On a Monday evening in late September, a small group of Brigham Young University students will stand among the paintings of the Museum of Art and speak other people's words. Not paraphrased, not dramatized, but word for word — the actual sentences of individuals who left their faith and, somewhere along the way, came back.
The occasion is "An Evening of Theatre, Art and Music: All the Beautiful Things, Earthbound and Heavenward," a free, open-to-all event on September 28, 2026, from 7:15 to 8:15 p.m. at the BYU Museum of Art on North Campus Drive in Provo. It is a preview: extracts from a full-length production, "All the Beautiful Things," that will run October 16 through 30. Each story performed that night is tied to a specific artwork in the museum's current exhibition, "Earthbound and Heavenward: The Sacred Art of Discipleship." Space is limited, and admission costs nothing.
The performers are Verbatim Theatre, a class of Theatre and Media Arts students led by Shelley Graham and Alexandra Mackenzie Johns. Verbatim theatre is a distinct and demanding form: rather than writing dialogue, the artists interview real people, transcribe their speech, and shape those transcripts into a script. The ethical stakes are high — the people on stage are speaking for people who are not in the room — and the BYU course built around the project takes that seriously. According to the course description for TMA 480: Verbatim Theatre: Return to Faith, students study "the ethics and efficacy of verbatim theatre" alongside the practical craft of interviewing and scripting, examining the work of leading practitioners in the field.
The subject matter is unusual, and it has a specific scholarly origin. The class's focus — the return-to-faith journey — grows out of research by BYU communications scholar Jessica Zurcher. As the course description explains, Zurcher's work began from a simple observation: there is a great deal of study devoted to the journey away from faith, and almost none devoted to what happens when someone comes back. That gap is what the students are filling, one interview at a time.
For Alexandra Mackenzie Johns, the project sits at the center of a career spent on religious performance. Originally from Jersey in the British Isles, Johns is a playwright, director, scholar, and educator who now leads playwriting within BYU's Theatre Arts Studies program. Her faculty biography describes a specialization in "large-scale commemorative theatrical events that bring communities' sacred stories to life," along with a research interest in site-specific theatre — the relationship between landscape and religious performance. She is currently engaged in three major projects: examining pilgrimage as performance along the Mormon Trail; studying how embodiment strengthens religious memory between medieval female Christian mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and contemporary Christians; and the verbatim return-to-faith project now reaching the stage. She has taught and collaborated with emerging artists in South Asia, East Africa, North America, and the Middle East, and co-convenes the "Performance, Religion, and Spirituality" group within the International Federation for Theatre Research. In a profile for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, where she developed a verbatim script exploring "doubt, spiritual loss, and the rediscovery of faith after a crisis," she put her commitment plainly: "I am deeply committed to theatre as a revelatory expression of identity and faith, blending playwriting, devising, verbatim theatre, site-specific work, and scholarship to illuminate the stories that shape communities and individual lives."
Shelley Graham brings a dramaturg's eye to the collaboration. A professor, writer, and dramaturg with degrees in theatre education and theatre history from BYU and an MFA in theatre pedagogy and dramatic writing, she serves as Dramaturgy Supervisor in the Theatre and Media Arts department. Her scholarly and creative work often explores women's experiences at the complicated intersections of faith and performance in Western history. She has worked as a dramaturg and education director for institutions including Pioneer Theatre Company, the American West Heritage Center, Utah Lyric Opera, and Provo's Covey Center for the Arts. Recent projects include dramaturgy and theatrical direction for the devised dance-theatre piece "Bind, Burn, Whisper, Press," and dramaturgy for the devised verbatim projects "City of Women" and "All the Beautiful Things" — for which she is also a co-writer. She is additionally the dramaturg for the new musical "Alice in Neverland," opening at the Alliance and 5th Avenue theatres.
