Duality of missionary women showcased in ‘The Big Quiet’

The well known “The Book of Mormon” play chronicles the male Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints missionary experience, taking big stages like Broadway by storm for its irony and humor. Yet the female experience of being an LDS missionary has been left untold. Until Pygmilian Productions showed “The Big Quiet” by Morag Shepherd and directed by Tamara Howell at Rose Wagner, that tells the female missionary experience from two wildly contrasting ends of the belief spectrum from the inside the shared apartment of sister Garcia and sister Roberts. 

Sister Roberts (Kenzie), played by Lily Hilden, and Sister Garcia (Mary), played by Juls Marino, confront the duality of being 19 year old women dedicating their lives to the word of God. Like an angel and devil sitting on each shoulder, the companions spent the entirety of the show duking it out, neither willing to budge on their earnest attempts to get the other to see the light. The light of which the audience is to choose for themselves. The play does not hide its ironic humoring of the church and its contemporary absurdities, yet it gives a platform for the audience to see the internal struggle many young women possibly face in their faith journeys.  

Sister Garcia is unabashed in her critical take on the essential duties of a missionary. Although having already converted five people in her short six month stay on the mission, she had already found great moral conflict in her acts, no longer willing to convert people since they often were those in their most vulnerable state, like a woman grieving her dying husband, or an old woman who doesn’t speak English. While Roberts chides her companion for not being more dedicated and dutiful, urging Garcia to turn to scripture, thumping their leather scripture cases, to guide her back to the straight and narrow. 

The play is ironic and funny, Garcia rebutting Roberts’ relentless rule-following with sarcasm. Rules Garcia has no regard for, imbuing a feminist thread of autonomy and freedom of mind in her character. Roberts takes the rules and expectations of fasting so far as to develop severe closeted eating disorders. 

“The Big Quiet” begins to break down the walls of having those tough conversations that Roberts and Garcia cannot evade in their tiny one room apartment. Showing the companions with arctic and equator level differences in their senses of faith. Yet willingly speaking to each other with dignity and respect, care and empathy – with some hints of sarcasm and irony for levity. A representation of conversation our highly partisan country could model after. 

Garcia staunchly refused to fast, especially after seeing her companion wither away before her eyes. She adamantly suggested that Roberts eat, that they have nothing in the fridge (besides packages of various sliced deli meats and cheese. Garcia loved cheese). But when Roberts refused to go to the grocery store with her, Garcia would go alone – against the rules of companions moving together in their pair at all times. She was hungry and she wasn’t going to let some idea of a God starve her. She got fast food, probably because that is all she could afford without income for two years. She gave the rest to Roberts, convincing her that it would make her feel better after seven days in bed from having a “fever.” Roberts scarfed down the food ravenously. 

There is an undercurrent of the risqué in Garcia’s autonomous ventures out of the apartment, or at night when she thinks Roberts is asleep. Roberts confronts her companion about speaking on the phone with someone, late at night, when they “are supposed to be asleep.” A man, it is acknowledged, that Garcia speaks with afterhours, laughing and giggling and swooning over the phone to which Roberts is appalled. One night, Garcia even snuck out without Roberts knowing until returning with her bike in the wee hours of the morning. Roberts is irate, shocked to see such overtly defiant behavior before her eyes, vaguely suggesting that Garcia went to relieve some pent-up sexual tension. 

In the last few scenes of the play, Garcia tells Roberts that she is pregnant, she is late on her period and took a test with undeniable results. A shocking close, a bit hasty, almost like they squeezed in this plot twist at the very last minute. But it brings light to the natural human curiosities of young women coming of age in their sense of self, in their sexuality, in their want to understand unnamed desires. While showing the immediate and immense consequences of uneducated and naive acts of curiosity.

Pregnancy out of wedlock has no place in the church, so perhaps this seemingly haphazard choice is also defiant of what is expected of women, in the church or otherwise. That she can have sex when she wants, that she can have a baby without being married to the father, that she is more than capable of raising this child regardless of being outside of the church’s frame of a healthy family structure. Representative of all the things Garcia stood for throughout the play. 

The girls also come to acknowledge Roberts never had a first kiss. Garcia offered to give her a kiss, to practice, to experience. They kissed on Roberts’ bed, a sensual moment of curiosity and relationship closeness after spending months together. Roberts was freaked out at first, but in a later moment of quiet intimacy, Roberts confessed she wanted to kiss Garcia again. To the surprise of her rebellious spirit, Garcia says no, that it was just practice, it meant nothing to her. 

Garcia having this secret romance with a man on the phone and then eventually sneaking away and getting pregnant, by a man, the choice by the playwright to deny Roberts of her gay curiosity while affording Garcia her opportunity to her hetero curiosities felt like denying queerness as a valid form of romance. It was glimpsed upon and then quickly closeted again. It felt like we are still succumbing to the male ideal, the male desire by writing Garcia’s risqué behavior in the context of male hetero connection, while denying this queer storyline’s potential. It perhaps would have been too predictable for Garcia and Roberts to act further on this queer throughline. Yet it also feels like it was slightly haphazard, not affording the queer line as much space as the traditional hetero relationships are always given. 

The play was a dense 90 minutes, the dialogue always witty and confrontational. The actresses’ sense of comfort and ease with their characters and each other on stage was palpable. It was an intimate showing, imagining the four women collaborating on the preparation for the show felt like an immense example of creativity and vulnerability. Working to perform an experience by women for women. 

Although Garcia and Roberts bickered the entirety of the show, they found moments of common ground and levity, calling each other endearing names that, despite their differences, they are the closest thing they have right now. That their duality, whether seen as the devil or the angel on one’s shoulder, is a powerful look at the inner conflict women and missionaries alike confront. To stay within the bounds of what is expected, or act in ways of self-truth and autonomy? Who is the devil and who is the angel?