to Seximony, From Script to Scripture: Revealing Mormon Women’s Sexuality through the Mormon Vagina Monologues,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 27, no. 2 (2011): 33. 57. Scott Heffernan, “Testimony Bingo,” Modern Mormon Men (blog), accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.modernmormonmen.com/2012/03/testimony-bingo.html. 58. Kristen Metzger (Martha Makepeace in the Nauvoo Pageant), in an interview with the author, July 27, 2013. 59. Ibid. 60. James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2004), 29. 61. Sarah Studevant Leavitt, History of Sarah Studevant Leavitt 1798–1847, ed. Juanita L. Pulsipher, unpublished manuscript (1919), Harold B. Lee Library Special Collections, Americana Collection. 62. Stephanie Foster Breinholt (Mesa Easter Pageant soundtrack narrator), in an interview with the author, September 24, 2015. 63. Callie Oppedisano, “Mormon Miracle Pageant: Experiencing Utah’s Theatrical Heritage,” Utah Theatre Bloggers Association, June 24, 2013, http://utahtheatrebloggers.com/15815/mormon-miraclepageant-experiencing-utahs-theatrical-heritage. 64. Bial, 72. 65. Bial, 29. Page 271 →66. John Fletcher, Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 87. 67. 3 Nephi 8:11. 68. 3 Nephi 9:15. 69. In comparison to representations of Christ in Mormon pageantry, the Savior of the World production that plays during the Christmas holiday season at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City dictates that the actor playing Christ does not speak and should not reveal his face to the audience (“Production Guidelines,” Savior of the World Production, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.lds.org/callings/music/savior-of-the-world/production-guidelines/). The result is a white-hooded figure that glides throughout the production and only speaks when an echoing voice-over says his words, while his back is turned. For me, the overall effect is less sacred, which I assume is the intent behind hiding his form and face, and more creepy. 70. Michelle Maiese, Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11. 71. Norine Allen (disciple of Christ in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 21, 2013. 72. Ibid. 73. Bial, 1. Morse next took the play to New York, where he exhausted all his personal savings and spent years in the attempt but was never able to secure permission to legally perform his work on a stage for audiences. 74. The Kenton Easter Pageant has been running now for more than sixty years and takes place in Black Mesa Canyon. It’s a local affair with a cast of about one hundred, mostly ranching families, and a modest crowd for a two-day pageant that begins with the Last Supper and ends with Ascension and a church service on Easter morning. (“Church in Kenton Presents 50th Annual Easter Pageant,” Amarillo Globe News, April 7, 2001; Galen Culver, “Great State: Panhandle Pageant,” KFOR, April 1, 2013.) The Great Passion Play has been running since 1968 and boasts to be “America’s #1 Attended Outdoor Drama.” It has a cast of almost 200 people and runs from May until October in Eureka Springs,

Arkansas. Eureka Springs has other accompanying attractions such as the Holy Land Tour (a recreation of Jerusalem sights), the Bible Museum, the Sacred Arts Museum, and the 67-foot tall Christ of the Ozark statue. (The Great Passion Play, accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.greatpassionplay.com/). The Zion Passion Play in Zion, Illinois, began as an Easter pageant in 1935 and now covers all of Christ’s life finishing with the Ascension. It is sponsored and run by Christ Community Church and performs for two weekends every other year to audiences of about 500. (“The Zion Passion Play,” Christ Community Church, accessed August 12, 2017, http://zionpassionplay.com). 75. The Castle Valley Pageant also features a live Christ on a cross and Christ in Page 272 →America. Unlike the other pageants, these scenes are not fully staged but are pantomimed as part of the story of Jesus being preached by missionaries to Native Americans. This pageant also ends with a resurrected Christ standing high above the pageant participants. 76. Tara Duffin Jensen (Mary Magdalene in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 23, 2013. 77. “Portrayal of Deity,” Handbook 2, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (secure website). 78. “Frequently Asked Questions,” Mesa Easter Pageant, accessed August 12, 2017, http://easterpageant.org/?page_id=9558. 79. Richard G. Scott, “I Have Given You an Example,” Ensign (May 2014): 33. 80. Thomas S. Monson, “Be an Example and a Light,” Ensign (November 2015): 86. 81. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 59. 82. Ibid. 83. “Savior’s Visit to New World Highlights Manti Pageant,” Deseret News, July 1, 2000. 84. James A. Bell, “Ritualized Theatre: The Performing Pilgrim’s Process at the Hill Cumorah Pageant,” in Mormons and Popular Culture 1, ed. J. Michael Hunter (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 176–77. 85. 3 Nephi 11:16–17. 86. Field notes of the author, July 8, 2010. 87. Ronald L. Grimes, “Religion, Ritual, and Performance,” in Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith, ed. Lance Gharavi (New York: Routledge, 2012), 38–39. 88. Gordon B. Hinckley in correspondence with Joseph F. Merrill, March 31, 1936, quoted in Sheri L. Dew, Go Forward with Faith: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996), 91. 89. Field notes of the author, March 23, 2013. 90. Ibid. 91. Field notes of the author, January 5, 2013.

Chapter Five 1. This phrase is reproduced in advertising throughout the town. It is also available in local stores as a plaque, a wood carving, and a various poster styles. 2. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, Nauvoo Production Version, unpublished script (Salt Lake City, 2006), 1. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Doctrine and Covenants 9:8–9. 6. The scripture continues to describe the disapproval as a “stupor of thought,” a phrase used as often as that of a “burning bosom” in LDS discourse. Page 273 →7. Dallin H. Oaks, “Always Have His Spirit,” Ensign (November 1996): 59. 8. Mr. Murphy (shepherd at Christ’s birth in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March, 21, 2013. 9. In most Christian religions, the Holy Spirit is a member of the unified godhead, where God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one God. Mormon theology is nontrinitarian, where the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three separate beings unified in full harmony of purpose. In both traditions, however, the Holy Ghost or Spirit is identified by his non-corporality, his connection to the will of God, and

his ability to influence believers by his presence. 10. See John 14:26 and 15:26; Moroni 10:8–17; Alma 18:35; Doctrine and Covenants 11:12; and Doctrine and Covenants 88:3. 11. Moroni 7:16. 12. Robert D. Hales, “The Holy Ghost,” Ensign (May 2016): 105–7. 13. Doctrine and Covenants 8:2. 14. Doctrine and Covenants 9:8. 15. Doctrine and Covenants 9:9. 16. Megan Sanborn Jones, “Imagining a Global Religion, American-Style: The Sesquicentennial Spectacular Pageant as a Ritual of Community Formation,” in By Our Rites of Worship: Latter-day Saint Views on Ritual in Scripture, History, and Practice, ed. Dan Belnap (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2013), 330–31. 17. Joseph B. Wirthlin, “The Unspeakable Gift,” Ensign (May 2003): 27. 18. Emily Wadley (Nauvoo Pageant associate director), in an interview with the author, July 26, 2013. 19. Henry Bial, Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 49. 20. Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 251. 21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 49. 22. Ephesians 2:19. 23. Henry B. Eyring, “Our Hearts Knit as One,” Ensign (November 2008): 68. 24. Ephesians 2:18. 25. Claudia Bigler, “Invocation,” unpublished musical score (1999). 26. Matthew 18:20. 27. Field notes of the author, July 26, 2013. 28. The Nauvoo Pageant starts at 8:30 p.m.; the Hill Cumorah Pageant starts at 9:15 p.m.; and the Manti Pageant starts at 9:30 p.m. The Mesa starts the earliest at 8:00 p.m., but adjusting for Arizona’s opting out of daylight savings, its start time happens in about the same relationship to sundown as the other pageants. 29. Rotary/Lions Concessions is a fundraising arm of a consortium of four different local service groups: the Bloomfield Rotary Club, Newark Rotary Club, Palmyra/Macedon Rotary Club, and Twin Cities Lions Club. Page 274 →30. Andrea Wenzel, “Eating Together, Separately: Intergroup Communication and Food in a Multiethnic Community,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 621. 31. Nick Ravo, “Pageant Gets Real Fire and a Flying Jesus” The New York Times (July 23, 1988). 32. Ethan Todras-Whitehill, “Mormon Faith and Spectacle at Hill Cumorah in Palmyra, N.Y.,” The New York Times (July 27, 2007). 33. Peter Applebome, “A Mormon Spectacle, Way Off Broadway,” The New York Times (July 13, 2011). 34. Amy Hughes, Spectacle of Reform: Theatre and Activism in Nineteenth Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 4. 35. Ibid., 8. 36. Ibid., 42–43. 37. Bial, 38. 38. Ibid. 39. “Cross,” LDS Gospel Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.lds.org/topics/cross. 40. Alma 32:28. 41. Hughes, 156. 42. Dallin H. Oaks, “Worship through Music,” Ensign (November 1994): 11. 43. There has been recent, expanded research into the neurobiological explanations for emotional responses to music. See Isabelle Peretz and Robert J. Zatorre, eds., The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2003); John Sloboda, Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); William Forde Thompson, Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Jeannette Bicknell, Why Music Moves Us (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); John Sloboda and Patrik N. Juslin, eds., Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 44. Crawford Gates, “The Delights of Making Cumorah’s Music,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13 (2004): 74. 45. Ibid., 70–77. 46. Boyd K. Packer, “The Spirit of the Tabernacle,” Ensign (May 2007): 26. 47. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 60. 48. Bicknell, xi. 49. John Sloboda, “Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings,” Psychology of Music 19 (1991): 110–20. 50. Ibid., 110. 51. Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 74. Page 275 →52. Steve Grover (Hill Cumorah Pageant participant), in a Facebook Messenger conversation with the author, July 6, 2010. 53. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 88. 54. Marsie Trego, “Performances Begin!” The Nauvoo Band Wagon: The Adventures of a Young Performing Missionary (blog), May 25, 2014, https://thenauvoobandwagon.wordpress.com/2014/05/. 55. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2003), 143. 56. Ibid. 57. Field notes of the author, March 22,В 2013. 58. Ward Wright (Hill Cumorah Pageant battle master, actor, and director), in an interview with the author, October 4, 2010. 59. In Mormon vernacular, the term “General Authorities” refers to leading members of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-Day Saints: the prophet (and president of the Church), his counselors, members of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, members of the Quorum of the Seventies, etc. 60. Boyd K. Packer, “Covenants,” Ensign (May 1987): 25. 61. Ron Middlebrook (Roman soldier in the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 23, 2013. 62. Sister Elbert (Young Performing Missionary in Nauvoo), in an interview with the author, July 26, 2013. 63. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 60. 64. Doctrine and Covenants 130:1–2. 65. Taylor, 82. 66. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 149. 67. Sack is not the only performance scholar to rework Phelan’s claim. Herbert Blau, in his work Take Up the Bodies, extends Phelan’s formulation to argue that live performance doesn’t just disappear without a trace, but it dies as we watch it (Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982], 83.) Philip Auslander points to other foundational assumptions about the power of live theater: live theater is “magic,” there is a special energy between actor and audience, and that audience and actors create a “community.” He argues that these are clichГ© and unreflective.В For Auslander, liveness is a mediated condition much like any other; viewers simply imagine it as different (Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture [London and New York: Routledge, 1999], 3). 68. Daniel Aaron Sack, After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 2–3. 69. Field notes of the author, June 20, 2012. Page 276 →70. A Tribute to Joseph Smith, 71.

