A man goes on a mission. He is sent deep into the jungle, to confront a world of cruelty and insanity almost beyond his comprehension, and certainly beyond anything he was trained to deal with. Faced with impossible odds, he goes off-script, begins to improvise in ways that alarm his superiors. They tell him his methods are unsound, withdraw his commission, order him to return home, but he refuses to comply. Instead, he goes completely rogue, proclaiming himself a prophet of a new religion of his own founding, and from the natives of the jungle builds his own army of fanatical followers. And over them he rules, a corpulent hulk spouting arcane texts.

I’m talking, of course, about The Book of Mormon. (What did you think I was talking about?)

I saw the show last night, and let me say at the outset that it is incredibly funny. Funny on a gross level (in both the sense of gross-out humor – “I still have maggots in my scrotum” – and in the sense of “big picture”) and funny on the detail level. This is a parody show, which usually means humor that is topical but not deep and music that is serviceable but not memorable, but neither was true in this case. The music parodies a variety of popular musical forms, from Lion King-style faux Africana, to chirpy Broadway tunes of the era of How To Succeed In Business or The Pajama Game, to the contemporary rock musical ballad. But the tunes also work in their own right – with different lyrics, they would fit right in to any of the kinds of shows being parodied. And more often than not the jokes reverberate and resonate across the show and, indeed, right out of the theatre. (I expect to be quoting Joseph Smith on his deathbed saying “I guess that’s what you’re going for” for some time to come in the face of minor adversity.)

And the performances were uniformly outstanding. I almost don’t want to call out the name roles – Nikki James as the innocent African girl Nabulungi, Rory O’Malley as the repressed (but entirely self-aware!) gay Mormon mission head, Andrew Rannells as the Mormon Mr. Perfect who discovers that God has a sense of humor, and Josh Gad who is just scarily good vocally as the friendless and graceless sidekick who becomes the leader – because the ensemble is so strong and this really is an ensemble show (for all that it has a number called “Mostly Me”).

And the stagecraft is phenomenal as well. I’m quite sure I’ve never seen someone’s brains blown out on stage before. But if I have, I’m absolutely sure that they didn’t stage the effect so that you see what look like brains being blown out the back of the murdered character’s head. On stage. Get whoever put together that effect a production of Titus or Macbeth to direct.

Now, having said all that, I want to pick at the one major thing that bothered me about the show as a whole. And that is the relationship between the Africans and the two missionaries, and how we are supposed to take the “reality” of both the Africans and the situation these kids find themselves in.

That brains-blown-out moment is a real coup-de-theatre. It “brings the real.” But what’s brung cannot be un-brung. And the resolution of the story tries really hard to un-bring it.

As we approach the end of the play, where do the various characters stand in their arcs? Elder Price, Mormon Mr. Perfect, has completed his arc. He’s the Job character – he did everything Heavenly Father asked, and instead of being sent on mission to Orlando like he wanted he’s sent to hell, also known as Uganda – and even when he thinks he’s finally figured out what he’s supposed to be doing there – using his incredible firmness of faith to convert a maniacal warlord named General Butt F—-ing Naked to the LDS Church – it turns out he’s wrong, as he gets his holy book literally shoved up his large intestine. And what brings him back from the bottom is seeing the analogy between what his pathological liar partner, Elder Cunningham, has been up to (making up ridiculous stories to convert the locals) and what the prophetic founder of his church did lo these many years ago – a recognition that his life has already been in service to another man’s creative impulses, and that therefore he’s never been at the center of the story … and that that’s okay. Great: arc complete.

Nabulungi, meanwhile, is at the bottom of her arc, the darkness before dawn, just waiting for that last turn towards the light. She and her fellow villagers have just put on a show-stopping performance of the story of Mormonism as (mis)told to them by Elder Cunningham that reveals his freelancing to the mission President, and gets the whole mission shut down. (The show is an elaborate parody of the “Small House of Uncle Thomas” scene in The King and I, and is absolutely hilarious.) She converted to Mormonism because she thought she would get a free ride out of the hell of Uganda to the paradise of Salt Lake City (she sings a beautiful ballad of longing about same, finely balanced between parody and real poignancy), and now she learns not only that the stories she was told weren’t true, but that there was never any intention of helping her escape from Uganda. Anyone who has read about the kinds of horrors literally millions of would-be emigrants from all over Africa have gone through knows that this is a joke about something real. And her disillusion “brings the real” once again. She hasn’t just been denied a trip to Orlando. She may very well die, violently, as a consequence of her naivete.

