The Sunstone Review reviewed what may be the earliest instance of gay Mormon theater, “Emmett: A One-Mormon Show,” written and performed by Emmett Foster, which was staged in 1983 at The Public House in New York City.
Emmett’s mother has been married nine times. His sister tries to hide her smoking habit while she ogles missionaries. And teenage Emmett is learning that he’s gay. Just your average 1970s California Mormon family—and all performed by Emmett Foster.
“This, to me, belongs in testimony meeting,” David Fletcher wrote in his review. “What was ‘Emmett’ but one of those long, humorous travelogue testimonies to his fellow believers, the audience of liberated gays.”
“It reminded me of James Arrington’s ‘Farley Family Reunion,’” Fletcher continued. Indeed, Foster plays his mother, sister, and grandmother hilariously. His sister teasing her hair in the bathroom mirror while strategizing how to land the latest returned missionary. His mother letting her customers’ hair burn in her beauty salon’s hair driers while trading ward gossip on the phone. And his grandmother unwittingly serving up double entendres while her cats destroy her furniture.
Frank Rich, in the July 8, 1983, issue of the New York Times said, “Mr. Foster has a distinctive, if raw, comic talent. . . . equally adept at portraying the various women in his family, all of whose lives are losing battles between Satan’s temptations (cigarettes, men, Coca-Cola) and the devout desire to spend eternity in the celestial kingdom.”
But most interestingly, “Emmett Foster seems to feel no . . . serious resentment toward the events of the past,” Fletcher writes. Indeed, the play is 100-percent comedy, most of it focusing on the mannerisms of the three female characters.
Foster died in early 2023.