71. Sack, 2. 72. Jenee Wright Prince (director of the Mesa Easter Pageant), in an interview with the author, March 21, 2013. 73. Zechariah 9:9. 74. Field notes of the author, March 22, 2013. 75. Sack, 8–9. 76. Ward Wright (Mormon in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, former battle master, 1996–2009, and current director), in an interview with the author, October 12, 2010. 77. John 13:26 and field notes of the author, March 23, 2013. 78. Craig Camp (executive director of Nauvoo Theatrical Productions), in an interview with the author, January 3, 2013. 79. Elder Nelson (Young Performing Missionary in Nauvoo), in an interview with the author, July 26, 2013. 80. Spencer W. Kimball, “Education for Eternity,” Speeches of the Year, 1967–68 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1968), 12. 81. Ibid., 14.

Conclusion 1. Quentin L. Cook, “Roots and Branches,” Ensign (April 2014): 46. 2. Doctrine and Covenants: 88:73. 3. Before 2012, male missionaries had to be nineteen years old to serve a mission and female missionaries had to be twenty-one. After the lowered age requirements and the initial influx of missionaries that resulted, the surge dropped off by about 15 percent. Now, there is an average of 75,000 missionaries in the world. See Heather Whittle Wrigley, “Church Leaders Share More Information on Missionary Age Requirement Change,” Church News (October 6, 2012); Stacy Johnson, “LDS Church Sees 15 Percent Reduction in Missionaries after Age Change Surge,” Daily Herald (March 31, 2016). 4. M. Russell Ballard, “Sabbath Day Observance, Full Q&A,” YouTube, July 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQkNqbrAlB4. 5. Neil L. Anderson, “Youth Temple Challenge,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.lds.org/topics/family-history/temple-challenge. 6. My Foundation: Principles, Skills, Habits (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2015), 2. 7. Thomas S. Monson, “Hastening the Work,” Ensign (June 2014): 4. 8. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” Demographic Forum, Pew Research Center, May 2, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/. 9. Compare the figures in the 2007 and 2015 annual statistical reports: The Church Page 277 →of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Statistical Report, 2007,” Ensign (May 2007): 7; and “Statistical Report for 2015 April General Conference,” News Release, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 4, 2015, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/2014-statistical-report-for-2015-aprilgeneral-conference. 10. While the British Pageant was developed in and is performed in England, one could argue that since the style of the production was developed in Salt Lake City, with a dramaturgy that followed a pattern established by the Nauvoo Pageant and with a writing team of Americans and American-trained Brits, that even the British Pageant is American. 11. pbonthehill, “Dear Brothers and Sisters,” Instagram, December 21, 2017, https://www.instagram.com/p/BOSSf10g7iT/. 12. Montell Seely and Kathryn Seely, Castle Valley Pageant History (Spanish Fork, UT: Montell Seely, 2003), 377. 13. Ibid., 373. 14. Doctrine and Covenants 1:30. 15. Seely and Seely, 408. 16. Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer, “The Testimony of the Three Witnesses,”

The Book of Mormon. 17. It is impossible to trace whether or not Harris ever denied his testimony as the only testimonies preserved in records are all positivistic. From this, the assumption has grown up that he (and the other witnesses) never denied their testimonies. For an example of this with documentation, see Wayne Cutler Gunnell, “Martin Harris—Witness and Benefactor to the Book of Mormon,” (master’s thesis, Department of Religion, Brigham Young University, 1955), 34; Eldin Ricks, The Case of the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1971), 65–66. 18. Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996), 351–57. 19. Rhett Stephens James lists a number of friends and neighbors who retold the history of Martin Harris from their perspectives and testified that they heard Harris testify of his witness of the Book of Mormon. These include William Pilkington, William Homer, Ole Jensen, James Keep, George Godfrey, John Godfrey, Thomas Godfrey, Charley Shumway, John Buttars, Alma Jensen, Annie Jardine, Sarah Clark, William Gale, and Charlie Harris. William “Willie” Pilkington’s story, as recorded in his unpublished autobiography, is synopsized in Rhett Stephens James, “The Martin Harris Festival, 1875–1996,” Nauvoo Journal 8, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 45–46. 20. James, 50–51. 21. Thomas S. Monson, “To Learn, To Do, To Be,” Ensign (November 2008): 62. 22. John Fletcher, Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 71. 23. Field notes of the author, August 8, 2013. 24. David M. W. Pickup, “вЂTruth Will Prevail’ Pageant Tells Story of Church in BritishPage 278 → Isles,” August 8, 2013, https://www.lds.org/church/news/truth-will-prevail-pageant-tells-story-ofchurch-in-british-isles. 25. See Bryan J. Grant, “The Church in the British Isles, The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992): 227–32. 26. Joel, “The British Pageant: Better than Expected?” By Common Consent (blog), August 21, 2013, https://bycommonconsent.com/2013/08/21/the-british-pageant-better-than-expected/. 27. Simon Munday, “The British Pageant—вЂTruth will Prevail’ Promotional Video,” YouTube, January 19, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euchNoD8Ht0. 28. “British Pageant President and Director in Place for 2017,” November 13, 2016, Mormon Newsroom, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org.uk/article/british-pageant-president-and-director-in-placefor-2017. 29. Anonymous pageant director, in an interview with the author, July 2, 2013. 30. B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Century I in Six Volumes, vol. 6 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1965), 184. 31. Stephen Kerr, interview, “British Pageant Episode 5—Dress Rehearsal for Public,” LDSEuropeTV, July 31, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhan0sygo-c. 32. Amy Harris, “Of Dead and Dead People: How Family History Can Save the World,” Brigham Young University Devotional Speech (July 18, 2017). 33. Ibid. 34. Harold Bloom, interview transcription, “The Mormons,” Frontline Documentary Film, Public Broadcasting Station, accessed August 12, 2017, http://www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/script2.html. 35. “Excerpts from Recent Addresses of President Gordon B. Hinckley,” Ensign (January 1998): 73. 36. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 37. Rodger Sorenson (Former Hill Cumorah Pageant artistic director), in an interview with the author, November 2009. 38. Jason Whetin (participant in the Hill Cumorah Pageant), in an interview with the author, July 8, 2010. 39. Field notes of the author, July 26, 2013 and Sally Randall, “Nauvoo Letters,” in Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900, eds. Kenneth W. Godfrey, Audrey M. Godfrey and Jill Mulvay Derr (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1982), 145–46.

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Index acting theory: emotional emphasis in, 161; Kirby on, 151–152, 169n33. See also performance scholarship; rehearsal process; sincerity, embodying and performing Actor Prepares, An (Stanislavski), 161 acts of devotion, 32, 75–77, 140–151; embodiment of, 171, 174, 176, 224; performing the dead as and through, 138, 139, 144–151, 152, 176 Adam, James, 23 administration, 71–73, 258n69; centralization of, guarantees controlled message, 40–41, 65–68, 69, 72–73; by Missionary Department, 43, 65–67, 71–72 advertising and publicity, 74, 110–111, 191; for British Pageant in England, 236; for sacred sites, 92 afterlife, degrees of glory in, 28–29. See also eternal family doctrine; resurrection doctrine After Live (Sack), 209 Alma (Book of Mormon prophet), 194–195 America as promised land, 32, 88, 114–125, 132, 264n70; Constitution, divine origins of, 116–118; defense of, 117, 118–125, 127–130; founding fathers, 126, 128, 129; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 119, 121, 122–124, 130; Manti Pageant, 114–115, 119, 120–121, 126, 127–129, 131, 265n81; Mesa Easter Pageant, 119; Mormon Battalion, 127–128, 267n103; Nauvoo Pageant, 119, 124–125, 126; revelation of, 114–118, 264n69; violence and, 117, 119–121, 122, 123–125. See also Mormon heritage sites; sacred sites American Historical Pageantry (Glassberg), 39 American new pageantry, 39–40, 42 American Pageant Association, 39 American Passion Play, The (pageant), 9 America’s Witness for Christ (Hill Cumorah Pageant). See Hill Cumorah Pageant (America’s Witness for Christ) anachronism, 64, 73–74, 227, 240 ancestors and ancestry, 27, 90, 125–126, 180; family history research, 24, 53, 101, 137, 222, 249n59; individual identity and, 239; living proxies for, 205; proxy ordinances, 3, 28, 29, 83, 101, 222, 250n70; redemption of dead, 30, 33, 101, 182, 250n70; sacred site engagement, 53, 136–137, 176; sealing rituals, 30, 108; temples, 99, 104; visits from, 202–203. See also family; redemption of dead, LDS theology of Anderson, Benedict, 186 Anderson, Mabel, 49, 85 Anderson, R. Clair, 85 Anderson, Travis, 63

