Artistic Director Jerry Rapier: 20 Years of ‘FACING EAST’

Bruce Bastian, Jerry Rapier, and Carol Lynn Pearson on opening night of the off-Broadway leg of the world premiere of FACING EAST (May 2007, Atlantic Stage 2, New York City)

BY JERRY RAPIER

FACING EAST received its world premiere at Plan-B Theatre (Salt Lake City, November 2006 & April 2007; off-Broadway at Atlantic Stage 2 in New York, May-June 2007; and at Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco, August 2007). Directed by Jerry Rapier, it featured Charles Lynn Frost as Alex, Jayne Luke as Ruth, and Jay Perry as Marcus. The production was designed by Cheryl Ann Cluff (sound), Greg Ragland (graphics), Jerry Rapier (costumes), Randy Rasmussen (scenic), Victor Saldivar (wigs), and Cory Thorell (lighting), with Ross Thorell as crew Jennifer Freed as stage manager. It's since been produced all over the country and in Mexico. Now we're bringing it home.

The following also appears in the September 2026 issue of QSaltLake Magazine.

In August of 2005, playwright Carol Lynn ­Pearson invited 10 people, including me and her dear friend, philanthropist Bruce Bastian, to a private reading of the very first, very raw draft of her new play, FACING EAST.

She sat in the middle of a borrowed living room in downtown Salt Lake City and read all three roles: Ruth and Alex McCormick, the quintessential Mormon power couple whose gay son has committed suicide, and Marcus, their son’s partner whom they meet for the first time, graveside.

When it was over, we collectively couldn’t breathe.

No one wanted to disturb the silence.

It was sacred.

Once I caught my breath, I knew that Plan-B Theatre had to produce the play. So Carol Lynn and I worked on the script over the next few months. The next step was a reading as part of Utah Pride Center’s Winter Pride in January of 2006, this time with a full cast. The moment that reading began, I knew that the breathless, sacred silence we had experienced the previous August wasn’t a fluke: we were creating the rare piece of truly transformational theatre.

By 2006, Bruce’s foundation had been supporting Plan-B for five years. This project was different. He personally, fully funded the world premiere of FACING EAST that November. And that was just the beginning. Carol Lynn and I were sitting next to each other during the final preview. Bruce was sitting directly behind us. When the performance ended, he leaned forward between us and said, ‘What’s next?’ For a moment, we weren’t sure what he meant: next was opening the show! But he was a step ahead of us.

He invited us to lunch at his home the next day to discuss the play’s future. On the drive there, Carol Lynn and I decided to ask for the moon. So, over lunch, I said, “We should take it to New York.” And he said, “Okay.” And Carol Lynn said, “And San Francisco too.” And Bruce said, “Okay.” Before FACING EAST officially opened that night, we were blessed to know that it was the first leg of a coast-to-coast adventure. What we didn’t know was how life-changing that adventure would be. We became the first, and remain the only, Utah theatre company to transfer an intact production off-Broadway.

That year we spent with FACING EAST was, and remains, the stuff of dreams.

Carol Lynn recalled to The Salt Lake Tribune, “I met Bruce in 1986 when my book Goodbye, I Love You (the story of my life with my gay husband and his death from AIDS) was published [by Random House]. This tall, sad-looking man hesitantly approached me after a book signing at Deseret Book in Orem, and asked if he could fly to California (where I had relocated) to visit with me. He was one of the large number of desperate gay men who agonized over their dilemma as a Mormon man with a wife and children in a church they knew that condemned them. Many saw something unheard of in me and my story. Embrace a gay person? Tell them they’re not evil? Radical thought! This particular man happened to be highly influential and wealthy. He was an inventor and co-founder of WordPerfect. He flew in. He brought me a computer! We talked and talked, and he has told me many times since those conversations changed his life. Bruce used his money to bless causes and individuals that aligned with his vision.

As Bruce and I sat together on the front row of Plan-B Theatre at opening night of FACING EAST, he whispered to me, ‘This is the best money I have ever spent.’”

Attending FACING EAST was like attending church. Not counting-minutes-until-I-can-get-out-of-these-clothes church, but I-don’t-want-to-disturb-this-unexpected-catharsis church. Families would gather in the lobby after the show and hold each other, even pray together.

Over the last 20 years, audiences at 18 other theatres across the country and in Mexico — from church basements to small theatres like us at Plan-B to LORT [professional] theatres like Pioneer Theatre Company — have shared in the ferocity, compassion, love, honesty, and grace that is FACING EAST.

