I’m going to be shutting down my blog at www.mormonboy.com/blog in the near future. I may bring it back to discuss all things specifically gay and Mormon. But for now, THE MORMON BOY BLOG has served its purpose. It has documented the highs and lows and many interesting comments from friends and “enemies” over the last three years or so. It’s like a journal or scrapbook. And I love a good scrapbook! I grew up Mormon!

It takes a lot of work to do a blog, as any blogger knows. And I believe as a professional writer I have a choice sometimes: work on making my blog a work of art (which many bloggers do so much better than me!) OR work on the art–essays, artitcles, books, and plays meant for publishing. So many times I have gone down the blogging rabbit hole when I have had publishing or opening night deadlines to attend to! And applications to finish. And this blog server doesn’t have spell check.
Do you know how much time it takes to double check spelling and grammar?! And as you can see, I can’t seem to get the spacing right either. But hey, it’s about content, not editing, right? I have come to the conclusion that a blog needs to support my art, not BE my art. (Don’t judge a blog by its cover!)

I created a new blog last year that I will be using to help let you know where I am and what I’m doing. But to know who I am and what I’m really thinking or feeling, please see or read my professional work. Sometimes a blog is looked to as the only word on a subject when in reality ”The Play’s the Thing!” THE MORMON BOY TRILOGY includes: Confessions of a Mormon Boy, Missionary Position, and Who’s Your Daddy? And there will be others but not always with “Mormon” in the title!

“I may not be a Latter-day Saint, but something about me will always be Mormon.”

Keep Smiling!

Steven Fales

Maybe Brigham Young would have liked Confessions of a Mormon Boy . . .

MB Productions presents the U.K. premiere of the off-Broadway hit

CONFESSIONS OF A MORMON BOY
Written and performed by Steven Fales
Directed by Tony Award Winner Jack Hofsiss (The Elephant Man)

EDINBURGH FRINGE FESTIVAL
Aug 5 – 28 @ 21.00; Tickets £10
Remarkable Arts, Hill Street Theatre, Venue 41
19 HILL STREET, Edingurgh, Scotland
0131 226 6522
Remarkable-Arts.com

Confessions of a Mormon Boy is Steven Fales’ award-winning, humorous and inspiring solo play recounting his epic journey from “perfect” Mormon boy in Utah to high-priced call boy in New York City. This provocative true story takes the audience through his Mormon mission to Portugal, excommunication, divorce, prostitution and crystal meth addiction as he struggles to reclaim himself, his two children and his ‘Donny Osmond smile’. Confessions of a Mormon Boy was a hit off Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse. Part One in The Mormon Boy Trilogy.

Confessions of a Mormon Boy received the Oscar Wilde Award Nomination for Outstanding New Writing in the Theatre at the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival 2008, a New York Outer Critics Circle Award Nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance 2006 and an Overall Excellence Award at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival. The book of the play, Confessions of a Mormon Boy was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Steven Fales is a classically trained actor with a BFA from Brigham Young University and an MFA in acting from the University of Connecticut. He turned to writing and stand-up when his perfect Mormon world fell apart. Born in Provo, Utah and raised in Las Vegas. Credits include Caesar’s Palace and leading roles at the Utah Shakespearean Festival, Pioneer Theatre Company, Coconut Grove Playhouse, Connecticut Repertory Theatre, Sundance Theatre and has worked in film and television. He is currently touring his cabaret show Mormon American Princess and The Mormon Boy Trilogy which includes Missionary Position and Who’s Your Daddy? www.mormonboy.com

Fales says ‘I wrote the play so that my two young children would one day be able to understand their father. I kept thinking that if I were to die, there wasn’t anyone I could fully trust to tell my kids who their ‘wicked gay’ dad really was and how much I loved them.” Additionally, Confessions of a Mormon Boy was written to help end spiritual violence against gays and lesbians in churches, mosques, and synagogues.

“Compelling confessional theatre.” NEW YORK TIMES
“As moving as it is funny.” NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
“An uncommonly powerful, gripping and very moving piece of theatre.” CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“Feels like a sacred gift” BOSTON GLOBE
“Brilliantly acted and beautifully written” IRISH DAILY MAIL
“The best of the solo genre.” LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Sexy and harrowing. A story that must be told.” SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

For press and interviews in U.K. please contact: Dani Rae, dani@remarkable-arts.com
4/12 Old Tolbooth Wynd, Edinburgh EH88EQ SCOTLAND, 07989366830 or 07770852021
U.S. press contact: Lori Fales, mormonboyprod@aol.com or (646) 498-2894

Listings CONFESSIONS OF A MORMON BOY
Written and performed by Steven Fales; Directed by Jack Hofsiss
After excommunication, divorce, prostitution and drugs, a sixth-generation Utah Mormon, reclaims his kids and ‘Donny Osmond’ smile. Told with humour, song, and THE BOOK OF MORMON. A true story.
5 July to 28 August 2011
Preview Aug 5–7 21.00, 8-9, 11-16, 18-23, 25-29 (90 minutes)
Tickets £10 Ticket Sales 0131 226 6522
Hill Street Theatre, 19 Hill Street, (Venue 41) Edinburgh, Scotland
www.remarkable-arts.com

It was written by my good friend Al Watt from Los Angeles. He teaches classes on screenwriting and all kinds of creative writing at the LA Writers Lab and his new book The 90-Day Novel is the number one book on writing at Amazon.com. I could write much more about his talent and his work and his equally talented wife, Mary-Beth Manning who’s superb solo show Mother just made it into the New York International Fringe Festival! But here’s what he just said about my new solo show WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

“Steven Fales is funny, moving, bitchy, wise, and brutally honest. Who’s Your Daddy might even make you wish he was yours.” Al Watt, Diamond Dogs and The 90-Day Novel

Thanks for this endorsement, Al. You are the best! I can’t wait to bring the show to Los Angeles!