animals, 107, 191, 212–214 Archive and the Repertoire, The (Taylor), 167, 202 Argetsinger, Gerald, 66, 252n21, 253n24 Aristocracy of Everyone, An (Barber), 115–116 Aronovick, Leslie, 72 Articles of Faith. See Pearl of Great Price, The Page 304 →audience numbers, participants, 15–16, 39, 83, 234; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 16, 114, 174, 223; Manti Pageant, 16, 191; Mesa Pageant, 16, 145; Nauvoo Pageant, 16, 52 audience numbers, spectators, 15–16, 39, 58, 83, 185–186, 236, 251n5; local impact, 50–51; maintaining high levels, 75; tracked through referral cards, 13, 81 audiences: as community, 185–191; definition, 13, 186; demographics, 13; emotional response, 186; read pageants as uplifting, 64–65; sacred sites and, 95, 97, 105; temples and, 105; venue size and, 155–156. See also participant/spectator interaction; spectators auditions and casting, 72, 78–79, 109, 121, 176, 265n86 Auslander, Philip, 122, 275n67 Bachelard, Sarah, 7–8 Ballard, M. Russell, 9–10, 222 baptism, 22, 26, 28, 60, 166, 235, 250n70. See also redemption of dead, LDS theology of Barber, Benjamin, 115–116 Barton, Doug, 49 Basinger, Janine, 123 battles: Hill Cumorah Pageant, 46, 121, 122–124, 130, 195, 204, 215–216, 266n90; Manti Pageant, 120–121, 122, 159–160, 195, 265n86; music and, 195–196; Nephites and Lamanites, 46, 121, 122–123, 124, 159–160, 215–216. See also violence Bean, Kent R., 122 Bean, Marcia, 136, 137 Bean, Monte L., 136 Bean, Palmyra, 136 Bean, Rebecca, 135–136, 137 Bean, Steve, 136–137 Bean, Tami, 137 Bean, Trevor, 137

Bean, Willard, 135–136, 137 bearing witness. See testimony/witnessing belief, 18, 23–24, 144, 151–154, 227; sacred site affirmation through, 90, 91, 92–93, 95, 96–97, 98, 105, 107; spiritual feelings confirm, 107, 183, 185, 192, 224 belief of participants, 14–15, 17–18, 95–96, 150, 241; emotional sincerity conveys, 151–156, 162–165, 173, 176, 224; spiritual feelings confirm, 107, 162, 181–182, 183, 185, 192. See also participants and participation; sincerity, embodying and performing belief of spectators, 14–15, 125, 192, 214, 241; spiritual feelings confirm, 185, 192, 224 Bell, James A., 75–76, 97, 172–173 Bial, Henry, 8, 153, 164, 167, 185, 193 Bible, the, 8, 16, 45–46, 64, 98, 144; Bial on representation, 153, 167, 193; community described in, 186–187; as LDS scripture, 20, 254n29. See also Book of Mormon; Mesa Easter Pageant (Jesus the Christ) Bicknell, Jeanette, 198 Black Mesa Easter Pageant, The (pageant), 167, 271n74 Bloch, Carl Heinrich, 170 blocking. See staging/blocking Bloom, Harold, 239 bodies and embodiment, 3, 7, 8, 14, 140, 231; battle sequences, 122, 123, 124; facial expressions, 55, 149, 154–155, 156–157, 158, 216; kneeling, 111–112, 169, 170–171, 172, 173, 174–175, 176; repetition and memory, 166–167, 170–171; ritual acts of devotion, 171, 174, 176, 224; sincerity performed through gestural emphasis, 155–156, 157, 158–159, 165; testimony and, 4, 138, 167, 176, 208, 227, 229. See also choreography; performing the dead; spiritual feelings Bodnar, John, 40 Book of Mormon, 3, 5, 16–17, 254n29, 264n73; Alma (prophet), 194–195; America as promised land, 116, 119, 120–121, 125, 128, 131; audience familiarity with, 64; Christ appears in Americas, 58, 173–174; Clarkston Pageant, 229–234; geographical locations in, 86–87, 94, 260n5; Harris and, 2, 88, 229–231, 232, 277n17, 277n19; King Noah story, 155–156; likening the scriptures, 74; Mormon (prophet), 120, 204–205, 261n24; Moroni (prophet), 86, 95, 261n24; Nauvoo Pageant, 17, 56–57, 234; Nephite/Lamanite battles, 46, 121, 122–123, 124, 159–160, 215–216; printing of, 86, 229; prophets, 21, 24, 86, 95, 120, 194–195, 204–205, 215, 261n24; spiritual feeling and, 183, 194–195; temples, instructions to Page 305 →build, 98; Third Book of Nephi, 165–166; witnessing, scripture on, 59; as word of God, 254n29. See also Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Hill Cumorah Pageant storyline Book of Mormon, The (musical), 168, 253n24 Book of Mormon, translation: dramatized in Hill Cumorah Pageant, 17, 41, 86, 87, 89; dramatized in Manti Pageant, 50, 102, 114–115, 263n43; Hill Cumorah as sacred site, 41, 86, 87, 89. See also golden plates Bowman, Matthew, 21, 35–36 Breinholt, Stephanie Foster, 72

British Pageant (Truth Will Prevail), 51, 221, 224, 234–239; location, 2–3, 53, 234, 277n10; storyline, 16, 17, 64, 234–235, 235–236 Brown, Samuel Morris, 20, 30, 108 Brunson, Seymour, 22 Bushman, Claudia, 33 “Called to Serve” (Mormon missionary anthem), 235 Calweti, John, 120 Camp, Craig, 90, 205, 260n15 Camp, Heidi, 90 Card, Orson Scott, 45, 67, 191 Carlson, Marvin, 10–11, 240 Castle Valley, 224–225 Castle Valley Pageant, 3, 15–16, 33, 224–229, 271n75; sacred site engagement, 88–89; storyline, 16–17, 225–226, 227–229 cast organization, 109–110, 111, 112, 114, 142 casts. See participants and participation celestial glory, 28, 29 Central Utah Pioneer Heritage Association (CUPHA), 95, 262n28 chain of belonging, 30, 108, 112, 114, 132, 137. See also eternal family doctrine Chambers, Claire Maria, 8 characters, historical and religious figures as, 125–130, 168, 266n96. See also Jesus Christ, as character; performing the dead; Smith, Joseph, Jr., as character charisma, 154, 269n45 children/teenagers, 63, 77, 251n6; importance to Christ, 114; sealing and, 108; in temple cultural celebrations, 38. See also family; Young Performing Missionaries (YPMs) children/teenagers, as participants: battle sequences as coming of age rite, 121–122, 124, 265n86; in Hill Cumorah Pageant, 44, 77, 114, 121–122, 124; in Manti Pageant, 47, 109; in Mesa Pageant, 140–141. See also participants and participation; Young Performing Missionaries (YPMs) choreography, 70–71; of battle sequences, 121, 265n86; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 71, 121, 123–124, 266n90; Manti Pageant, 70, 192–193, 265n86; Mesa Pageant, 60–61, 73, 78, 145–146; Nauvoo Pageant, 94, 104. See also bodies and embodiment; staging/blocking Christ. See Jesus Christ Christianity, 118; definition, 245n4

churches, as public sacred sites, 87, 260n10. See also temples and temple building Church Music and Cultural Arts pageant development model, 236 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2, 268n1; administrative organization, 20–21, 67–68, 248n48, 275n59; Handbook, 74, 75, 168; land purchased and maintained by, 92, 135–136; member retention, 223; Missionary Department, 43, 65–66, 66–67, 71–72; Mormonism, definition, 245nn2, 4, 259n95; as official pageant producer, 9, 38–39, 251n7; priesthood in, 20–21, 248n48. See also Book of Mormon; Smith, Joseph, Jr. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, history as pageant storyline, 16–17, 38–40, 63–64. See also Manti Pageant storyline; Nauvoo Pageant storyline Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, purposes of, 58–59, 75–84; living the gospel of Jesus Christ, 75–80, 83, 98, 146–147, 181; missionary work, 75, 76, 80–82, 83, 98, 181–182; redemption of dead, 72–74, 82–84, 98–99, 182; temples and temple work, 98–99, 182. See also redemption of dead, LDS theology of; testimony/witnessing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, scriptural works: Pearl of Great Price, 20, 24, 129, 249n60. See also Bible, the; Book of Mormon; Doctrine and Covenants Page 306 →City of Joseph (Oscarson), 54–55, 256n44 Civil War reenactments, 10, 40 Clarkston, Utah, 229 Clarkston City Cemetery, 2, 15, 88, 230–231 Clarkston Pageant (Martin Harris: The Man Who Knew), 33, 43, 224, 229–234; sacred site engagement, 2, 4, 15, 88, 230–231; storyline, 16, 17, 232–233 Colton, Donald B., 41, 44 commandments of God, 26–27, 180, 184; obedience engenders prosperity, 116, 118, 125 communion, 186–187 community, 17, 58, 62, 66; audience as, 185–191; of Bean family in Palmyra, 135–136; participants as, 9, 48, 53, 72, 97, 142, 225; through shared meals, 189–190; town involvement, 16, 42–43, 50–53, 93–94, 188–189, 228 confirmation, 184, 185 Connerton, Paul, 170 Constitution, U.S., 116–118. See also America as promised land Contemporary Mormonism (Bushman), 33 contemporary updates, 73–74, 163–164 conversion, 74, 125, 223, 231–233, 235. See also missionary work Cook, Quentin L., 99–100, 221 costumes, 73, 135, 172, 214; of Christ, 112, 168, 194; differentiating, to account for audience size, 159–160;

