While there have been plenty of stories about male missionaries in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rendered in film, television and theater, there has been a dearth in stories about Mormon sister missionaries. However, last year’s release of Heretic, a horror film about a pair of sister Mormon missionaries who hope to convert a reclusive man only to discover that he is pathological, has attracted a fair amount of attention, in addition to a respectable box office showing.
Alarmed by what they described as a graphic depiction of violence against women in the film, the LDS church shared with journalists a backgrounder about missionary safety. Meanwhile, more than a few former Mormon missionaries have noted the film’s portrayal of their experiences as realistic and nuanced. Among them, April Young-Bennett wrote, “[T]he relationship between the two missionaries … seemed like a real missionary relationship to me. On our missions, we’re paired with another missionary as a companion and required to stay together constantly until we are reassigned to work with someone else in a different city or neighborhood a few months later. We’re always working with people we haven’t known very long but we quickly develop a camaraderie because we spend all day everyday together. The missionaries in Heretic seemed like that: close, but also strangers. They were obviously products of the same culture, but they were also different people with distinct personalities.”
Similarly, the relationship between two sister missionaries in the upcoming premiere of Morag Shepherd’s The Big Quiet, a two-hander being staged by PYGmalion Theatre Company, is realistic and subtly framed much like the one described above — except this time. as an intimate chamber theater drama.
Directed by Tamara Howell, the production will run Feb. 21 through March 8 in the Black Box Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Set twenty years ago (2005) in San Diego, the play takes place entirely in the apartment of Sister García (Juls Marino) and Sister Roberts (Lily Hilden).
Shepherd shapes a fascinating counterpoint that propels the dramatic and tense stakes involved at the narrative heart. Roberts, who has yet to successfully bring a convert to baptism, admires García, who already has completed five cases with investigators (that is, non-LDS individuals who are meeting with missionaries). However, women missionaries are not allowed to complete the baptismal stage of the conversion process — a ritual reserved exclusively to the men in the church. Roberts is quintessentially posited as a rules-abiding missionary while García has loosened her boundaries and is comfortable with bending their expected obligations in doctrine and decorum.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Shepherd, who no longer is a church member, said The Big Quiet is based largely on her LDS missionary experiences in San Diego, which occurred between 2000 and 2002. “I moved the time five years later because I had specific references that I wanted to plug into the piece,” she explained. Gordon Hinckley was then church president, a popular leader who had a relatively better grip on public image management than his successors. Another was a 2004 story in Salt Lake City that gained national attention, involving a typical young Mormon couple. Mark Hacking had reported that his wife, Lori, a teacher, as missing but the search ended in shock when he confessed to murdering his wife. As they were preparing to move across the country, she had learned that he had elaborately concocted a lie about studying to become a doctor. These bits serve to tint the conversations the two missionaries share, building to enlightening nuances that will eventually point each woman to their respective epiphanies.
Of three Mormon-centered plays Shepherd has penned in the last decade, The Big Quiet is her most inward looking script, especially in balancing both characters’ respective perceptions that define their personal relationship to the LDS church. “I wrote the character of Sister García as what I wished I had behaved like during my mission,” she said. “I behaved more like the pent-up rule-abiding Sister Roberts.”
While she did not have a missionary companion like García, it was not until later that she started to feel rebellious and question Mormonism, especially after she read about the religion’s links to Freemasonry, which would become part of her decision to leave the LDS faith.”I concentrated so much on my mission that even when I felt conflicted, I doubled down on the rules.” Ironically, Shepherd, during her mission, was more like García in successfully converting individuals to join the church.
In 2017, Shepherd won the Association of Mormon Letters’ award for best drama of 2016, for Burn. A classic example of how Shepherd handles the objective of minimalism in theater, Burn’s theatrical contours,were chiseled in part by the playwright’s struggles with her Mormon faith and the realization that she did not have to try to fit into a religion she didn’t fit into, as she discovered.
In 2023, Shepherd’s play Worship, in an exceptional premiere produced by Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre, comprised four tableaus, with a cast of five actors. In the hands of another playwright, the script likely could have been an unconstructive polemic.
If one considers The Big Quiet as part of this trilogy, the significance of this playwright’s journey is evident. As noted in The Utah Review’s coverage of Worship, Shepherd, who has been out of the Mormon faith community for quite a while, continues to contemplate how and why she feared for so long becoming uncomfortable and even avoiding the risk of being ostracized as an enemy or adversary, if she would have pursued questions proving whether or not what the church says is true. Likewise, citing how she has shaped Sister Roberts in The Big Quiet. Shepherd also is wisely careful not to belittle members who believe in the church. But, she also infuses the stage atmosphere with a distinct air of discomfort, to the extent that it becomes lucid for anyone to comprehend, regardless of whether or not they were ever part of the Mormon faith community.
“I do not think that Mormons who will see this show should be offended at all,” Shepherd said. “It reflects my own journey and while I was angry at the time I am not so angry anymore. In this play, I am trying to be fair in how both sisters express their feelings.“ Considering the play is set 20 years ago, before smartphones and social media apps became omnipresent, she added that rules in the 2000s were much stricter for missionaries than they are now. Women no longer are required to wear skirts at all times. Unlike then, when missionaries were restricted by how much contact they would have with their families at home, the current generation is permitted to make TikTok videos, for example, and other social media content.
In The Big Quiet as with the two other plays, we are left with characters who assuredly are struggling or will do so eventually, regarding their fears in probing their faith and ties to the Mormon community. However, what makes a Shepherd play like The Big Quiet stand out is realizing that the stories and conversations the two missionaries share resemble and resonate with those which any two young women who live together in an apartment, might have, regardless of the circumstances that led to them becoming roommates and friends in the first place. The Big Quiet, for instance, explores eating disorders, as well as matters of sex, spirituality and relationships.
Active as a playwright, director and producer, Shepherd and Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre will take My Brother Was a Vampire, a play that Plan-B Theatre premiered in 2022, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.
For tickets and more information about The Big Quiet, see the PYGmalion Theatre Company website.