Avaunt, God
By T.E. Kalem
THE ACTOR'S NIGHTMARE AND SISTER MARY IGNATIUS EXPLAINS IT ALL FOR YOU
by Christopher Durang
Parody is Christopher Durang's native element. He can mimic and spoof manners, trends and styles of speaking in ways that inflict the sting of truth just as surely as those of a good caricaturist. But Durang tends to end his plays unconvincingly, in a spasm of violence, as if he had been brooding on deeper things all along--like, say, man's fate. It is as if the playwright as jester suddenly dropped his mask and wished to be acknowledged as a thinker. These two one-acters at Manhattan's Playwrights Horizons Theater display both Durang's virtues and his defects.
The Actor's Nightmare is an In joke. The simple non-hero is named George Spelvin (Jeff Brooks), a theatrical pseudonym for an actor playing a secondary role in a play. Spelvin has unaccountably wandered into stage company that he has never kept. The time is the present, but the other actors arbitrarily inform him that he is Edwin Booth's understudy in Hamlet and must go on tonight since "Eddie" has been injured in a car crash.
As the play-within-a-play begins, Spelvin enters dressed in black Renaissance garb, but the setting is a terrace of a posh hotel overlooking the harbor at Nice, and the first lines addressed to him are from Noel Coward's Private Lives. The plots thicken and boil. Beckett's Endgame and Happy Days are intermingled as well. With zany aplomb, Durang combines absurdist juxtapositions of lines and characters in Spelvin's massive identity crisis.
In the play's final sequence, Spelvin's role is that of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. For the first time, Spelvin is more than baffled. He feels a chill of apprehension, and rightly so, as he hears the stage directions: "The Executioner will be played by himself." When the curtain rises on curtain calls, Spelvin does not. This mordant conclusion echoes that of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Man is a simple soul inadvertently entangled in a blind mess called life with nary a clue as to its meaning and no aid from a Seeing-Eye God.
Durang shakes a stormier fist at God in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. Those who do not find the play abominably blasphemous (and some may) will find it damnably funny. The parody, this time, is of Roman Catholic elementary school education and, by extension. Catholic faith, dogma and practice.
Sister Mary Ignatius (Elizabeth Franz) has taught for many years at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow school. She believes that to spare the rod is to spoil the child, perhaps eternally. Her rod is the catechism. Her prize pupil (Mark Stefan) can make pinpoint distinctions between venial and mortal sins. The sister pops a cookie into his mouth after each impeccable response, and Stefan plays the role with the precision of an ordained parrot.
In midplay a second parody begins. Four of the nun's former students have come to perform a kind of Passion Play that had been staged by one of their classmates in their years at the school. The little troupe enacts the life of Christ from his birth in Bethlehem to his Crucifixion on Golgotha.
The purpose of this visit is not nostalgic piety, but flaming accusation. The foursome unfold tales of a mother's agonizing death by cancer, of rape, homosexuality and abortion. It is a cumulative defihurled at the nun, daring her to answer the question that she ducked during the lecture: "If God is all powerful, why does he allow evil?" The Sister's response is so malignant and melodramatic that it practically blows away the play.
Durang must know that the existence of evil is not proof that God does not exist. That is a boy's debating point, but then, the play is rather like a clever boy's mocking revenge. At the risk of skirting blasphemy, one must salute Elizabeth Franz's formidable Sister Mary Ignatius as an in carnation of God's wrath.
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