sewing of, as act of devotion, 149–150; signifying spirits, 206, 207, 208, 228 crucifixion enactment, 191, 193–195; in Hill Cumorah Pageant, 70, 168, 196; in Mesa Pageant, 61, 166, 168, 193–194 Culberson, William C., 120 Cumorah Conferences, 41 Cumorah Hill. See Hill Cumorah dance, 62–63, 145–146, 217. See also choreography Davies, Douglas, 19 death, 1–2, 20, 21–22, 124–125, 239; degrees of glory, 28–29; veil rhetoric and, 27, 88, 99–100, 140. See also eternal family doctrine; performing the dead; performing with the dead; redemption of dead, LDS theology of; resurrection doctrine; violence devotional rhetoric, 90, 92. See also acts of devotion Diderot, Denis, 161 directors, 72–73, 78–80, 155, 173; casting process and, 78–79; participation history of, 204–205; rehearsals and, 79–80; soundtracks dictate choices of, 70; work as act of devotion, 149 districts. See family casts divorce, 108, 263n57 doctrine. See acts of devotion; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, purposes of; eternal family doctrine; redemption of dead, LDS theology of; resurrection doctrine; temple ordinances; testimony/witnessing Doctrine and Covenants, 20, 64, 118, 143, 249n60; hastening work of salvation, 221; missionary purpose outlined, 81–82; spiritual feelings described in, 181, 272n6 Dolan, Jill, 11 donkey incident, 212–214 Dox, Donnalee, 8, 35 dress, customs of, 62–63. See also costumes Driggs, H. Wayne, 44–45 Du, Simon W., 8 Dyreng, Doug, 47 Dyreng, Helen, 47 Dyreng, R. Morgan, 47 Eastern States Mission, 41, 44, 252n14 Easter pageants, 59, 167. See also Mesa Easter Pageant (Jesus the Christ)

Eberwein, Robert, 123 economic impact of pageants, 50–51, 53, 255n40 effigy, 138–139. See also performing the dead Eliade, Mircea, 91, 260n16 Elkins, James, 162–163 embodiment. See bodies and embodiment Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (Maize), 166–167 emotions: Holy Ghost and, 182–185, 187; music evokes, 182, 196, 198–199, 274n43; special effects evoke, 192; spiritual feelings and, 182–185, 187, 192, 195, 198–199, 201, 218–219; tears/crying, 161–163, 184, 262. See Page 307 →also sincerity, embodying and performing; spiritual feelings England, British Pageant and, 234–239 eternal family doctrine, 198, 226; chain of belonging, 30, 108, 112, 114, 132, 137; heaven families, 30, 108–109, 112, 114. See also sealing ritual evangelical performance, 5, 11, 34, 144, 164 evangelicals, 82–83, 118, 231 exaltation, 4–5, 27, 74–75, 82–83, 101–102; degrees of glory and, 29; family and, 28, 108–114; hastening work toward, 221–223; as performance goal, 15, 137–138, 176, 183. See also redemption of dead, LDS theology of; resurrection doctrine; salvation; sealing ritual Eyring, Henry B., 187 facial expressions, 154–155, 216; sincerity and, 149, 154, 158; venue size and, 55, 156–157. See also bodies and embodiment; staging/blocking faith. See belief family: exaltation and, 28, 108–114; family history research, 24, 53, 101, 137, 222, 249n59; home as private, sacred site, 88; importance of institution, 110–111; tradition of participation, 43–48, 61, 77, 109–115. See also ancestors and ancestry; children/teenagers; eternal family doctrine; sealing ritual; Smith family family casts: Hill Cumorah Pageant, 77, 78, 109–110, 112, 114; Manti Pageant, 109; Nauvoo Pageant, 78, 109, 110, 111, 113, 145 feeling the Spirit. See spiritual feelings Fetterman, Beth, 55 Fetterman, Michael, 55 Fielding, Eric, 85–86, 87, 131, 132, 133 “First Vision, The” (of Joseph Smith, Jr.), 18–19, 29, 91, 92, 248n42, 261n17; dramatized in Hill Cumorah Pageant, 94; dramatized in Manti Pageant, 49–50, 64 Fletcher, John, 8, 11, 34, 82–83, 164–165, 231

food, 189–190 For the Strength of Youth (Mormon resource manual), 63 fourth wall. See participant/spectator interaction fund raising, 51 funeral sermons, 22–23 future, time period, 4, 5, 7, 209 Garden Grove Burial Grounds, 1 Gates, Crawford, 70, 196–197 gathering, 186–190. See also community; Holy Ghost gender: battle sequences, 123, 266n90; casting, 121, 265n86; pageant administration, 258n69; priesthood, 21, 248n48, 258n69. See also women genealogical consciousness, 239 genealogy. See ancestors and ancestry; family Gennep, Arnold Van, 75–76 Gentile, definition, 115 gesture. See bodies and embodiment Gharavi, Lance, 8, 173 ghosting, 202 ghosts. See Holy Ghost; performing the dead; performing with the dead; spiritual feelings Ghosts (Rayner), 138 Glassberg, David, 39, 266n96 God: commandments of, 26–27, 116, 118, 125, 180, 184; punishment of, 118, 195; restrictions on portraying as character, 168; Smith’s vision of, 18–19; theophany, 90–91 golden plates, 19, 20, 21; buried in Hill Cumorah, 41, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 123, 131; Clarkston Pageant, 232; Harris as scribe, 229–230, 231; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 46, 94, 123, 131; Manti Pageant, 102. See also Book of Mormon; Book of Mormon, translation goodness/righteousness, 62–68; Christ-like behavior, 140–141, 143, 144, 146–148; Nauvoo Pageant, 125; pageant administration, 65–68, 73; pageantry form inspires, 63–65; violence, 119–120; wickedness, 192–193, 215–217 gospel, living the, 75–80, 83, 98, 146–147, 181 Grandin Printing Press, 86, 188 graveyards and cemeteries, 1–2, 3, 32, 41; Clarkston Pageant, 2, 4, 15, 88, 230–231

Great Passion Play, The (pageant), 9, 167, 271n74 Grimes, Ronald L., 173–174 Hansen, Harold, 45, 252n21 Harris, Amy, 24, 239, 249n59 Page 308 →Harris, Martin, 2, 88, 229–231, 277nn17, 19 Harris, Martin, Jr., 230 Harris, Tracy Anderson, 43–44 Hart, D. G., 118 Haunted Stage, The (Carlson), 240 heaven, 207–208 heaven family. See eternal family doctrine; family “He Lives” (hymn), 215, 233 hell, 28 Henshaw, John and Mary (Manti Pageant characters), 203, 207 heritage. See Mormon heritage sites; sacred sites Higbee, Elias, 23 Hill Cumorah, 47, 85–87, 132, 260n5; golden plates buried in, 41, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 123, 131; naming of, 86–87; purchase of, by Bean family, 135–136; set design positioning, 85–86, 87, 131 Hill Cumorah Pageant (America’s Witness for Christ), 2, 3, 75–76, 189, 273n28; administration, 66, 67, 73; advertising, 74; audience numbers, 16, 114, 174, 186, 223; battle sequences in, 46, 121, 122–124, 130, 195, 204, 215–216, 266n90; Bean family involvement, 137; Card rewrites script, 45, 67, 191; choreography, 71, 121, 123–124, 266n90; Driggs writes original script, 44–45; emotional sincerity, 154, 155, 156; families cast in, 77, 78, 109–110, 112, 114; finale, 46–47, 58, 168, 210, 211, 214–215; history of, 43–45, 175, 252n21, 252n24, 256n51; longevity of, 44, 47, 256n51; music, 70, 196–197, 199–200; Palmyra involvement and economy, 51, 255n40; participants live on site, 76, 110, 142; participants’ time commitment, 54, 79, 110, 142, 145; performing the dead, 137, 148, 166, 168, 172–173, 174; performing with the dead, 201, 204–205, 210–211, 214–215; set design, 85–86, 87, 130, 133, 191, 193; Smith character in, 17, 46–47, 94, 131; soundtrack of, 45, 68, 70, 72, 73, 155, 163–164; special effects, 191, 193, 214–215; staging/blocking in, 45, 155–156, 172, 173–174, 253n24; tradition and, 43–47; venue size, 155, 171. See also Jesus Christ, as character in Hill Cumorah Pageant Hill Cumorah Pageant, sacred site engagement, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 133; America as promised land, 119, 121, 122–124, 130; golden plates buried in hill, 46, 94, 123, 131; set design positioning, 85–86, 87, 131. See also sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with Hill Cumorah Pageant storyline, 16, 44–47, 64, 112, 123–124; Book of Mormon, translation, 17, 41, 86, 87, 89; Christ visits America, 58, 172–173, 174; King Noah story, 155–156; Lehi’s dream sequence, 193; Nephite/Lamanite battles, 46, 121, 122–123, 124, 159–160, 215–216; Third Book of Nephi, 166 Hinckley, Gordon B., 89, 132, 175, 240

