Liberty Jail Play by Orson Scott Card Available for
Free
When
the Prophet Joseph Smith was locked up in the jail at Liberty,
Missouri, in 1837-38, he was under a sentence of death.
The Saints — including his family — were refugees fleeing
murderous mobs, many of his closest friends and most trusted
Church officials had betrayed him, and it looked impossible
for the prophecies concerning the building of a temple and
the building of Zion now seemed impossible of fulfillment.
Yet out of that time of despair
there emerged some of the most powerful revelations of this
dispensation.
Five others were locked up
with Brother Joseph: his two counselors in the first
presidency (Sidney Rigdon and Hyrum Smith, his older brother);
Lyman Wight, a firebrand who had been a leader of some of
the Danite raiders; Alexander MacRae, a young man whose
imprisonment is almost inexplicable; and a non-Mormon, Caleb
Baldwin.
These six very different men
were imprisoned in a two-story structure with no windows,
an unhealthy, too-cold or too-hot and always too-dark environment.
And thirty years ago, Mormon
author Orson Scott Card decided that there needed to be
a play set in that jail. The result was Liberty Jail,”
which began life as a musical drama, but which has recently
been revised without the music.
Orson Scott Card, a professor
of writing and literature at Southern Virginia University,
is best known for his fiction, but his roots are deepest
as a playwright. His plays, including Stone
Tables; Father, Mother, Mother, and Mom; The
Apostate; and Fresh Courage Take, were popular
with Utah audiences in the 1970s.
In celebration of Joseph Smith's
bicentennial, Card is making the play available at his Nauvoo.com
(http://www.nauvoo.com)
website.
If you want, you can simply
read it — though, as Card points out, "Play scripts
aren't art, they're a PLAN for a work of art."
That's why Card is also making the play available for Church
units or other groups of members to put on the play royalty-free during
2006 — as long as the audience is not charged for admission.
The complete rules for producing
the play are available for reading or download at the Nauvoo.com
website (http://www.nauvoo.com/).
