Interview: THE BOOK OF MORMON'S Kayla Pecchioni Talks About Playing the Straight Man Amidst Outrageous Comedy in Advance of DPAC Show

When Kayla Pecchioni first saw Tony Award-winning THE BOOK OF MORMON about six years ago, she didn't quite get it.

"It's so funny when I saw the show I actually could not grasp the message," she says. "I was so overwhelmed by how In Your Face it was, I was like, 'what is this show, what is going on,' I just had no clue what it was about."

So, when she got the call to come audition for the role of Nabalungi, the principal female lead, she had some trepidation about it.

"I was like I don't know if I can say the things that they say, do the things they do," she says. "And I talked to a couple of my friends who were in the show on Broadway and they were just like 'no, this is really, to quote the show, going to change your life.' And it has every day since."

Still, Pecchioni says it took her a while to figure out her place in the show.

"When you have so many people around you who are doing this outrageous comedy and doing it so well and getting this outrageous laughter, it really took me a while to be like, 'oh, well for me less is more.' The less I do character-wise in the show, the more the audience responds to it."

Although the show was somewhat of a novelty when it opened on Broadway in 2011, Pecchioni says it is also a beautifully constructed, timeless piece.

"When BOOK OF MORMON first came along, it was kind of a pioneer in its field," she says. "You had things like AVENUE Q around the same time that were also a little bit shocking, but nothing as far along the line as the BOOK OF MORMON."

"I think over time, we have kind of gotten desensitized to the shock value, and people can see that it honestly is just a true musical," she adds. "The show borrows from so many classic shows to set up this formula for what you could say is the perfect musical."

And it's that perfect formula that has brought together fans from all over the country who have met Pecchioni and company at the stage door that has been the most surprising and gratifying part of the tour.

"The fandom has been so overwhelming to me," she says. "When I go to the stage door and I see these kids that are just like, 'I've been following your journey since day one and I want to do this and do you have any advice,' it's powerful because to me I'm still a 25-year old girl, I feel like I just got out of school, and just breaking into all of this, and for people to look up to me already is the one thing I was not expecting."

And her advice for anybody seeing the show for the first time who might have the same knee-jerk reaction she did when she first saw the show is to have an open mind and believe.

"This doesn't happen often at all, but I have seen people walk out right after the first shocking thing in Act I, and I'm like, 'but you don't quite get it quite yet,'" she says. "You have to stay 'til the end, you have to ride the wave and it's going to make you uncomfortable, and the payoff is greater than anything else."

"At the end of the day, you play out this entire ridiculous show, and then we have people leave the theater crying," she adds. "They're like I got so much laughter and laughter and laughter, and then out of nowhere I was so emotional because the story is just literally to have faith in something and believe in something. I find it quite beautiful."

THE BOOK OF MORMON runs August 7 - 12 at The Durham Performing Arts Center. For more information, visit:

https://www.dpacnc.com/events/detail/the-book-of-mormon-2.

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