historical commemoration pageantry, 16–17, 38–40, 63–64. See also Manti Pageant storyline; Nauvoo Pageant storyline Historic Nauvoo, 157, 188; establishment of, dramatized in Nauvoo Pageant, 94; as living history village, 51–52, 53, 89, 91; Nauvoo Temple’s importance to, 103–104. See also Nauvoo, Illinois; Nauvoo Pageant (A Tribute to Joseph Smith); religious tourism; sacred sites history. See pageants, history of Hoffmann, Heinrich, 170 holy dying, 20 Holy Ghost, 18–19, 168, 180–190, 273n9; emotional response to feeling, 182–185, 186–190, 192, 218; gatherings and, 187–188, 190; inviting presence of, 180–181, 182, 186–190. See also spiritual feelings How Societies Remember (Connerton), 170 Hudman, Lloyd E., 96 Hughes, Amy, 192, 195 humor, 213–214 Hunter, Howard W., 29 hymns, 55, 61, 104, 127, 196–199, 200, 205. See also music identity creating, 17, 239 “I Know He Lives” (song), 61 “I Know It Is True” (Clarkston Pageant song), 233 immoral entertainment, 62–63, 73, 257n65 In Heaven as It Is on Earth (Brown), 20 Page 309 →Jackson, Richard H., 96 Jefferson, Thomas, 126, 128, 129 Jesus Christ, 4–5, 18–19, 27, 28; children’s importance to, 114; Christ-like behavior, 140–141, 143, 144, 146–148, 168, 170; decorative imagery of, 170, 193–194; living the gospel of, 75–80, 83, 98, 146–147, 181; visit to America, 58, 172–174, 265n81. See also resurrection doctrine; testimony/witnessing Jesus Christ, as character, 167–172, 173, 175, 271n69, 271nn74, 75; challenges of role, 146–148; costumes of, 112, 168, 194; crucifixion, 70, 168, 193–194, 196; in Manti Pageant, 58, 120, 166, 168, 172, 210, 265n81; in other liturgical drama, 167; pageant finales, 58, 168, 210–211, 214–215; representation guidelines, 168–169; spiritual feelings evoked by, 147, 168–169, 173 Jesus Christ, as character in Hill Cumorah Pageant, 112, 166; crucifixion, 70, 168, 196; in finale, 46–47, 58, 168, 210, 211, 214–215; visit to America, 58, 112, 172–173, 174. See also Hill Cumorah Pageant (America’s Witness for Christ) Jesus Christ, as character in Mesa Pageant, 59, 64, 74, 107; birth and baptism, 60, 166; crucifixion, 61, 166, 168, 193–194; in finale, 58, 61, 168. See also Mesa Easter Pageant (Jesus the Christ)

Jesus the Christ. See Mesa Easter Pageant (Jesus the Christ) Johnson, Grace, 48 Johnson, Susan, 51 Jones, Megan Sanborn, 30–31, 33–34, 35–36, 37, 242–243 Jorgensen, Merilyn, 47, 70 Jorgensen, Mike, 47 Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat (Broadway musical), 110 Joseph Smith Historic Site, 51 Kennedy, Dennis, 14 Kerr, Stephen, 238 Kimball, Heber C., 235 Kimball, Spencer W., 219, 248n48 King Follett Discourse, 23–24, 198 “King Follett Discourse” (vignette performance), 156, 198 Kirby, Michael, 151–152 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 93 Kleinman, Bertha K., 200 Knapp, Raymond, 201 kneeling, 111–112, 169, 170–171, 172, 173, 174–175, 176 Konijn, Elly A., 161 Laird, Robert and Becky (Nauvoo Pageant characters), 56, 104, 105, 203, 207, 235 Lane, Belden, 91, 95 Langdon, William Chauncy, 39 laying on hands, 25–26 LDS. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Leavitt, Sarah Studevant, 163, 176 Lewis, Heidi, 97 lighting, 43, 87, 194, 206–207, 208, 232–233. See also production and set design Linenthal, Edward, 91

Lingan, Edmund, 8 lip syncing, 17, 70, 72, 258n76. See also soundtracks Liveness (Auslander), 122 live performance: Nauvoo Pageant as, 17, 232; vs. recorded, 122, 208–209 living proxies, 138–140, 164, 168–169, 175–176, 205. See also performing the dead Livingston, Lindsay, 97–98, 101 living the gospel, 75–80, 83, 98, 146–147, 181 local pageants, 38, 251n5 LoMonaco, Martha S., 12, 57, 143, 200–201 longevity of pageants, 42–43, 44, 47, 256n51 Lusvardi, Mark J., 59–60 MacKaye, Percy, 39 Maize, Michelle, 166–167 Manti, Utah, 16, 92, 188, 255n40; Temple Hill, 49, 94–95, 96, 102 Manti Pageant (The Mormon Miracle Pageant), 2, 3, 273n28; administration, 66, 73; advertising, 74; audience numbers, 16, 50, 186, 191; battle sequences in, 120–121, 122, 159–160, 195, 265n86; choreography in, 70, 192–193, 265n86; community involvement, 42–43, 50–51, 188, 189; emotional sincerity, 154, 155, 160; families cast in, 109; history of, 48–51; Jesus Christ as character in, 58, Page 310 →120, 166, 168, 172, 210, 265n81; Manti economy, 50–51, 255n40; open participation, 78, 109; participant/spectator interaction in, 159; participants’ time commitment, 42–43, 79; performing with the dead, 203, 207, 210; set design, 48–49, 100, 102–103, 191, 192–193; Smith as character in, 49–50, 64, 102, 114–115, 121, 129, 148; soundtrack of, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 163–164; special effects, 191, 192–193; tradition and, 42–43, 47–48, 48–50, 70; venue size, 155, 171; Washington and Jefferson in, 126, 128, 129. See also staging/blocking, Manti Pageant Manti Pageant, sacred site engagement, 31, 92, 94–96, 131, 132–133; America as promised land, 114–115, 119, 120, 128–129, 265n81. See also Manti Temple Manti Pageant storyline, 16–17, 49–50, 64, 94–95, 103, 253n30; Book of Mormon, translation, 50, 102, 114–115, 263n43; Mormon Battalion, 127–128 Manti Pageant storyline, Book of Mormon sequences, 17, 49–50, 64, 114–115, 267n111; America as promised land, 119, 120–121, 126, 127–128, 131; Christ’s visit to America, 58, 166, 168, 172, 210, 265n81; Moroni in, 94–95, 102, 193; Third Book of Nephi, 166; wickedness cycle, 192–193, 215 Manti Temple, 89, 96, 128; action staged on, 50, 100, 102–103, 131, 191, 193; Moroni’s dedication, 95, 261n26; set designed to accentuate, 48–49 marketing, 18 marriage, 108–109. See also sealing ritual Martin Harris Memorial Amphitheater, 2, 231

Martin Harris: The Man Who Knew. See Clarkston Pageant (Martin Harris: The Man Who Knew) martyrdom, of Smith brothers, 104, 126–127 “Mary’s Lullaby” (song), 61, 200 Mason, David, 8 Matthews, Bill, 77 Maxson, Tyler, 107 McAuley, Gay, 186 McConachie, Bruce, 14 McConkie, Bruce R., 86 media: Mormon promotional, 80; pageant publicity, 110–111, 191; recorded vs. live performance, 122, 208–209; use banned during participation experience, 142 megachurches, 9 memorialization, 7 memory, 139, 166–167; memorization, 69; ritual performance and, 170–171 Mesa Easter Pageant (Jesus the Christ), 2, 3, 58–62, 189, 273n28; administration, 66, 73; advertising, 74; animals in, 107, 191, 212–214; audience numbers, 16, 58, 145, 186; auditions, 78, 79, 109; choreography in, 60–61, 73, 78, 145–146; decorum expectations, 140–141; emotional sincerity, 153, 154, 155, 163–164, 167; finale, 58, 210, 211, 214–215; history of, 59–60, 256nn51, 54; music, 60, 61, 199–200, 233; participants’ time commitment, 79, 145; participation as act of devotion, 145–146, 150–151; performing the dead, 1, 31, 140–141, 145–146, 150, 153, 175; performing with the dead, 1, 31, 183, 204, 205, 209; script, 58, 59, 70–71, 256n51; set design, 60, 106, 191; soundtrack of, 68, 70–71, 72, 163–164, 216; Spanish language performances, 58, 70, 258n76; special effects, 149, 191; staging/blocking, 215–216; tradition and, 47, 57, 62; venue size, 155; wickedness portrayed in, 216–217. See also Jesus Christ, as character in Mesa Pageant Mesa Easter Pageant, sacred site engagement, 31, 92, 119, 133, 189; on Mesa Temple grounds, 59, 89, 100, 105–108, 131 Mesa Easter Pageant storyline, 16, 59–61, 64, 209–210, 216; crucifixion, 61, 166, 168, 193–194; resurrected Christ returns, 58, 166; ten virgins parable, 217 Mesa Temple, 92, 263n44; Mesa Pageant on grounds, 59, 89, 100, 105–108, 131 Metten, Charles, 70, 196–197 Miller, Karol Jean Kasteler, 150 mimesis, 138 Missionary Department as central administration, 43, 65–66; artistic directives, 66–67; musical choices, 71–72; Nauvoo Pageant, 72 missionary work, 44, 60, 276n3; as Church purpose, 75, 76, 80–82, 83, 98, 181–182; Eastern States Mission, 41, 44, 252n14; Page 311 →evangelical, 82–83, 231; full-time, 80–81, 259n94; Nauvoo senior missionaries,