The pairing of the performance with the museum's galleries is not incidental. "Earthbound and Heavenward: The Sacred Art of Discipleship" opened recently and will remain on view as a centerpiece of the museum until September 2028. Curated by Maddie Blonquist, the Roy and Carol Christensen Curator of Religious Art at the museum, it draws dozens of works from the MOA's permanent collection alongside new pieces by living artists, spanning more than five centuries of Christian imagery. Its organizing idea, in the museum's own framing, is "sacred distance" — the gap disciples of Christ often sense between where they are and where they would like to be. The exhibition's epigraph comes from Isaiah 51:6: "Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath."
Blonquist has described the show as a portrait of "souls aspiring for something more, sometimes weighed down by the difficulties of being mortal," capturing "the feeling of being grounded and earthbound, but also that upward trajectory that we experience with wanting to be with our heavenly parents." The exhibition moves through five themed sections — Of Heaven and Earth, Desire and Emulation, Called and Consecrated, Saints and Sinners, and Peoples and Prophets — whose titles hinge on conjunctions rather than oppositions. "That 'and' is doing a lot of heavy lifting," Blonquist told the BYU Daily Universe. "I'm not saying 'saints or sinners,' I'm saying 'saints and sinners' because we are both."
A review in the online arts journal 15 Bytes noted a striking feature of the exhibition: for a show of Christian art, there are surprisingly few images of Christ as its subject. The first painting visitors encounter, Herbert Schmalz's "The Return from Calvary," depicts a group of disciples making their way through Jerusalem under a blackened sky, the crucifixion having just happened offstage. The exhibition, the review observed, keeps redirecting attention toward the people around Christ — the disciples, the witnesses, the crowd. That instinct rhymes almost exactly with the logic of verbatim theatre, which likewise turns its gaze from the central figure toward the ordinary people who surround a story and carry it in their own words.
Among the works on view are pieces with their own local histories: a 17th-century "Head of Christ" from the circle of Rembrandt, a gift to the museum; Norman Rockwell's "Lift Up Thine Eyes"; a large stained-glass "Jesus and the Woman at the Well"; and "Nazareth," a bird's-eye oil-and-gold-leaf painting of Christ's childhood hometown by Emilia Wing, a Polish-born artist who attended BYU and served as a missionary in Russia and Kazakhstan. Blonquist selected it among ten works she believes deserve wider recognition, noting that the museum's collection is "alive with saints and sinners, pupils and prophets — figures whose struggles and hopes mirror our own."
The September preview is billed as a collaboration with the College of Fine Arts and Communications, and it arrives at a moment of transition for the arts at BYU. A new Arts Building for the College of Fine Arts and Communications has been approved and is being constructed on the site of the former Harris Fine Arts Center. The Daily Universe reported that "All the Beautiful Things" will be presented to the community in connection with the building's opening in October — the same month as the production's full run.
The interfaith dimension of the project has already been visible on campus. At BYU's first Interfaith Arts Night, held February 2 at the Museum of Art, Johns performed a monologue from "All the Beautiful Things" amid music, poetry, and commentary from students of different faiths, including performances by the Rhythm and Soul Collective and the Folk Dance Ensemble. "It was a beautiful reinforcement that we are all one before the Lord," Johns said at the time, "and I really appreciate that about all interfaith work. It reminds us of our shared humanity in a world that is so focused on polarization." She added that such evenings serve as "a beautiful reminder that more unites us than divides us."
That sentiment is close to the thesis of the September event. The stories being told are not tidy. They are accounts of leaving and returning, of doubt and rediscovery, gathered through interviews and preserved in the speakers' own phrasing — the hesitations, the repetitions, the exact words. Set among paintings that dwell on the distance between earth and heaven, they make a particular kind of sense. The exhibition argues that heaven often approaches in mundane, everyday details; the production argues that it also approaches in ordinary speech.
For those who attend, the evening offers something rare: a chance to see a work-in-progress before it is finished, staged not in a theater but in a gallery, with the art that inspired it hanging on the walls. It is free, it is open to all, and it lasts an hour. But the material behind it — years of scholarship, dozens of interviews, and the careful transcription of lives — is anything but small.