And now, in 2026, we’re bringing it home.

Carol Lynn and I had planned to honor the memories of Bruce Bastian, who passed away in 2024, and Charles Lynn Frost, the original Alex, who passed away in 2021, with this 20th anniversary revival. Little did we know that it would also proffer us the great privilege of also honoring hers.

2026 SUNSTONE SYMPOSIUM

Barbara Jones Brown, director of Signature Books, invited me to participate in a panel on July 31, 2026, celebrating two milestones of Carol Lynn Pearson’s work at the Sunstone Symposium. Connell O’Donovan was there to discuss the 40th anniversary of Goodbye, I Love You, and I was there to discuss the 20th anniversary of FACING EAST. Barbara led the panel as the publisher of Carol Lynn’s diaries.

Carol Lynn had told me she couldn’t travel anymore, so she wouldn’t be able to attend our revival, and wasn’t sure she could do much press. That’s when I knew her time was truly short. Because if there’s anything Carol Lynn was always up for as Mormondom’s preeminent LGBTQ+ advocate, it was talking to the press.

She’d told Barbara the same regarding participating in our panel discussion and promoting her diaries. So, Barbara traveled to Carol Lynn’s home in the Bay Area and recorded her reading passages from her diaries.

And then, on July 29, we got the news that Carol Lynn had lost her battle with uterine cancer and had passed away.

It was surreal to be speaking about her work less than 48 hours after she’d passed. She was suddenly so far away. But she was also there with us, thanks to Barbara’s recordings. I invited actor Jay Perry to attend. He created the role of Marcus in the world premiere of FACING EAST 20 years ago and was now preparing to play Alex in the revival. Barbara met him right before the session began and asked if he would share a few thoughts about his experience with the play.

When the time came, Barbara signaled, and Jay testified.

FACING EAST was the seminal experience of my professional, personal, and spiritual life. And continues to be that today.

I met with my counselor my junior year of high school, and she asked, ‘What’s important to you? What’s meaningful? And how do you want to spend your life?’ And I didn’t know. But I knew that I wanted to try to do something that would be helpful. I wanted to be useful. I had been bitten by the theatre bug, but I also thought about maybe psychology or possibly even the priesthood. Senior year, closing night of my big high school musical, I looked up into the lights and thought, ‘This is how I’m going to do that thing I want to do: to be useful.’

When I read FACING EAST, I was immediately struck by the intensity of it. In that first reading in front of an audience [at Winter Pride], I had a really strong feeling that this was a play that wasn’t just a play.

I had the rare opportunity that many actors never get, to be able to do something far beyond their own ambitions as an actor. Something that was useful. Truly. That really, really helped people. At the end of that experience, I remember having a conversation with my mother: ‘If I never get to do anything else on a stage again, I got to do that.’”

Carol Lynn wrote in her journal (Volume 3) that “Jay Perry was stunning as Marcus.”

PREPARING FOR THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY REVIVAL

I’ve been reading and re-reading my text messages and emails with Carol Lynn since her passing. There were lots of loving notes about how cute my son Oscar was at various ages. And then this one, from last December:

“Finding a few things in my diary about the development of Facing East.

June 1, 1978

On Thursday my brother Warren and I drove to Provo and visited the cemetery. I had not realized that all of the graves there are laid out so the dead are facing east, in order that on resurrection morning, when the trumpets sound in the east, they can all arise and be facing the correct way. Wow. Isn’t it great to have the Only True Information so we don’t just lie there backwards and confused on resurrection morning?

August 14, 2004

First, the playwriting workshop I took this weekend in San Francisco. Sponsored by Golden Thread Productions. Octavio Solis, about whom I read good things on the web, taught/facilitated. Small group. Twelve around a table. Minds stretching and exploding. I might not have gone had I known how on the spot/intense the experience would be.  

I’m a traditional writer, plan things, think things, slowly, slowly develop things. Slam, smash, we had to go with the assignment instantly, see a character, interview her/him, place them in a scene, add another character, hear dialogue.

An instruction:

Write a few lines about a story you are thinking of writing.” I am so involved with my current story that this was hard. But I brought up one I’d thought of off and on — something about a man who rejects his gay son and influences him toward suicide, which has happened before the play opens. The character who showed up, to my surprise, was an old woman. The grandmother, before the funeral. I’m assigned to ask her questions.

Who hurt you the most?

”My husband.”

Why?