52, 254n37; number serving, 221–222; in Preston, England, 234–235; service assignments, 80–81, 189, 259n94; temple importance, 99. See also Young Performing Missionaries (YPMs) Monson, Thomas S., 63, 170, 222, 231 Morgan, David, 155–156 Mormon (prophet), 120, 261n64 Mormon (prophet), as character, 204–205 Mormon Battalion, 50, 127–128, 254n30, 267n103 Mormon Doctrine (McConkie), 86 Mormon heritage sites, 88–93, 96, 97–98, 175; Smith Family Homestead, 41, 135, 188. See also America as promised land; Hill Cumorah; Historic Nauvoo; sacred sites; sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with Mormonism, definition, 245nn2, 4, 259n95. See also Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Mormon Miracle Pageant, The. See Manti Pageant (The Mormon Miracle Pageant) Mormon People, The (Bowman), 36 Mormon Pioneer Cemetery, 1 Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area, 89 Mormon Tabernacle Christmas Concert, 38, 251n7 Mormon tourism. See religious tourism Moroni (angel), 261n64; as character, 94–95, 102, 130–131, 193; dedication of Manti’s hill, 94–95, 261n26; statues of, 95, 102, 262n28, 263n44 Morse, Salmi, 167, 271n73 music, 195–202, 214–215, 218–219, 239; battle sequences and, 195–196; emotions and, 182, 196, 198–199, 274n43; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 70, 196–197, 199–200; hymns, 55, 61, 104, 127, 196–199, 200, 205; Manti Pageant, 69; Mesa Pageant, 60, 61, 199–200, 233; Missionary Department oversees, 71–72; Nauvoo Pageant, 55, 104, 187, 198, 200–201; spiritual feelings evoked by, 182, 196–202, 218–219; trumpet fanfare, 199–200. See also soundtracks “Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture” (Calweti), 119–120 narration, 49–50, 93, 209–210; declamatory style, 68, 72, 73, 164; updated, 73, 163–164. See also soundtracks; vocal technique Nauvoo, Illinois, 90–91, 93–94, 104, 255n42, 260n15; as living history village, 51–52, 53, 89, 91; religious tourism to, 50, 96, 188; as Smith’s final resting place, 1, 126. See also Historic Nauvoo Nauvoo Brass Band, 52, 90, 201–202, 255n37 Nauvoo Pageant (A Tribute to Joseph Smith), 2, 3, 273n28; administration, 66–67, 73; advertising, 74; audience numbers, 16, 52, 186; auditions, 78; British Pageant and, 3, 16, 234–235, 277n10; community involvement, 51–52, 188–189; contemporary updates, 73; costumes, 73, 149–150; emotional sincerity, 152, 154,

156–158, 162; families cast in, 78, 109, 110, 111, 113, 145; finale, 210–211, 214, 233; history of, 52, 54–56, 254n37; as live performance, 17, 232; music, 104, 187, 198, 200–201; Nauvoo economy, 50; participants as insular community, 72–73; participants live on site, 76, 110, 142; participant/spectator interaction in, 56–57, 73, 93, 160, 179–180, 233; participants’ time commitment, 79, 110, 145; participation as act of devotion, 145, 149–150; performance exported from SLC, 47, 53, 54, 55, 66–67, 72–73, 78, 157; performing the dead in, 31, 97, 143–144; performing with the dead, 31, 176–177, 179–180, 205–207, 214; remote location, 16, 188; set design, 104, 150, 191–192; Smith character in, 55–56, 57, 125, 126–127, 148, 207; special effects, 191–192; spiritual feelings during, 198, 206; staging /blocking in, 111–112, 149–150; tradition and, 47, 51–52, 54; venue size, 72, 154, 156–157; violence in, 103, 124–125; witnessing of Christ in, 58, 210–211. See also vignette performances (Nauvoo); Young Performing Missionaries (YPMs) Nauvoo Pageant, sacred site engagement, 90, 92, 93–94, 103–105, 179, 180; America as promised land, 119, 124–125, 126; audience as community, 188–189; Historic Nauvoo, 89, 91, 94, 103–104. See also Nauvoo Temple Page 312 →Nauvoo Pageant storyline, 16, 55–57, 64, 119, 206–207; Book of Mormon, 17, 56–57, 234; British Pageant, 234–235; fictionalized historic characters, 56–57, 73, 203, 207, 235; Historic Nauvoo establishment, dramatized in, 56, 94, 125; martyrdom of Smith brothers, 126–127; Pratt, 56–57, 93, 125, 179–180 Nauvoo Temple, 51–52, 54, 56, 91, 99, 103–105, 254n36; visible and referenced in pageant, 94, 97, 100, 103–104, 105, 131–132, 242–243; “Women in Zion” and, 162 Nauvoo Temple, pageant dramatization of construction, 57, 104–105, 125, 192, 198–199, 207; choreography during, 94, 104; sewing of set pieces, as act of devotion, 150; spectators’ reaction, 97 Nauvoo Theatrical Productions, 52, 255n37 Nelson, Russell M., 29, 108–109, 140 Nephite/Lamanite battles, 46, 121, 122–123, 124, 159–160, 215–216 New York Times, 87, 191 Neyman, Jane, 22 Oakland Temple Pageant (And It Came to Pass), 245n3 Oaks, Dallin H., 67, 140, 181, 196 obedience, 116, 118, 125, 169–170 Oberammergau Passion Play, 41–42, 60 Olsen, Greg, 170 Olsen, Ted, 47 “O My Father” (hymn, Snow), 198 O’Neill, James, 167 ordinances. See proxy ordinances; temple ordinances ordination. See priesthood

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 6–7 organization, administrative. See administration organization, of casts, 109–110, 111, 112, 114, 142 original sin, 27 Oscarson, R. Donald, 54, 256n44 Osmond, Donny, 110–111 Packer, Boyd K., 27, 140, 197, 205 pageant, defined, 17 Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, The (pageant), 39–40 pageant presidency, 65–66, 72, 258n69 pageantry form, motivations for use, 40–84; aesthetic safety of, 40, 62–65, 69, 73, 122; centralized administration guarantees controlled message, 40–41, 65–68, 69, 72–73; Church purposes furthered, 75–84; inspires goodness, 63–65; living the gospel, 75–80, 83; as missionary work, 75, 76, 80–82, 83; redemption of dead, 30, 72–74, 82–84. See also tradition pageants, history of, 37–40; American new pageantry, 39–40, 42; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 43–45, 175, 252nn21, 24, 256n51; longevity, 42–43 44, 47, 256n51; Manti Pageant, 48–51; Mesa Pageant, 59–60, 256nn51, 54; Nauvoo Pageant, 52, 54–56, 254n37; passion plays, 41–42 pageants, locations of. See sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with pageants, storylines, 49, 61–62, 253n29; British Pageant, 16, 17, 64, 234–235, 235–236; Castle Valley Pageant, 16–17, 225–226, 227–229; Clarkston Pageant, 16, 17, 232–233. See also Hill Cumorah Pageant storyline; Manti Pageant storyline; Mesa Easter Pageant storyline; Nauvoo Pageant storyline pageant schedules, 188–189, 273n28; participants’ time commitments, 42–43, 54, 79, 110–111, 142, 145 pageant venue size, 15–16, 55, 154–157, 159–160. See also audience numbers Palmyra, New York, 51, 255n40; Bean family in, 135–136; Smith Family Homestead, 41, 135, 188; temple in, 86, 100. See also Hill Cumorah Palmyra Heritage Site, 89 Paradox of Acting, The (Diderot), 161 participants and participation: as act of devotion, 75–77, 140–151; auditions and casting, 72, 78–79, 109, 121, 176, 265n86; Castle Valley Pageant, 225; cast organization, 109–110, 111, 112, 114, 142; by children /teenagers, 44, 47, 77, 109, 114, 121–122, 124, 140–141; Clarkston Pageant, 232; as community, 9, 48, 53, 72, 97, 142, 225; crew, 148–151; cross-generational, 44, 47, 48; decorum expectations, 140–141; definition, Page 313 →13–14; directors, 70, 72–73, 78–80, 149, 155, 173, 204–205; families cast as unit, 77, 78, 109–110, 111, 112, 113, 114; family traditions of, 43–48, 61, 77, 109–115; immersive experience of, 76, 141–142; live on site, 76, 110, 142; missionary service of, 80–82, 152; number of, 15–16, 39, 52, 83, 114, 145, 174; open to all, 78, 109; prayer, 190–191; rehearsals, 78, 79–80, 141, 144–145, 157, 190–191; relationship to character, 77–78, 204, 205–206, 237–238; returning, 15, 42–48, 53, 72–73, 145,

204; soundtracks and, 68–69; time commitments of, 42–43, 54, 79, 110–111, 142, 145; town involvement, 16, 42–43, 50–53, 93–94, 188–189, 228; tradition and, 42–48, 61, 77, 109–115; witnessing, 7, 81. See also audience numbers, participants; audiences; belief of participants; children/teenagers, as participants; performing the dead; sincerity, embodying and performing; spectators; volunteers participant/spectator interaction, 157–160, 179–181; British Pageant, 236–238; Clarkston Pageant, 233–234; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 233; Manti Pageant, 159; Mesa Pageant, 233; Nauvoo Pageant, 56–57, 73, 93, 160, 179–180, 233; sincerity conveyed through, 159–160, 165, 180 Passion, The (Morse), 167, 271n73 passion plays, 41–42, 60, 62. See also Mesa Easter Pageant (Jesus the Christ) Passion Week, 62 past, time period, 4, 5, 7, 240 Paul (apostle), 5, 154, 186–187 Pearl of Great Price, The, 20, 24, 129, 249n60 Pellegrini, Ann, 8, 11 performance: definition, 139; live vs. recorded, 122, 208–209; period pieces, 5–6. See also religious theater performance missions, 15, 137–138, 176, 183 performance scholarship, 8–9, 34–35, 208–209, 211, 275n67; sincerity and, 151–152, 153, 161, 170, 173–174 performance sites. See sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with performers. See participants and participation Performing Remains (Schneider), 10 performing the dead, 32, 127, 137–177, 181–182, 224; by acting as self, 143–144, 152, 164; Christ-like behavior, 143, 144, 168, 170; crew participation, 148–151; embodiment, 3, 7, 8, 14, 138, 140, 208, 231; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 137, 148, 166, 168, 172–173, 174; living proxies, 138–140, 164, 168–169, 175–176, 205; Mesa Pageant, 1, 31, 140–141, 145–146, 150, 153, 175; Nauvoo Pageant, 31, 97, 143–144; overcoming hardship, 142–143; spirits, stage portrayal of, 3, 206, 207, 208, 228; spirits inspire, 12, 138, 147, 242; testimony and, 153–154, 164–165, 165–170, 176, 177; as and through acts of devotion, 138, 139, 144–151, 152, 176; through choreography, 145–146. See also Jesus Christ, as character; sincerity, embodying and performing; Smith, Joseph, Jr., as character performing with the dead, 3, 7, 32–33, 179–219, 224; costumes signifying spirits, 206, 207, 208, 228; encountering literal spirits onstage, 181–182, 202–207, 228, 237–238; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 201, 204–205, 210–211, 214–215; inviting Holy Ghost, 180–181; Manti Pageant, 203, 207, 210; Mesa Pageant, 1, 31, 183, 204, 205, 209; music and, 182, 196–202; Nauvoo Pageant, 31, 176–177, 179–180, 205–207, 214. See also Holy Ghost; spiritual feeling persecution, 117, 135, 136 Peterfeso, Jill, 161 Petersen, Mark E., 49, 260n5

