Alexandra Mackenzie Johns Gives a Sneak Peek of Her Upcoming Faith + Works Lecture, “Conversations With Our Lively Dead: Theater, Belonging and Home"
Alexandra Mackenzie Johns, professor of theater and media arts, will deliver the final Faith + Works Lecture of the semester. Johns leads playwriting within Theatre Arts Studies, particularly exploring the reciprocity between landscape and religious performance. Her work focuses on how performance is an expression of faith and identity.
Q: Your lecture is titled “Conversations With Our Lively Dead: Theater, Belonging and Home.” What inspired this topic?
Johns: Theater has always been a search for belonging. We belong to our audiences, our collaborators and our communities, but we also belong to those who came before us. Theater is a haunted art form. When we stage a script that is hundreds or even thousands of years old, we are in conversation with our artistic ancestors. I often think of Marvin Carlson, who wrote about theater being the most haunted of art forms. Every production of Hamlet or Macbeth speaks to every production that came before it. Our absent dead are very present in the rehearsal room.
Q: You recently completed part of an ambitious project walking the Mormon Trail. How does that experience shape your work?
Johns: Last summer, my family and I attempted to walk the entire Mormon Trail. We walked about 360 miles from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters. It was grueling, beautiful and far more difficult than I ever expected. As a theater practitioner, I wanted to understand that epic journey through experience and storytelling. Many people who want to learn about the trail find scattered information online. I wanted to find the human stories behind the miles.
We plan to return to the trail with actors to film short monologues drawn from diaries and letters. The goal is to create a digital companion for families as they drive the trail. These early Saints are not the ancestors of all Latter-day Saints, but they are our spiritual foremothers and forefathers. Walking in their footsteps made me appreciate their sacrifice in a new way.
Q: Another major project you lead focuses on medieval female Christian mystic writers. What drew you to them?
Johns: When I arrived at BYU, I met Dr. Laura Hatch in Comparative Literature. She studies medieval women mystics, and I realized how little I knew about writers like Julian of Norwich, Marjorie Kempe, Christine de Pizan, Hildegard of Bingen and others. As I read their work, I kept imagining them on stage.
With faculty colleagues and students, we created a piece titled “City of Women: Book of Miracles.” We staged it in BYU’s Museum of Art and at the Cathedral of the Madeleine. Much of the script came directly from these women’s writings. Students often said they felt less alone because they felt connected to these women across centuries. That sense of vertical belonging, belonging with the dead who loved Christ, was profound.
Q: You are also developing a verbatim theater piece on the return to faith narrative. What can you share about that process?
Johns: Dr. Jessica Zurcher in Communications published research on why people return to faith after a crisis. She approached me about expanding that work through theater. Verbatim theater uses exact words from interviews, with permission, to build a script. Together with students and faculty across our departments, we have now collected more than 100 interviews.
Many disciplines study why people leave religion. Far fewer examine why people come back. It has been a privilege to hear people describe how they felt God’s love again after a period of rupture. We will hold a staged reading soon, followed by a full production in the new Arts Building.
Q: You often work in site-specific theater. What interests you about that form?
Johns: Site-specific theater means performing outside a traditional stage. The Nauvoo Pageant is site specific. So was staging “City of Women” inside the cathedral. Walking the Mormon Trail was also a kind of site-specific reenactment.
When we perform in a landscape, the landscape becomes the host of the story. The space carries memory. Whether it is a cathedral, a ruin, a forest or a mountain, the environment shapes the meaning of the performance in ways a traditional theater cannot.
Q: Who inspires you in your field?
Johns: I deeply admire Diana Taylor, who writes about the archive and the repertoire. The archive includes artifacts like letters, books and objects. The repertoire includes performance, which vanishes but stays alive in cultural memory. That language resonates with my work. As Latter-day Saints, we need our archives, but we also need performance to help us remember, to embody and to feel.
Q: What do you hope audiences gain from your lecture?
Johns: I hope the audience can see the connection between their faith and their work. For me, that means offering a glimpse into how my faith and my creative and theatrical work intersect. Ultimately, I hope they feel inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is a godly thing to pursue our passions and interests, whether intellectual or creative, with our whole hearts. I have had the privilege, opportunity and, at times, a bit of idiocy in doing that, and as I have pursued the question of “How do we tell our stories?,” my soul has expanded through learning the sacred stories of Latter-day Saints and the histories of our people.
Remembering is a sacred act. I hope that as people attend the lecture, they come to better understand theater’s power to expand our memory, as the Book of Mormon describes, and that through enlarged memory, their faith in Jesus Christ can grow. I also hope the Spirit will show them how they can pursue their own creative passions to build Zion more fully. All disciplines matter in that work, but I believe the arts have a particularly profound role to play in building Zion.