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Kimball Allen is a gay Mormon felon, an unusual combination of adjectives but a true descriptor for this native of Idaho. Nearly two years ago, Allen was sitting in a jail cell and wondered how he had gotten there. Lost in thought, he started to make a journal chronicling his memories to piece his life together; he had more than enough free time given his current predicament. It was during this process that an idea struck Allen, an idea that had never occurred to him before and that seized him so strongly that he couldn’t ignore it. He needed to share his experiences with other people.
It wasn’t long until Allen, who had never before worked as a playwright or an actor, started work on his one-man show Secrets of a Gay Mormon Felon. His performance covers nearly the full span of his life over the course of nineteen vignettes that tell Allen’s striking life stories. They go from his darkly humorous childhood, to his teenage sexual experiences and the religious backlash they caused, and his battles with addiction later in life that culminated in his arrest.
Like a modern day Oscar Wilde with the added wrinkle of his Mormon religion, Allen turned his time in jail into a engaging artistic expression with his one man show filled with moments of pain, sorrow, humor. The performance is littered with moments of touchingly funny naivety from his youth such how, in a failed attempt to prove to his father his manliness by stripping a deer carcass while hunting at the age of 11, he became a lifelong vegetarian.
The show also intimately deals with Allen’s sexual discovery and odd misadventures it brought him in his life from his first homosexual encounter in the boy scouts to his attempt to “pray the gay away” in college. It highlights the drama of his long journey of wrestling with his faith and the dramatic fallout after coming out to his parents.
Truly harrowing moments understate the performance including scenes where Allen describes his emotional spiral as he became addicted to drugs, embezzled money, and remembers his rape at the age of 13. Allen truly shows courage in his honestly to openly act out his life story and the emotions that it causes to swell up in both him and the audience.
Allen’s act has already received critical acclaim and played sold out performances at the festivals in Kansas City and other spots around the country, all of which is high praise for the novice actor and playwright. For him, the play is a form a therapy, a revitalizing event that translates into an emotional charged show that lets the audience experience his catharsis alongside him.
With the upcoming festival season, Allen plans to take the show across the country. He is currently scheduled to perform at the Oahu Fringe Festival in Honolulu, Hawaii this November. The play will performed from November 8th to the 11th and more information can be found on the festivals website at www.oahufringe.com.
The play has been a transformative experience on Allen’s life since his legal trouble. He’s since moved to Seattle and has been bitten by the theatre bug. He plans to continue acting and writing plays even well after he’s done with Secrets of a Gay Mormon Felon. His next play will add and expand on his darkly humorous childhood tales; acting out the wealth of stories he felt he didn’t have time to get to in his first play.
Whatever Allen’s future in theatre holds, Secrets of a Gay Mormon Felon comes at the end of a long journey for him and is a dramatic accomplishment of a high degree. Anyone who wishes to experience it can find more information and future performance dates and locations at www.secretsofagaymormonfelon.com. It’s a raw and honest rollercoaster ride of a show that is rarely offered nowadays. So if you want to reveal in the experience of one man’s personal story, to laugh and cry at tales of triumphant and defeat, or see just what it means to be a gay Mormon felon, then this play is a must. ~ From LA examiner, 2012
Allen leads off the play with the scene of his arrest (in which he plays both himself and the arresting officer, in a bathrobe for both roles), and then spends most of the rest of the play telling us how he arrived there.
He begins with his childhood, raised in an “Orthodox” Mormon family with 10 children in small town Idaho. “My family is very unique,” 10-year old Allen realizes, “The verdict is out on whether I want to be unique with them.”
In 19 short vignettes, he plays out his life, each scene representing formational periods or events that paved the path of his adventurous, tumultuous life, struggling as a boy and later as an adult with rules and assumed life choices. Some rules, such as “boys don’t kiss boys,” lead him to struggle with himself, his family, his community, and his religion.
Allen acts out his life story with humor, grace, and compassion, never blaming anyone else for his misdeeds, but also questioning the authority of a religion that tears people apart with unhealthy rules. The audience is swept up in his story while also discovering parallels in their own lives, places where they have tried to live up to standards and rules that are unrealistic or unhealthy. They cry with him when he sobs in the courtroom, “This is not the life that I chose to live,” and find hope in his final scene, “Absolution.” ~ KC examiner
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