Peterson, Ivo, 172 Phelan, Peggy, 209 Phelps, Irwin, 57 pilgrims. See religious tourism Pilkington, William, 230, 231 Pioneer Day, 38, 41, 44, 48, 54, 62. See also Manti Pageant (The Mormon Miracle Pageant) Pioneer Village (Castle Valley Pageant pre-event), 225 Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (Bial), 153, 167 Play On! Project (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), 6–7 plots. See pageants, storylines political action, 117–118 Page 314 →“Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief, A” (hymn), 127 “Praise to the Man” (hymn), 104 Pratt, Parley P., 25 Pratt, Parley P., as character in Nauvoo Pageant, 56–57, 93, 125, 179–180 prayer, 78, 142, 190–191, 211 Preach My Gospel (missionary curriculum), 60 pre-mortal life, 176 prerecorded soundtracks. See soundtracks present, time period, 4, 5, 7, 240 presentational style. See participant/spectator interaction Preston England Temple, 234, 238 priesthood, 27, 30, 231; gender, 21, 248n48, 258n69; pageant presidency, 65–66, 72, 258n69; powers and responsibilities, 20–21, 248n48; race, 248n48 Prince, Jenee Wright, 200 production and set design: Castle Valley Pageant, 224–225; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 85–86, 87, 130, 133, 191, 193; lighting, 43, 87, 194, 206–207, 208, 232–233; Manti Pageant, 48–49, 100, 102–103, 191, 192–193; Mesa Pageant, 60, 106, 191; Nauvoo Pageant, 104, 150, 191–192; size of set, 39, 85; special effects, 17, 149, 191–196, 214–215. See also sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with; temple-pageant proximity promised land prophecy. See America as promised land prosperity, 116, 118, 125

proxy ordinances, 27–28, 98–100, 104, 108–109, 171; ancestry research and, 3, 28, 29, 83, 101, 222, 250n70; as Church purpose, 75; historical vs. present understandings, 226; Holy Ghost and, 182; introduction of, 20, 22–23, 24–25, 29; pageants likened to, 139–140, 175–176; temple importance, 28, 82, 99. See also redemption of dead, LDS theology of proxy performance. See performing the dead psychophysical acting theory, 144 punishment of God, 118, 195 race, 126n111, 248n48 rain, 211–212 Rayner, Alice, 138 recordings. See soundtracks redemption of dead, LDS theology of, 3, 18–30, 33, 238; baptism and, 22, 28, 250n70; belief sustained through, 23–24; as Church purpose, 72–74, 82–84, 98–99, 182; motivation for pageantry form’s use, 30, 72–74, 82–84; origin of doctrine, 18–25; Smith family and, 18–25, 24, 26, 27–28, 249n60; temples, 98–99, 101–102, 222. See also proxy ordinances; Smith, Joseph, Jr. referral cards, 13, 43–44, 81 rehearsal process, 78, 79–80, 141, 144–145, 157, 190–191. See also participants and participation Relief Society, 157–158 Religion, Theatre, and Performance (Gharavi, ed.), 8, 173 religious meaning, 239 religious theater, 9–11, 40, 167; passion plays, 41–42, 60, 62; YPM and, 52, 255nn37, 38 religious tourism, 50–51, 95, 96–97; distance traveled for, 16, 55, 77, 188, 237; economic impact of, 51, 53, 255n40 Renaissance fairs, 6, 7 Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (RLDS), 51, 254n36. See also Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints resurrecting the past, 3, 17–18, 57–58. See also performing the dead; performing with the dead resurrection doctrine, 4–5, 8, 27, 29, 61, 209–210, 245n4. See also exaltation; Jesus Christ revelations, to Smith: America as promised land, 114–118, 264n69; Doctrine and Covenants, 20, 64, 118, 143, 181, 249n60; feeling Holy Ghost’s presence, 184; redemption of the dead theology, 20, 26, 27–28, 29; to restore Christ’s original church, 19, 20, 21, 92, 227. See also “First Vision, The” (of Joseph Smith, Jr.) Richins, Keith, 191 righteousness. See goodness/righteousness ritual, 190, 203; definition, 173–174; embodiment, 171, 174, 176, 224; gesture and sincerity, 166–167,

170–175; ritual performance and memory, 170–171 Page 315 →Ritual Imports (Sponsler), 62 Roach, Joseph, 138–139, 154 roadshows, 38 Roarke, Caroline, 8 Romney, Mitt, 12 Rudin, Rachel, 6 Rux, Macksene, 68 Sabbath day worship, 222 Sack, Daniel Aaron, 209, 211 sacrament ritual, 190. See also ritual Sacred Grove, 91–92, 188 sacred sites, 88–93, 189, 260n15; ancestry and, 53, 136–137, 176; living/dead encounters on, 88, 90, 95, 99–100; spiritual feeling, 77, 92, 95–96, 105, 107. See also America as promised land; Hill Cumorah; Historic Nauvoo; Manti Temple; Mesa Temple; Nauvoo, Illinois; Nauvoo Temple; temples and temple building sacred sites, affirmation of: through belief, 90, 91, 92–93, 95, 96–97, 98, 105, 107; through devotional rhetoric, 90, 92; through institutional control, 90–91, 91–92; through theophany, 90–91 sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with, 7, 85–91, 92–133, 223–224; Castle Valley Pageant, 88–89; Clarkston Pageant, 2, 88. See also America as promised land; Hill Cumorah Pageant, sacred site engagement; Manti Pageant, sacred site engagement; Mesa Easter Pageant, sacred site engagement; Nauvoo Pageant, sacred site engagement; temple-pageant proximity; temples and temple building sacrifices of pioneers and patriots, 115, 116, 118, 119–120, 127–128 Salt Lake City Cemetery, 2 Salt Lake Temple, 98 Salt Lake Theater, 37 salvation, 23, 24–25, 29–30; hastening work of, 221–223, 231, 239. See also exaltation; redemption of dead, LDS theology of SarlГіs, Robert K., 10 Savior of the World (pageant), 38, 251n7, 271n69 Schneider, Rebecca, 10, 40 Scott, Richard G., 170 scripts: Hill Cumorah Pageant, 45, 67, 191; Mesa Pageant, 58, 59, 70–71, 256n51; Nauvoo Pageant, 55–56; preservation of, soundtracks and, 68, 69. See also pageants, storylines

scriptural story pageants, 16–17. See also Hill Cumorah Pageant storyline; Mesa Easter Pageant storyline scripture. See Bible, the; Book of Mormon; Doctrine and Covenants; Pearl of Great Price, The sealing ritual, 112, 114, 226; enacted in Nauvoo Pageant, 57, 104, 207; explanation of belief, 27, 28, 30, 108–109, 111; Smith teaches about, 23, 26, 104, 238; temple importance, 99. See also eternal family doctrine; proxy ordinances Sears, John, 91 Second Coming, 46–47, 58, 102, 116, 210–211, 228 sets. See production and set design sewing. See costumes Shakespeare, William, 6 Sherrill, Rowland A., 91, 95–96 Sight and Sound Theatre, 9 sin, 27, 62–65, 257n65. See also goodness/righteousness sincerity, embodying and performing, 32, 111–112, 151–177, 224; Castle Valley Pageant, 226; by Christ character, 168–170, 171–172, 173, 175; definition, 164; facial expressions, 149, 154, 156–157, 158; gestural emphasis, 155–156, 157, 158–159, 165; performance scholarship, 151–152, 153, 161, 170, 173–174; ritual gesture and repetition, 166–167, 170–175; sharing testimony, 153–154, 161–162, 164–165, 167; spectator interaction, 159–160, 165, 180; tears/crying, 161, 162–163; venue size, 154–157, 159–160; vocal techniques, 161, 162, 163–164, 165. See also emotions; participants and participation; performing the dead; spiritual feelings Sloboda, John, 199 Smith, Alvin (Joseph Jr.’s brother), 18, 19–20, 25, 26, 29 Smith, Alvin (Joseph Jr.’s son), 20 Smith, Emma Hale, 21 Smith, Hyrum, 21, 124–125, 126–127 Page 316 →Smith, Joseph, III, 254n36 Smith, Joseph, Jr., 36, 143, 181, 247n41; assassination of, 104, 124–125, 126; Bean family and, 135–137; criminal charges against, 126, 266n97; death of brother Alvin, 19–20, 22, 25, 26, 29; death of brother Hyrum, 124–125, 126; death of children, 21; death of son Alvin, 20; doctrinal teachings, 4–5, 18–25, 23, 26, 104, 208, 238; final resting place, 1, 126; founds LDS Church, 21, 27, 227; funeral sermons by, 22–23; Harris serves as scribe, 229–230; martyrdom, 104, 126–127; priesthood of, 20–21, 27, 248n48; statue of, 126, 266n101; visitations to, 20–21, 89, 248n42, 261n17. See also Book of Mormon, translation; redemption of dead, LDS theology of; revelations, to Smith Smith, Joseph, Jr., as character: challenges of role, 148; in Hill Cumorah Pageant, 17, 46–47, 94, 131; in Manti Pageant, 49–50, 64, 102, 114–115, 121, 129, 148; in Nauvoo Pageant, 55–56, 57, 125, 126–127, 148, 207 Smith, Joseph, Jr., first vision. See “First Vision, The” (of Joseph Smith, Jr.)

