These ‘Housewives’ aren’t model Mormons
Religion central to drama in way that’s unique for franchise
The stars of the latest series in the “Real Housewives” franchise are an assortment of over-the-top, attention-seeking personalities straight out of Bravo central casting.
There’s a tequila entrepreneur who picks up family dinner at Taco Bell in her Porsche. A baby-voiced blond who celebrates her wedding anniversary with a spin on the stripper pole. Oh yeah, and a woman married to her step-grandfather.
Like their counterparts elsewhere in the country, the affluent women of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” thrive on petty drama, conspicuous consumption and regular visits to the plastic surgeon.
But one thing sets them apart: The majority of the cast members are — or once were — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a religion known for promoting wholesome values rather than rosé-fueled catfights.
The location offers snowcapped mountains as a scenic backdrop and affords cast members plenty of opportunities to wear extravagant apres-ski fashion. But as the epicenter of the Mormon Church and a place where the LDS influence reverberates in everyday life, Salt Lake City provides rich anthropological terrain, particularly when it comes to the lives of women who don’t conform to church rules.
While the show includes the usual petty disputes, religion is central to the drama in a way that is unique within the “Housewives” universe, where goat yoga class is about as spiritual as it gets.
“It is really surprising how open they are about Mormonism and how it relates to their lives,” says “Real Housewives” executive producer Andy Cohen.
Excessive drinking, lewd talk, immodest dress and messy personal lives are virtual prerequisites for aspiring housewives — but also contradict the church’s conservative strictures.
Needless to say, the women of “RHOSLC” aren’t exactly model Mormons: Lisa Barlow converted from Judaism, owns several liquor companies and describes herself as “Mormon 2.0” because of her lax attitude to church laws. Jen Shah was raised Mormon but converted to Islam when she learned about the church’s history of racial exclusion. Whitney Rose was excommunicated from the church after cheating on her first husband. And Heather Gay, who is divorced, bristles at the constraints put on her as an unmarried woman. (Adding to the spiritual melange are remaining cast members Meredith Marks, a Jewish jewelry designer, and Mary Cosby, the couture-loving “first lady” of a Pentecostal church.)
For several of the women, the show is a continuation of their spiritual journey. Gay, a mother of three whose ex-husband is from a wealthy Utah family, becomes increasingly disillusioned with the church over the course of the season.
When she divorced six years ago, Gay says, “I had no version of a future for myself. I didn’t know any single moms who weren’t destitute and depressed and coming to the church for financial assistance.”
She no longer adheres to the church’s modesty code, the law of chastity or the word of wisdom, the name for the commandment against substances such as alcohol and tobacco. And she’s critical of the church’s stance on LGBTQ rights and women’s equality.
“I go through that transition pretty publicly (in the series). While my faith still defines me in so many ways, I don’t practice it anymore,” she says. “It is an all-encompassing faith. That’s why it’s really traumatic to leave it. I still feel like it runs through every single thought I have.”
Rose, the aforementioned pole-spinner, is a descendant of Shadrach Roundy, one of Joseph Smith’s bodyguards. The pressure to conform to the feminine ideal is what drove her to get married at 19, despite doubts about her relationship. “One-hundred percent that was a consequence of me trying to be perfect. It’s the architecture from the day you’re born.”
She subsequently fell in love with a co-worker 18 years her senior and embarked on a passionate affair, which resulted in their excommunication and a second marriage that has lasted a decade and produced two children.
Rose says she and Gay “dive in deep” about their experiences in the church over the course of the season.
“The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” has what might be the most racially integrated cast in what has been a segregated franchise and part of what drew Shah to the series was the opportunity to show a more diverse side of her community.
“I felt like I needed to represent that it’s not just Caucasian, blond-haired, blue-eyed women that run successful businesses here,” she says.
With popular shows set aboard luxury yachts in the Caribbean and in Hamptons beach houses, Bravo has been eyeing the majestic mountains of the West for years. “We’ve cast in Aspen about a million times,” says Cohen, who previously developed another show about modern Mormons that fell apart when participants dropped out.
“I think there’s a lot of mystery about the church, and people are intrigued by it,” says Cohen.
Some locals are already displeased. A review in the Deseret News, a churchowned newspaper based in Salt Lake City, warned readers that the show is “full of digs at Utah culture (and) church members ... that will make any Utah diehard squirm or even surge with anger.” (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints declined to comment on the show.)
Bravo is not worried about potential blowback.
“I think there will be a lot of people who say this doesn’t represent Salt Lake City or the Mormon church,” says Cohen. “It’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to represent a certain group of friends in that area.”
Gay sees it differently — and hopes that people who feel like they don’t have a place in the church, whether because of their gender, sexuality or marital status, do too.
“For me to go on this show and speak openly about what I think and feel is a huge liability for the church,” she says. “What I really want to do is create a safe space for a lot of recovering Mormons throughout the world.”
