"Facing East" - a play by Carol Lynn Pearson

We attended a marvelous production of "Once on this Island" put on by International City Theatre in Long Beach a few years back, so we're on their mailing list. The brochure for their new season arrived a couple days ago, and in browsing the selections, I came across a play called "Facing East" by Carol Lynn Pearson. Here's what the description of the play in the brochure says.

Ruth and Alex McCormick are an upstanding Mormon couple reeling from the suicide or their excommunicated son. Stuck between their faith and their new reality, they try to come to terms with their own inner demons and the love they lost.

Yeah, that's going to be a rollicking good time at the theatre, isn't it? The description was interesting enough to me that I think we're going to try to see it when it's on next June/July.

In searching around for more information, I did come across something even more interesting. The description of the play on ICT's website is similar to what's on the brochure, but it contains a few extra tidbits about the plot of the play.

The Southern California premiere of Pearson's eloquent and multifaceted play about the challenging intersections of faith and family, diversity and love. Ruth and Alex McCormick are an upstanding Mormon couple reeling from the suicide of their excommunicated homosexual son. But when they meet their dead son's partner for the first time, they must come to terms with their own inner demons and the love they lost.

I'm wondering if the difference in the two descriptions was just by happenstance or if there was a concerted effort to leave off information in the brochure that the son was gay or that the parents would have interaction with their son's lover.

I would think those two additional elements would make it even more of a laugh riot.

Not.

I'll have to keep tabs on when tickets go on sale for this show. It's a relatively small theatre, very intimate, so the performance should be incredible.

Here's a website with information about a performance of the play last year, and here's the official website of the author. Her background, history and life experiences are really interesting, so I might be picking up a few of her books as well.