Sister Dottie S. Dixon

Stage » The oft-quoted show business cliché is again relevant during a national epidemic.

By Roxana Orellana

 

The Salt Lake Tribune

 

Updated: 10/31/2009 02:34:44 PM MDT

Ask theater producers about flu season and the national H1N1 emergency, and you’ll hear the old show-business cliché: The show must go on. After all, canceling or postponing a show translates to losing thousands of dollars and time already invested in the production, and disappointing time-starved audiences. It also can be complicated and expensive to reschedule a production in some of the city’s busiest small theaters.”The first recourse is always to try to fill the empty role and go on with the show,” said Pruyn, artistic director of Pygmalion Productions. “Frequently roles are shuffled or actors are brought in to step in the role.”

But in the case of “The Passion,” that wasn’t possible, as the show is built around Dottie, the Mormon housewife from Spanish Fork with a gay son. After Frost, who created the character with Troy Williams, was hospitalized, there was nothing left to do but cancel.

For the South Jordan Community Theatre and other community groups that work with large youth casts, H1N1 or other illnesses can prove disastrous. The young company had a brush with the flu virus last spring during a production of one of Utah’s favorite musicals, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

“We were faced with this virus and the potential it could ruin our company,” said executive producer Kevin Dudley. As the cast prepared for the show’s dress rehearsal, the orchestra director came down with the illness.

Another potential disaster occurred on the last day of rehearsal, when the actor playing Joseph showed up wearing a boot and crutches — thankfully, just a prank. But the two incidents sparked the board of directors to come up with a plan, as Dudley explained: “a buffer against these types of tragedy in order to avoid financial ruin.”

For the company’s current run of “Annie,” scheduled for Nov. 13-24, an actor was selected to understudy the title role. In addition, the 80-member cast was divided into three performing groups, allowing the director to transfer different actors among the casts, as needed. That’s a change, as the company had resisted casting understudies because of the little time actors might have onstage. “We changed our policy as a direct result of the H1N1 virus and potential negative financial impact closing a show would have,” Dudley said.

The flu virus already has made appearances during rehearsal, as a couple of the leads have called in sick. With weeks to go before opening night, the staff is counting on a full recovery.

Actors who are feeling ill are encouraged to stay home, Dudley said, and like kid-oriented businesses throughout the Salt Lake Valley, the theater troupe has invested in hand sanitizer and encourages frequent hand washing and directing coughs into elbows at rehearsals. “For us, the bottom line is: The show must go on,” Dudley said.

Planning ahead for illness isn’t just a potential headache for small theaters. At the state’s oldest professional company, producers rely on understudies, creative staging and planning ahead.

Canceling a show is rare; according to PTC managing director Chris Lino, that’s only happened twice in more than 40 years of productions. Once in the 1980s, a lead actor got sick, and there was no understudy for the production, and then once in 2007, power went out in the building for an evening.

For PTC’s current show, Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?,” which opened Oct. 30 and plays through Nov. 14, there are no understudies for the cast of 11. “In a case like this, unless the actor is going to hurt himself, even if he is sick, he goes on,” Lino said, quoting artistic director Charles Morey.

In general, actors are conscientious about staying healthy despite the demands of performing regularly. Yet Jerry Rapier, producing director for Plan-B Theatre Company, wisecracks that he has become the official stand-in for sassy gay or Japanese male characters. Joking aside, neither of his experiences of replacing an actor has been funny, he added.

In 2006, he directed “Love! Valour! Compassion!” for Wasatch Theatre Company. In the last week of the run, actor Eric Tierney was hospitalized, and the director stood in for his character, with a script in hand. Tierney, 26, died suddenly of liver failure just hours after the play closed.

Earlier this year, Rapier stood in for actor Bryan Kido after his lung collapsed during the second week of the run of “Block 8,” and the actor was hospitalized. Again with script in hand, the director played the role. “We kept hoping he could at least do the final performance, but his other lung collapsed, and he was in and out of the hospital through the summer,” Rapier said. “It has to be something that’s drastic for them not to go on.”

By Sean P. MeansTribune Columnist

Updated: 10/12/2009 02:59:29 PM MDT

If you don’t know these two, some introductions. Bagley, as Tribune readers know, is this newspaper’s editorial cartoonist (and 2008 winner of the prestigious Herblock Prize). Sister Dottie is quickly becoming a one-woman phenomenon, with appearances on radio, the Internet and her one-woman play “The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon — Second Helpings,” playing six nights a week (except Tuesdays) until Oct. 25 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W. 300 South, Salt Lake City.

The Mormon Kama Sutra shows faithful LDS members ways to enjoy bedroom activities with one’s E.C. (Eternal Companion). It identifies body parts, from the male organ (that’s the thing that plays music at the Tabernacle) to the Ohmyheck spot (the female body’s equivalent to “that little bald man inside the door who checks your temple recommend”). And it introduces Mormon-friendly sexual positions with such names as “The Jell-O Pin” and “Pulling the Handcart” — all with handy drawings, by Bagley, of a pudgy Mormon married couple.

The book, whose cover seal boasts it is the “40th anniversary edition,” didn’t exist other than a prop in a play, admits Salt Lake actor Charles Lynn Frost, the man under Sister Dottie’s wig and granny glasses.In “The Passion of …,” written by Frost and Troy Williams, Dottie describes and acts out scenes from her life as an upstanding Mormon woman from Spanish Fork. She also speaks at great length about the two loves in her life: Her husband Donnie and their only child, Donnie Jr., who is gay.

The Mormon Kama Sutra appears in the first scene, when Dottie discovers a copy of the book in her wedding-night bed, given to Donnie by his more world-wise sister. Dottie credits one position, the “Y Mount,” for leading to Donnie Jr.’s conception.

“Everybody kept saying, ‘Is that a real book?,’ ” Frost said over coffee last week. Frost and Williams, sensing a marketing opportunity, started writing one — and Frost approached Bagley about illustrating it.

After trying to write descriptions for Bagley to illustrate, Frost said, “we realized Pat’s got to draw it first.” They came up with 25 or 30 ideas, including a few same-sex options to make the book “more inclusional.” (“We helped Pat with those,” Frost said. “He doesn’t have a gay gene in his body.”)

Between the play and now the book, Sister Dottie (which Frost and Williams first created as a recurring character on community radio station KRCL) has quickly joined the pantheon of Mormon parody — alongside the potshot humor of “Saturday’s Voyeur” and the green Jell-O jokes of many LDS-themed movies.

A key to Dottie’s success, Frost believes, is her warmth. “I didn’t want her to be mean,” Frost said, adding that some LDS spoofs “can be vicious.”

Frost believes Dottie’s love for her son benefits the gay-and-lesbian audience, which doesn’t get many characters to embrace from Hollywood. Even the most acclaimed gay-themed movie in recent years, “Brokeback Mountain,” features characters who “end up either dead in a ditch or lonely in a trailer,” Frost said.

For those who aim to bridge the gap between gays and Mormons, art has a big role to play in turning hearts and minds, Frost said.

“Art is one of the most powerful tools we have,” Frost said, “and comedy and parody is one of the most powerful parts of theater.”

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form, at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture.