‘Honestly, I think I’ve experienced more bigotry because of my Mormon background than because I’m gay,” says Nathan Cuckow after a few moments of chewing on the question, seeming almost a bit surprised in his own answer. “I mean, partly that’s because of the life I lead, and partly because I’ve never really made a big deal about my own sexuality, but it’s amazing to see people’s faces when you tell them you come from a Mormon family.”

Cuckow isn’t being glib, either. Unlike certain religious groups, who like to see persecution everywhere despite being the dominant cultural force in their respective areas of the world for hundreds of years now, the Mormons have a fairly extensive history of being kept down, from their founding in the early 1800s, when the US government actually declared war on them, to the modern day, when specious accusations of culthood and questionable marriage practices continue to dog them.
 
That said, he’s also illustrating one of the core ideas behind his newest play, 3 Different Heavens: that bigotry can take many forms, and the problem with it isn’t so much who you’re being bigoted against as it is that you’re doing it at all.

The play tells the story of two mothers, Susan (Coralie Cairns), a boisterous, borderline alcoholic who joins her son at gay bars to troll for one-night stands, and Joyce (Blair Wensley), a psychologically delicate, decidedly reserved smalltown Mormon. The mismatched pair are brought together when their sons, David and Jonathan (also played by Wensley and Cairns, respectively), die in a car crash. As if their backgrounds weren’t trouble enough for any potential understanding, it’s also revealed that Jonathan was hiding the true nature of his relationship with David from his mother, for fear that she wouldn’t approve, and Susan has to break the news to her.
 
 Despite how it would first appear, though, it’s liberal Susan who seems to carry more prejudices and preconceived notions than Joyce, in particular concerning Joyce’s deep religious beliefs. As Cuckow explains, he comes across that kind of bigotry frequently—particularly in the theatrical community, a supposedly open, understanding place. 
 
“There really is a kind of liberal bigotry, especially in theatre, which is so leftist,” Cuckow says, citing a sort of preaching-to-the-choir mentality that doesn’t particularly encourage disparate worldviews. “I mean, those are my politics, so I don’t have a big problem with that, but in some ways these left-leaning people can be just as intolerant, just as willing to fall back into stereotypes and prejudice as some of the people they’re speaking out against.”
 
Cuckow isn’t merely pointing fingers in this regard, either: he freely admits that he spent many years indulging a similar kind of intolerance, unwilling to accept people who’s opinions differed from his own. 
 
“My biggest conflict with my family was when I stopped going to church—it took them a while to accept me for who I was after that, though ironically enough once they did I was the one who became the bigot, who wouldn’t accept their beliefs,” he says, explaining that things got much better once he became more open and accepted the differences between them, as they had for him. “That’s what we’ve needed to do to maintain a relationship, and that’s part of what I’m getting at [in 3 Different Heavens]: there has to be some understanding, some compromise, if you’re going to maintain a relationship; you ‘agree to disagree,’ and get on with your life, because a lot of the time it’s just not worth it to keep up these separations.”
 
That’s something that Cuckow understands better than most. As both an openly gay man and someone with a Mormon background—Cuckow purposely tried to deal with both in Heavens, calling it his “most personal play [he’s] ever written, although it’s not autobiographical in any way”—he knows all too well just how divisive life choices can be. 
 
“We have a tendency to divide ourselves along so many different lines: politics, religion, all these things separate us—which is kind of ironic, actually, because so many of them start off being about humanism and get kind of twisted and turned around—but we have to realize that these things are man-made, are self-created,” he explains. “We all start off as newborns with the potential for everything, and we just keep putting stuff on ourselves that separates us. I think we’d be much, much better off if we adopted a more all-encompassing perspective, and avoided these different kinds of labels entirely.” 

That humanistic philosophy has come up repeatedly in Cuckow’s work, from his breakthrough play, the one-man STANDup HOMO, through his two collaborations with Chris Craddock, 3...2...1 and Bash’d (the latter of which, it was just announced, will be getting a full Off-Broadway production early this summer, a prospect that had Cuckow excited and humbled when we talked). One common thread through all of them is about coming to accept who you are, one of the first steps, Cuckow says, to understanding other people.
 
“Everyone has some kind of pressure put on them to be a certain way, whether it’s from society, or their family or religion—all those things are putting pressure on people trying to make choices,” explains Cuckow. “I think you’ve to try to ignore those pressures and figure out what you want to be, make your own choices.” 
 
That said, most of those choices up to this point are related in some way around coming out of the closet, and Jonathan’s struggles to tell his mother about his homosexuality also proves central to 3 Different Heavens. For Cuckow, though, homosexuality isn’t so much a topic as it is an approach, the most natural way he sees of talking about the things he wants to talk about, whether that’s the prevalence of bigotry or the importance of being yourself.
 
“For me, Jonathan’s story—and, really, any of the people struggling with coming out that I’ve written about—is really more about being true to yourself than it’s necessarily about coming out,” Cuckow says. “Sexuality is just kind of a natural lens for me to view these things through, because even though it’s been changing quite a bit lately, it’s still one of our last accepted bigotries. 
 
“Really I think a lot of what I do is about humanism, about being understanding to other people and being accepting of your true self, and sexuality is just my focus for explaining those issues,” he continues. “Love is a truly universal thing—I mean, literally, without love and sexuality, there wouldn’t even be life, it’s that natural to us, but there’s an awful lot of pressure put onto it, from so many different forces, to me it’s an obvious thing to look at when you’re trying to explore something essential about people.”

Unsurprisingly, that desire to explore what’s essential to people is what’s keeping Cuckow from becoming a mouthpiece for any one viewpoint. Though there are big subjects tackled in Heavens—the play opens with a dialogue about the creation of the world, and questions of religion, sexuality and honesty submarine their way through much of the script, underlying when they’re not sitting on the surface—Cuckow resists pronouncing on any of the particular ideas, instead letting Joyce and Susan, and the audience, attempt to figure things out for themselves.
“I think something like this easily could have become a conversion piece, and I definitely didn’t want that,” he says. “I didn’t want this to be about who was right and who was wrong, because I really don’t think that gets us very far.”
 
And it’s that kind of relativism that ultimately defines 3 Different Heavens, whose title refers as much to varying viewpoints as it does to the literal three heavens Mormons believe constitute the afterlife. As Cuckow explains, the labels we apply—Mormon, liberal, queer—are largely immaterial: it’s the people underneath that truly matter.
 
“The thing is, all these things are people,” he explains. “Whatever labels they put on themselves, it’s people who are interpreting these things and acting them out in the real world, and because of that nothing is ever going to be black and white. You’ve got to try to understand people if you’re going to understand anything else.” V

Fri, Feb 29 - Sun, Mar 9 (8 pm)
3 Different Heavens
Directed by Trevor Schmidt
Written by Nathan Cuckow
Starring Coralie Cairns, Blair Wensley