Hail ‘Mary’

If you’re looking for something a little different in community theater this month, The Driftwood Players’ Alternative Stages series may have what you’re looking for in the black comedy “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.”

Christopher Durang’s Obie award winning one act takes a stab at an area of American life that’s generally not an easy topic for satire: organized religion. In this case it’s Catholicism that gets the treatment.

The play’s opening minutes are light hearted: Sister Mary Ignatius (Diane Lindenstein) introduces herself by lecturing the audience on the universe: the solar system, however, is of less interest to her than heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo. The road map of the afterlife is complicated, but the Sister is unwavering in her certainty of the specific conditions that must be met to enter into each of these realms. She may be “old school,” obviously not pleased with Pope John XXIII’s reforms of the Second Vatican Council, but she’s obligated by her vows to integrate these changes into her personal theology. Everything has its place in her world, regardless of how illogical or contradictory it may seem.

When a group of the Sister’s former students, now adults, arrive on the scene, the plot begins to enter darker territory. The group has come at the invitation of Sister Mary to reinact the life of Jesus in a bizarre pageant originally conceived by a classmate, one of the Sister’s pet students. Instead, they are there to confront her for the years of humiliation and abuse she perpetrated upon them as children.

The black comedy that ensues is adeptly handled by director Janet Lynn Cole and a supporting cast that includes Randy Meyeres, Mary Urlie, Cynthia A. Edwards and Ian Gerrard as the former students. Each of the actors must work quickly in less than an hour to bring the audience up to speed on characters who have all been fundamentally altered by their relationships with Sister Mary. Urlie injects Diane with a keen sense of injustice, absolutely consumed by the tragedies in her life that all seem to point back to Sister Mary’s conflicting moral lessons. As Thomas, Evan Jayne is a cheerful, catechism reciting 7 year-old. Despite having reached the “age of reason,” Thomas is blissfully unaware of just how damaging the Sister’s influence may be to his psyche.

For those in the audience who expected a blithe treatment of the subject, in the tradition of “Nunsense” or “Late Nite Catechism,” the shift in the play’s mood came as a shock. “Sister Mary Ignatius” is not for anyone who takes their religion seriously, is easily offended, or who has a nostalgic longing for their parochial education. This is dark, edgy comedy, more likely to resonate with those who regard themselves as “survivors” of Catholic school.