Viola Davis has collected an Academy Award, an Emmy, two Tonys and dozens more acting kudos, and now another powerhouse role has propelled her to the top of the 2021 best actress Oscar race: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the unapologetically brash real-life Southern blues singer at the center of a tempestuous 1927 Chicago recording session in the August Wilson adaptation “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
It’s a juicy role that has landed Davis in the Oscar conversation along with her co-star, the late Chadwick Boseman, who dazzles in his final performance as a hotheaded young horn player with eyes for Ma’s girlfriend and radical new ideas for Ma’s music. But even the formidable Davis admits she wasn’t initially sure she could pull off the swaggering blues legend.
“There’s a typecasting that happens in the business, and after a while, you start to typecast yourself and think of 50 million other people who could have played the role,” says Davis, 55. “But that’s not what acting is. It’s a transformative art form. It’s about taking whatever you have and using it to transform into a character that is completely different than you.”
She typecasted herself, Davis says
— until she stopped comparing herself to other actresses and embraced the challenge. Denzel Washington never doubted that she could fill Rainey’s shoes. “Viola can do anything,” says Washington, a producer on “Ma Rainey.” “There was no question that she could do it. She’s a once-in-a-generation talent.”
In 2010, she starred with Washington in the Broadway revival of playwright Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning “Fences.” Six years later, with Washington at the helm, Davis reprised the role of dutiful 1950s housewife Rose Maxson in the film version and won her first Academy Award.
Back in 2001, Davis won her first Tony for “King Hedley II,” another title in Wilson’s 10-play “Century Cycle.” Wilson’s impact is of major significance to Davis, who also executive produced the upcoming Netflix documentary “Giving Voice,” about an annual speech competition dedicated to the playwright’s legacy.
“August Wilson was basically a griot, which in Africa were historians, storytellers, praise singers, poets, who kept the history alive in the tribes,” she says. “They kept our stories alive. And that’s what August Wilson was — a griot. And what makes him powerful is that he’s ours. He belongs to the African American community. He wrote to elevate us. To elevate our humor. To elevate our beauty. To elevate our pain. To elevate our complexity, and to elevate ultimately who we were in every decade of life.”
In “Ma Rainey,” Davis sinks her teeth into the title character’s grandiosity with nuance and rings even her triumphs with a bruising, melancholy aftertaste. An openly queer Black songstress defiant of the bigotry of the era, Ma Rainey demands her due from all who cross her path, from the strangers whose hostile glares she returns while parading her much-younger girlfriend (Taylour Paige) on her arm, to the bickering members of her band (Colman Domingo, Michael Potts, Glynn Turman, Boseman) and the white managers (Jeremy Shamos, Jonny Coyne) trying to squeeze another hit record out of her on the cheap.
As the day unfolds, Ma tangles with her recording execs and the band spins yarns and trades barbs in a basement practice room. The ensuing symphony of microaggressions and melodrama is deceptively mundane; swirling tensions reach a fever pitch over a musical arrangement, a stutter and an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” — titled after the hit song that becomes hotly contested over the course of the chaotic afternoon — left Davis invigorated.
In Rainey, she found an artist whose battles hit close to home. “She was a woman who was unapologetic about her worth and her power. She’s constantly reminding people who she is, and that had a transformative effect on me too,” says Davis. “That’s what happens a lot in our profession: You’re always hustling for your worth. That’s what you’re constantly doing in this business and in this world, so it felt very liberating to play a woman who was not doing that.”
Researching such a singular historical figure was no easy feat, says director George C. Wolfe, considering that only “six or seven” photographs of the real Rainey exist today. Unlike contemporaries like Bessie Smith, Rainey was not considered glamorous or anointed by white mainstream media.
Instead, Davis drew on Wilson’s text, adapted for the screen by playwright and actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and searched within to understand who Rainey was. “What I have to rely on is my life experience, because therein lies the problem: Ma Rainey is considered the Mother of the Blues, but finding any material about Ma Rainey was very difficult,” she says.
She thought of her aunts, her mother, her grandmother and of women spiritually in tune with Rainey. “I understand the emotional life of those people because they’re in my life — those complicated, beautiful, funny, hardcore, unapologetic people have been in my life forever.”
But Ma also has a surprisingly tender side reserved for her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) and for her lover Dussie Mae. Her truest moments of vulnerability, however, are shared with her bandleader and trombonist Cutler (Domingo), with whom she briefly drops the exhausting veil of toughness she dons in most aspects of her life.
Domingo describes an unusually intensive two-week rehearsal period the cast had in which they pored over the script in meticulous detail, “as if we were a theater company.” “We talked about the idea that Ma and Cutler have a closeness that they don’t have with the rest of the band. She was a pioneer, she was very much a maverick — and what she did was she empowered the men in her band as well.”
By contrast, Davis conjures a prickly dynamic with Boseman as Levee, whose youthful arrogance and newer, jazzier style represent a looming threat to Ma’s authority. After playing mother and son in 2014’s “Get On Up,” the duo wage a battle of wills as adversaries in “Ma Rainey,” which Davis calls a “fitting denouement” to Boseman’s cinematic legacy.
“Levee is probably one of the greatest, if not the greatest role for an African American man, ever, because it absolutely encapsulates them — their pain, their vision, their dreams, their talent,” she says. “It’s like someone who has a great figure who has to wear a burlap sack; this is an artist being fitted with an August Wilson garment that couldn’t have been more perfect. And he wore it beautifully. He just played the role beautifully.”