”He only loved me on Sunday morning, at church. When he took off his church clothes, he never smiled at me.”

Octavio loved that line, ‘Only loved me on Sunday morning! — you can’t make that up — you have to receive it from some special place!’ He said the first scene I wrote would be a terrific first scene to a play — directly after the funeral.

The grandmother would become Andrew’s mother Ruth. And the man and husband would be combined into one character: Andrew’s father Alex.

Carol Lynn nudged me with an email in early 2016: ‘How about a 10th anniversary production?’ But it felt too soon. In 2021, we texted about a 15th anniversary production, but everything was uncertain because of the pandemic. And then in June 2024, a week after we received news of Bruce’s passing, she emailed me that she was doing better after a prolonged illness and included a review of a production that was running in Mexico and said: “Hey — do a revival sometime, Jerry. Our issues are not yet at the finish line in Utah.” I responded with, “Maybe for the 20th anniversary…”

And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Over the next year, I had a lightbulb moment: Jay Perry could now play Alex! And it would be the perfect opportunity for us to honor the memories of Bruce and Charles Lynn Frost. When I called Carol Lynn in January of this year to tell her we were moving ahead with a 20th anniversary revival, she was thrilled. Although she was recovering from another prolonged illness, she rewrote two lines to ensure that the play could be set in 2026.

IMPORTANCE TODAY

In “The Life of Reason,” Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And we are in the midst of that repetition. In the first seven months of 2026, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in 46 state legislatures nationwide, an attempt to strip away the civil protections that accompany marriage equality, and even marriage equality itself. Most have been defeated, but the act of bringing them forward does its own damage. Truth be told, 2026 feels an awful lot like 2006, when FACING EAST received its world premiere at Plan-B Theatre.

FACING EAST is as prescient now as it was 20 years ago, maybe even more so. It remains a template for listening and leading with love at a time when both are at risk. It challenges presuppositions of what mothers and fathers are capable of. And it personifies Carol Lynn’s impact on LDS culture as a touchstone (and sometimes lifeline) for those who are gay and LDS, and their families.

Developing and directing FACING EAST has been the single greatest honor of my 30-year career in the theatre. It changed me, challenged me, inspired me, and healed me, as it did for countless others.

Revisiting it is an honor and a blessing.

Thank you, Carol Lynn.

Jerry Rapier has been artistic director of Plan-B Theatre since 2000. He directs Plan-B Theatre’s 20th anniversary revival of FACING EAST, running Oct. 22–Nov. 8 in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. Tickets and details at planbtheatre.org/facingeast – several performances are already sold out. The ­Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson, Volumes 1–4 and a new edition of FACING EAST will be available for purchase at all performances.

FACING EAST PRODUCTION HISTORY

• Plan-B Theatre, Salt Lake City, UT, October/November 2026

• Lakeside Little Theatre, San Antonio, Tlayacapan, Mexico, June 2024 & January 2025

• Old Grantsville Church Foundation, Grantsville, UT, June 2024

• Breaking Boundaries Productions, Idaho Falls, ID, December 2022

• All Under One Roof, Pocatello, ID, June 2017

• Utah/Idaho Performing Arts Company, Draper, UT, November 2016

• Trinity Performing Artist Series, Toledo, OH, October 2012

• Actors Repertory Theatre of Idaho, Idaho Falls, ID, December 2011

• The Workshop Theater, Richmond, VA, February 2011

• Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, June/July 2010

• Triangle Players Acts of Faith Festival, Richmond, VA, February/March 2010

• International City Theatre, Long Beach, CA, June/July 2009

• Diversionary Theatre, San Diego, CA, March/April 2009

• Southern Utah University Arts Administration Program, Cedar City, UT, November 2008

• Stillspeaking Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, July/August 2008

• Buffalo United Artists,Buffalo, NY, April 2008

• Philadelphia Gay & Lesbian Theatre Festival, Philadelphia, PA, June 2008

• Spotlighters Theatre, Baltimore, MD, June 2008

• The Space Between Theatre, St. George, UT, June 2008

• Plan-B Theatre @ Theatre Rhinoceros, San Francisco, CA, August 2007

• Plan-B Theatre @ Atlantic Stage 2, off-Broadway, New York, NY, May/June 2007

• Plan-B Theatre, Salt Lake City, UT, November 2006 & April/May 2007

TICKETS

the 20th anniversary revival of FACING EAST by Carol Lynn Pearson runs October 22-November 8 in the Studio Theatre at The Rose. Please click here for details and tickets!