Steven Fales strips his life bare in “Confessions of a Mormon Boy.” (photo courtesy of Wanzie Presents) 

Playwright-actor Steven Fales is excitedly sharing a deep thought about dreams and hopes and inner peace and choices when he cuts himself off midsentence.

“Whoa, I’m getting way out there,” he says with a chuckle.

It’s easy to get “way out there” when you’ve had a life like Fales’.

A gay Mormon living in Salt Lake City, he married and had two children. He turned to “reparative therapy” to change his sexual orientation, but when that didn’t work, he was excommunicated from the church. He divorced his wife, worked as a male escort to pay his child support, tumbled into depression and turned to drugs.

His children helped him find the strength to snap out of his downward spiral.

“I saw that my dreams, my real dreams, my relationship with my children, were slipping away,” he says.

Fales turned his story, which played out from 2000 to 2002, into “Confessions of a Mormon Boy,” a one-man show he’ll perform at the Parliament House’s Footlight Theatre this weekend.

“Confessions” has spawned a bit of an empire: He has written two sequels — he refers to them as his “Mormon Boy trilogy” — and the show has successfully run off-Broadway. He’s taking it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland this summer and is working on an off-Broadway return with the complete trilogy.

Steven Fales wrote and stars in “Confessions of a Mormon Boy,” the first of three autobiographical shows. (photo courtesy of Wanzie Presents) 

“I never thought I’d be a solo performing artist, but it’s paid off in a lot of ways,” says Fales, 41.

Though his life has been full of surprises, being gay was not one of them. Before he married Emily Pearson, now his ex-wife, he told her he was gay.

“Anyone who gets married does it for more reasons than sex,” he says. “We did the best we could.”

It was not the typical Mormon family: Emily’s father was also gay and had died of AIDS. Emily’s mother, Carol Lynn Wright Pearson, wrote “Goodbye, I Love You,” a memoir about her experience as wife of a gay man and the friendship they developed after their divorce.

“My ex-wife has seen the play; my ex-mother-in-law has seen it. They are major characters,” Fales says.

When he struggled with his marriage, Fales turned to therapy to become straight: “At first I thought it was the answer. They gave a lot of false hope.”

When it failed, he confessed all to the church: “I turned myself in like a good Mormon boy.”

The subsequent excommunication sent him “reeling,” he says: “I couldn’t believe these strangers were going to judge me as a Mormon, as a human, making everything I had done as a Mormon null and void.”

He left Salt Lake City for New York. It didn’t take long to fall into prostitution: “When you are that angry and hurting and confused and broke … you come to the big city and get caught up.”

In 2003, he wrote the play. A reviewer for The New York Times in 2006 called “Confessions” a “fairly conventional, although admittedly compelling, piece of confessional theater,” saying the show’s many humorous moments reveal “a vaudeville comedian’s dependence on shtick.”

Fales was criticized by the Times for keeping his emotions under tight control; he says as time passes from the events he’s reliving, he’s able to open up even more.

“It was almost freakish to write it so soon, but I’m glad I did,” he says. “Now, with hindsight, I’m able as an actor to layer it with a lot more depth.”

Ultimately, Fales says, he didn’t write the play for critics or a mass audience. He had only his children in mind.

“I didn’t want my children to know my story through the filters of anyone but me,” he says. “I wrote it because I’m a dad.”

He had one of the off-Broadway performances recorded to give them, and he adapted the script into a book, sold on Amazon.com

Now 14 and nearly 16, his son and daughter still haven’t seen it.

“I think they’re getting ready,” he says. “Maybe they’ll read the book.”

He hopes among the lessons his children learn from his story is one of perseverance.

“Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better,” he says, “but it does get better.”

I close my eyes and start focusing on my breathing. In and out. In and out. No peeking! I hate this. But I just go with it! In my mind’s eye, I rise up over myself and the lawn, over Utah, over New York, and across the Atlantic to my Aegean Pre-Existence. (Mom’s ducks and geese quack and honk but I hold my course.) I find my Mediterranean way to the Isle of Zakynthos, my Greek great-grandfather’s ancestral home. The sea is calm and aqua blue. And on the sand, Apollo’s Ionian sun kisses my olive skin and turns it a deep, dark native brown.

I meditate my way inland, up the rocky cliffs to an olive vineyard with an old stone cottage housing an olive press used to make extra virgin olive oil — for the anointing and healing of the sick. There is a red door with paint chipping off. And the sign on the door reads, “Know Thyself.” But something’s not right as I reach for the latch. It’s too soon. I’m not ready. I can’t. Thank goodness the latch is stuck.

Honk. Quack. I’m out. Quack. Honk. I open my eyes. Damn! Honk. Quack. Progress not perfection.

To see what is behind that door later in the play, which you won’t believe can happen, see Who’s Your Daddy? Remember that with Greece, anything is possible!