“Instead of waiting for Him to return, I am going in search of the Nephite God, the Savior of the world. Jesus.” This is Zed speaking, short for “Zedekiah,” one of three Nephite apostles who Christ promised could minister to the earth’s inhabitants continuously until the second coming. In this monologue, we learn that after 2,000 years, Zed, the third of the American trinity, is restless. He had been sidetracked by the theater, where, unlike his own existence, people’s stories actually have endings, and feels estranged from the other two Nephites who share his charge. Recounting the history of his early life as a translator of records in ancient Zarahemla, followed by his special calling, the neurotic Zed takes us on a provocative journey from the nineteenth-century American stage to the gold mines of the Sierra Nevada, from the dusty home of a polygamous wife in Utah Territory to the horrors of the 1911 Triangle Fire in New York City. Ultimately a meditation on immortality, Zed’s “voice from the dust” humorously and poignantly addresses human frailty and the contingent nature of religious texts.

David G. Pace, Ron Frederickson