Local theater preview: Playwright Debora Threedy's Mountain Meadows 

• Robert Holman

Writing about a historical event—even an innocuous historical event—offers plenty of challenges. For playwright Debora Threedy, taking on the tragic, controversial "Mountain Meadows Massacre" offered a chance to think not just about a historical event itself, but how people process it years after the fact.

Threedy's world-premiere play Mountain Meadows takes its title and its launch point from the September 1857 attack on an emigrant wagon train in Utah by Mormon settlers, and the subsequent attempts to blame the murder on Native Americans and generally cover it up. Its focus, however, is not on portraying those events themselves, but instead on two women dealing with the aftermath: Nita, inspired by historian Juanita Brooks, who's researching the event; and Miranda, a survivor of the attack looking into her family's involvement.

Though Threedy spent 30 years as a professor of law at the University of Utah, she's not a Utah native, and says she doesn't recall specifically when she first became aware of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But upon retiring in 2017 and moving to Southern Utah near St. George, she discovered that the site was just 10 miles from her house. That was also a time when another writing project she had on her table just wasn't coming to fruition.

"That summer, I had a lot of personal loss," she says. "I lost my mother and younger brother in the space of three weeks. I was working on a children's play at the time, a happy, bouncing thing, and I just couldn't write it. My head wasn't in that space. So I jumped headfirst into [Mountain Meadows]."

In terms of crafting her narrative, however, Threedy was ultimately more interested in writing about the impact of the attack, rather than attempting to recreate the event itself. "In some ways, the event itself was so horrific that it kind of defies understanding," she says. "Certainly for the theater, you'd have to go all Greek, with the death happening off-stage. As I got more into the story, the interesting parts to me all required reflection—the way that everybody who was involved tried to cover it up, and it wouldn't be covered up. On a personal level, it came to haunt the individuals involved; on a societal level, it came back to haunt the church. It was that haunting aspect that really interested me."

Creating a work of theater inspired by history ultimately means being responsible both to the facts of history, and to the job of making a compelling drama for an audience. For Threedy, navigating the space between those two responsibilities is part of what makes this kind of story an appealing artistic challenge.

"I've sort of evolved, over time, my personal code of ethics about that," she says. "I won't portray as real something I know is inaccurate; I won't lie or fabricate about things that are known. But about any historical person or event, there's a ton we don't know. I feel fine about filling in the holes for the things we don't know. I feel fine about fabricating conversations when we know two people talked, but we don't know what they talked about. In a way, it's kind of like the challenge I think faces people who write sonnets, or other literature that has rules—the challenge of creating powerful drama within the constraints of what we know to be a fact."

While the timeline for Mountain Meadows' creation pre-dates some of the more volatile present-day controversies surrounding teaching uncomfortable historical subjects like racism in America, Threedy realizes that the topic now has perhaps even more significance. "I don't think that was in my conscious mind when I started writing the story," she says, "but as events have transpired, and I immersed myself in the story, that attempt to whitewash history, in one way or another, is absolutely the same. It happens all the time."

That idea is also connected with how hard it is for people psychologically to acknowledge that they might be part of a lineage that caused harm, even if they personally did not cause the harm. She notes that among the three quotes that she included on the title page for the play, one that originally applied to descendants of Nazis feels relevant to the Mountain Meadows story, and perhaps more generally to others who struggle with what their ancestors might have done: "The deeds of our forebears haunt us always; we learn nothing by turning away from their misdeeds. They are and are not us, and that is the puzzle."

"That really resonated with the story I'm trying to tell," Threedy says, "about all of these people trying to grapple 100 years later with figuring it out. My answer to that question is, we're not responsible for what happened in the past, but we are responsible for how we talk about what happened in the past. That's bringing the responsibility into the present."