So what brings her to the light? Two things. First, all the villagers who converted to Mormonism suddenly reveal that they, unlike Nabulungi, were sophisticated about all the crazy Mormon (and Cunninghamist) stories from the beginning. “Salt Lake City isn’t a real place. It’s a metaphor.” And then, when the evil General Butt F—-ing Naked returns to kill everyone (or at least cut off their clitorises), elders Price and Cunningham successfully scare him off by making up more nonsense about their own (and their God’s) incredible powers. (“He’ll shoot Joseph Smith missiles and turn you into a lesbian!”)

Both choices struck me as highly problematic. That the Africans believe that these crazy white boys will give them visas to come to America is a black-comic notion with enormous punch. That they became Mormons even though they knew they weren’t going to give them visas is … well, it drains the situation of reality. These people are threatened with death. They are not looking for a metaphor.

And if they are looking for a “life lie” as Ibsen put it – something to believe in, fervently, even though it isn’t true, because it keeps them going – then … what is it that Elder Cunningham is offering? “I love these Mormon stories – they are so f—-ing weird!” says Nabulungi’s father after one of Cunningham’s preaching sessions. That sounds like an accurate description of how Stone and Parker relate to Mormonism, and it explains their obvious soft spot for the religion. But it’s not the experience of a typical convert, at least not in my experience of religious converts. The ending doesn’t make the Africans forget their misery. It makes us forget it. And it’s a betrayal of the considerable power with which the creators “brought the real” in those earlier moments.

And what about Elder Cunningham? What’s his arc? Does he have one? Not really. He doesn’t “man up” in any meaningful sense. Rather, he keeps doing the same juvenile stuff he was doing at the beginning – he just feels awesome about it now. On one level, this is just fine. Cunningham is kind of the holy fool of the enterprise, and you don’t expect the holy fool to have an arc. But the problem is that we spent a bunch of time getting close to Cunningham, most notably in the songs, “Man Up” and “Baptize You.” What Cunningham gets is perilously close to wish-fulfillment.

Which raises the question that I began this review with: what’s the difference between Cunningham and Colonel Kurtz – or, for that matter, General Butt F—-ing Naked? Both Elder Cunningham and General Naked have wacky religious beliefs that sprang from their own heads. It’s just that General Naked’s beliefs involve the imperative of female circumcision, while Cunningham’s involve … well, mostly alluding to Star Wars and Star Trek. And being nice to people.

The “message” of The Book of Mormon harkens back to Numbers 11:29. Two men in the Israelite camp, Eldad and Medad, are seized with the spirit of prophesy. Joshua asks Moses if he should restrain them, and Moses replies: “Enviest thou for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!” Similarly: would that we all, like Elder Cunningham, instead of following Joseph Smith’s teachings, instead followed his example, and made up our own crazy mythology – whatever works. But, again, so far as I can tell, that’s what General Butt F—-ing Naked was doing at the beginning of the show. And, moreover, Joseph Smith wasn’t simply preaching “let’s all be really f—-ing polite to each other.” The show makes reference to some of Smith’s “problematic” revelations regarding race, but doesn’t make any mention of the incredibly central place of polygamy in Smith’s original revelation – even though that would be obviously relevant to the African context. I suspect the reason is that raising the subject of polygamy would present to the audience a real question of whether Joseph Smith was more like Elder Cunningham, or more like General Butt F—-ing Naked.

Honestly, my impression is he wasn’t much like either. I have a soft spot for Mormonism myself. I recognize their enormous debt to biblical religion, and not only do I believe imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I applaud as someone who was interested in biblical religion before he really became interest in rabbinic Judaism (and who still kind of thinks something very important was lost in that particular transition). And gosh darn it, they really are incredibly nice people. But there’s a falseness to the ending, not only in terms of the real history of the LDS Church or the reality of Africa but in terms of the realities that the creators of the show have put on the stage. And I regretted that.

Was there an alternative? I don’t know. I hesitate to even suggest anything given what amazing talents Parker, Lopez and Stone are. But I do wonder whether a better ending wouldn’t have had Nabulungi become the new prophet, inspired by Cunningham as he was inspired by Joseph Smith. I have no idea what kind of religious weirdiosity she’d come up with. But at a minimum, I’d know it wouldn’t be horrific like General BFN’s (we  know from her first introduction that Nabulungi has a “wonderful disposition”), and I’d know that whatever she did come up with would spring from an authentic African experience. Not to mention that, if we’re to believe the clitoris is a holy thing, wouldn’t it make sense for General BFN to be convinced of this by a woman?

Just a thought.