Smith, Joseph, Sr., 21, 25–26 Smith, Joseph F., 24–26, 249n60 Smith, Joseph Fielding, 260n5 Smith, Lucy Mack, 19, 21 Smith, Samuel, 21 Smith, William, 22 Smith family, 21–22, 86, 135, 254n36; Sacred Grove, 91–92, 188 Smith Family Homestead, 41, 135, 188 Snow, Eliza R., 198, 205–206 Sorenson, Roger, 90 sound effects, 194 soundtracks, 68–74; British Pageant, 236; City of Joseph, 54; consistency in, 68–69; dated quality, 69, 163; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 45, 68, 70, 72, 73, 155, 163–164; lip syncing, 17, 70, 72, 258n76; Manti Pageant, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 163–164; Mesa Pageant, 68, 70–71, 72, 163–164, 216; narration, 49–50, 68, 72, 73, 93, 163–164, 209–210; sincerity in, 155, 163–164; staging/blocking dictated by, 69, 70, 155. See also music Spanish language performances, 58, 70, 258n76 special effects, 17, 149, 191–196, 214–215 spectacle, definition, 192. See also production and set design Spectacles of Reform (Hughes), 192 spectators, 7, 8, 10–15, 64–65, 72, 190–191; definition, 13, 186; demographics, 12–13; economic impact, 50–51, 53; referral cards, 13, 43–44, 81; spiritual feelings of, 14, 183. See also audience numbers, spectators; audiences; participants and participation; participant/spectator interaction; religious tourism spirits. See Holy Ghost; performing the dead; performing with the dead; redemption of dead, LDS theology of spiritual feelings, 10–12, 35–36, 241; belief as prerequisite, 14, 95–96; Christ role and, 147, 168–169, 173; communing with spirits, 12, 127, 137–140, 181–182, 202–207, 237–238; confirmation of truth through, 107, 162, 181–182, 183, 185, 192, 224; described in Book of Mormon, 183, 194–195; described in Doctrine and Covenants, 181, 272n6; emotions and, 182–185, 187, 192, 195, 198–199, 201, 218–219; exaltation and, 176, 183; feeling Holy Ghost, 182–185, 186–190, 192, 218; gatherings and, 186–190; inviting Holy Ghost’s presence, 180–181, 182, 186–190; music evokes, 182, 196–202, 218–219; of participants, 14, 76, 79–80, 144–145, 184; participants try to influence spectators’, 14, 164–165, 179, 185–187, 189; at sacred sites, 77, 92, 95–96, 105, 107; Smith’s revelations about Holy Ghost’s presence, 184; special effects evoke, 192; spectacle of violence evokes, 193–194, 195–196; of spectators, 14, 183, 184, 224; spiritual growth, potential, 78, 141–142; tears from, 162–163; through testimony, 76, 173, 183, 189. See also Holy Ghost; performing the dead; performing with the dead; redemption of dead, LDS theology of Sponsler, Claire, 62 spouses, cast participation of, 109. See also family

stages and theaters. See sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with staging/blocking: battle sequences, 121–124, Page 317 →159–160; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 45, 155–156, 172, 173–174, 253n24; Mesa Pageant, 215–216; Nauvoo Pageant, 111–112, 149–150; soundtracks dictate, 69, 70, 155; venue size, 15–16, 55, 154–157, 159–160. See also choreography; participant /spectator interaction; sincerity, embodying and performing staging/blocking, Manti Pageant, 172; participant/spectator interaction, 159–160; soundtracks dictate, 70, 155; Temple used in, 50, 100, 102–103, 131, 191, 193. See also Manti Pageant (The Mormon Miracle Pageant) Stanislavski, Constanin, 161 Stevenson, Jill, 5, 8, 11, 42, 144 substitution. See performing the dead surrogation, 138–139. See also performing the dead Swatos, Bill, 51 Swindle, Liz Lemon, 170 tableaux, 59, 157 tabula rasa interpretation of land, 116 Taylor, Diane, 167, 202, 208 tears/crying, 161–163, 184, 262. See also emotions; sincerity, embodying and performing teenagers. See children/teenagers; family; Young Performing Missionaries (YPMs) Teilens, Saskia, 128 temple cultural celebrations, 38, 251n6 Temple Hill (Manti, Utah), 49, 94–95, 96, 102 temple ordinances: endowment ritual, 28; priesthood and, 21, 29. See also proxy ordinances; redemption of dead, LDS theology of; sealing ritual temple-pageant proximity, 100–108, 224; Manti Temple, action staged on, 50, 100, 102–103, 131, 191, 193; Manti Temple visible and directly referenced, 48–49, 94, 96, 100, 102–103, 131; Mesa Temple visible and directly referenced, 106–107, 131; Nauvoo Temple visible and directly referenced, 94, 97, 100, 103–104, 105, 131–132, 242–243. See also sacred sites, pageants’ engagement with temples and temple building, 75, 98–108, 262n35; dedications, performances accompanying, 9, 38, 351n6; importance of, 28, 32, 82, 87–88, 98–99, 101; Kirtland, Ohio, 91, 99, 104; Moroni statues, 102, 263n44; number built, 98, 99, 263n44; Palmyra, New York, 86, 100; Preston England Temple, 234, 238; as public/private spaces, 87–88; site selection, 100; spirits present in, 99–100; story of Christ cleansing, 60, 167. See also sacred sites temple work. See proxy ordinances; redemption of dead, LDS theology of testimony/witnessing, 92, 165–170, 209, 210–211; definition, 8, 153; embodiment of, 4, 138, 167, 176, 208, 227, 229; of Harris, 230–231, 277nn17, 19; as injunction, 58–59, 141; participants and, 7, 81; performing the dead, 153–154, 164–165, 165–170, 176, 177; sincerity and, 153–154, 161–162, 164–165,

167; spiritual feelings and, 76, 173, 181, 183, 189; tears and, 163 theophany, 90–91, 102 “Through Deepening Trials” (hymn, Snow), 205 “Title of Liberty” rhetoric, 128, 267n106 tourism. See religious tourism town involvement, 16, 42–43, 50–53, 93–94, 228. See also community tradition, 40, 41–62, 59; community involvement, 48–53; definition, 42; of family pageant participation, 43–48, 61, 77, 109–115; Hill Cumorah Pageant and, 43–47; Manti Pageant and, 42–43, 47–48, 48–50, 70; Mesa Pageant and, 47, 57, 62; Nauvoo Pageant and, 47, 51–52, 54; religious, theological, 43; soundtrack use, 68–72. See also pageantry form, motivations for use “Trail of Hope” (vignette performance), 156, 163, 176, 205–206, 242, 255nn38, 39 Tribute to Joseph Smith, A. See Nauvoo Pageant (A Tribute to Joseph Smith) Truth Will Prevail. See British Pageant (Truth Will Prevail) Turner, Victor, 75–76 Uchtdorf, Dieter F., 53 United States. See America as promised land unity, 187 Urry, Francis L., 68 Utopia in Performance (Dolan), 11 Page 318 →veil rhetoric, 27, 88, 99–100, 140 venue size, 15–16, 55, 171; emotional sincerity and, 154–157, 159–160. See also audience numbers vignette performances (Nauvoo), 52, 56, 156–158, 160, 188; “King Follett Discourse,” 156, 198, 255n39; “Trail of Hope,” 156, 163, 176, 205–206, 242, 255nn38, 39; “Women of Nauvoo,” 156, 157–158, 160, 162, 255n39; YPMs in, 90, 163, 176, 205–206. See also Nauvoo Pageant (A Tribute to Joseph Smith) violence, 64–65; crucifixion and, 193–194, 195; in defense of America, 117, 119–121, 122, 123–125; in Manti Pageant, 122; in Nauvoo Pageant, 103, 124–125; spectacle of, evokes spiritual feeling, 193–194, 195–196. See also battles visions. See “First Vision, The” (of Joseph Smith, Jr.); revelations, to Smith visitations, proxy ordinances and, 99–100 visitations, to Smith, 20–21, 89, 248n42, 261n17. See also “First Vision, The” (of Joseph Smith, Jr.); revelations, to Smith; Smith, Joseph, Jr. vocal technique, 161–165, 180; talking through tears, 162–163, 164; vowel extension, 163, 164. See also

narration; sincerity, embodying and performing; soundtracks volunteers, 13, 80; British Pageant, 16, 234; Clarkston Pageant, 2, 15; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 51; Manti Pageant, 16; Mesa Pageant, 16, 145; Nauvoo Pageant, 16, 52, 149–150; pageant administration by, 65, 66. See also participants and participation war. See battles Warner, David, 55, 57, 200–201 wartime pageantry, 40 Washington, George, 126, 128, 129 weather, 211–212 Wenzel, Andrea, 189 wickedness, 192–193, 215–217. See also goodness/righteousness Widstoe, John A., 151 Wirthlin, Joseph B., 185 witnessing. See testimony/witnessing women: casting and, 265n86; clothing worn in temples, 207; Hill Cumorah Pageant, 123, 266n90; pageant administration, 258n69. See also gender “Women of Nauvoo” (vignette performance), 156, 157–158, 160, 162, 255n39 World War II, 123 Wright, Ward, 204–205 Young, Brigham, 1, 104, 105, 248n48, 261n26; Castle Valley Pageant, 88–89, 224, 228; as theater advocate, 37, 62 Young, Brigham, as character, 228; in Manti Pageant, 50, 127–129, 267n111 Young, Kent, 52 Young Performing Missionaries (YPMs), 52, 90, 152, 201–202, 255nn37, 38; emotion and, 218; gathering, 187; “Trail of Hope” vignette, 163, 176, 205–206. See also children/teenagers; missionary work; Nauvoo Pageant (A Tribute to Joseph Smith) Young Woman’s Journal (Mormon publication), 87 Youth Temple Challenge, 222 Zarilli, Phillip, 144 Zion Passion Play, The (pageant), 167, 271n74