mormon boy experience
about mormon boy
It’s been 15 years since playwright/performer Steven Heard Fales (Outer Critics Circle Award Nominee) opened his groundbreaking Confessions of a Mormon Boy Off-Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse directed by Tony Award-winner Jack Hofsiss (Feb. 3, 2006), and nearly 20 years since its world premiere at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in downtown Salt Lake City (Nov. 23, 2001)—where it became a sold-out, word-of-mouth counter-culture phenomenon. Since then, the independently produced, critically acclaimed autobiographical solo play has been performed over 2,000 times across the country and around the world from Los Angeles to London, Houston to Halifax, San Diego to Sydney.
Steven Heard Fales is a classically trained actor (MFA) who started writing and performing solo work after his “perfect” Mormon world fell apart following his formal excommunication from the LDS Church and subsequent divorce in 2000. He was married to actor/writer Emily Pearson with whom he fathered two children.
“I originally wrote Confessions for my kids. I wanted to make sure I left a personal record, because when I came out, you were expected to get AIDS and die. That’s the template I was given. I wanted to make sure my kids knew what happened to their dad and how much I loved them before I might run out of time like it did for my gay father-in-law, Gerald Pearson.”
Steven is the former son-in-law of celebrated Mormon author Carol Lynn Pearson who wrote about bringing her ex-husband home to die of AIDS in San Francisco in her bestselling memoir Good-bye, I Love You (Random House, 1986).
With Confessions of a Mormon Boy, Steven Heard Fales became the first gay Mormon to artistically tell his story in any kind of mainstage/mainstream way.
“I believe it’s our duty to tell our own stories in our own words in our own way in our own time on our own terms and often on our own dime. That’s what I’ll continue to do. It seems that a young dad grew up with a lot more to say!” Steven Heard Fales is the founder of the Solo Performance Alliance that encourages/supports/mentors others to tell their stories and advances the solo theatre genre.
Confessions deals with . . .
Confessions of a Mormon Boy was last performed February 2020 for a sold-out run at Chapel Off Chapel in Melbourne, Australia following a seven-month residency in Palm Springs, California and sold-out runs at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda and later Cape Town, South Africa; Oslo, Norway; and Evolution Theatre in Columbus, Ohio—all in 2019; and turns at Gay Days Anaheim at Disneyland and Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor in 2018. The pandemic forced him to cancel the rest of his global tour that included New Zealand, Taiwan, Mexico, and ultimately India, Israel, Brazil, et al.
Fall 2022 Steven Heard Fales will launch his “Mormon Boy Experience” with an updated Confessions that will continue to tour nationally and internationally on its way to a commercial revival in New York City, along with other solos, plays, books, and music including the rest of his Mormon Boy Trilogy and his latest solo dramedy Mormon Outlaw: Overcoming the Criminal Mind, about his American Western ancestry and colorful Trump worshipping Mormon family. During the pandemic he has been working on a 5-volume epic: Oxy-Mormon Memoirs from his “creativity cottage” in Palm Springs, California which he now calls home and from whence he exports his work to New York City, etc.
Pre-order Confessions of a Mormon Boy: Behind the Scenes of the International Solo Sensation, a follow-up to his Lambda Literary Award Finalist Confessions of a Mormon Boy: Behind the Scenes of the Off-Broadway Hit (Alyson Books, 2006) which includes the script at www.mormonboy.com. His Mormon Boy podcast begins March 2022. Check out his Mormon Boy Blog and YouTube Channel. He is on Twitter, Instagram, etc.
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SYNOPSIS
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