The Plays of Thomas F. Rogers: Crises of Faith

Thomas F. Rogers -- A former director of the BYU Honors Program, Thomas F. Rogers is professor emeritus of Russian language and literature at Brigham Young University and the author of more than a score of plays, many on Mormon subjects. Four of these have been published in God’s Fools (Signature Books, 1983), which also received the Association of Mormon Letters Drama Prize that same year: HUEBENER (the first literary treatment of its subject), FIRE IN THE BONES (again, the first literary treatment of its subject, the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre), GOD’S FOOLS (or JOURNEY TO GOLGOTHA) and REUNION. Other titles include: The SECOND PRIEST, The ANOINTED (an Old Testament narrative with music by C. Michael Perry) and The SEAGULL (translated and adapted from the Chekov play). In 1992, GENTLE BARBARIAN, FRERE LAWRENCE and CHARADES were published in a second anthology entitled ’Huebener’ and Other Plays by Thomas F. Rogers. Rogers has also penned stage adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novels CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE IDIOT, an opera libretto based on Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER, a translation of Georg Buechner’s WOYCZEK (produced at BYU), and scripts based on novels by local authors, Phillip Flammer and Ben Parkinson. The first of these received a BYU production, directed by Tad Danielewski, in which Rogers played the role of Marmeladov. Cited by Eugene England as ＂undoubtedly the father of modern Mormon drama,＂ Rogers received the Mormon Arts Festival’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1998 and in 2002 a Lifetime Service Award from the Association of Mormon Letters. His published stories have appeared in volume 2, no. 2 of Sunstone, the Summer 1991 and Winter 2001 issues of Dialogue (receiving an annual Dialogue fiction award) and in the collections Christmas for the World (SLC: Aspen Books, 1991) and The Gifts of Christmas (SLC: Deseret Book Co., 1999). Rogers studied at the Yale School of Drama and holds degrees from the University of Utah, Yale, and Georgetown. He has also studied theatre in Poland and Russian at Moscow State University and taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Utah. He and his wife Merriam are the parents of seven children, thirty-eight grandchildren and, so far, three great grandchildren. They reside in Bountiful, Utah.