Sisters Under Your Skin

By RICHARD CORLISS

Nuns and priests are the new stars on and off-Broadway

Jesus was effeminate, but not Jewish. St. Ignatius smoked Camels, which he stubbed out on the soles of his feet. The collection plate passed after the priest's sermon is like God's Nielsen rating. Priests drink too much wine, and nuns are the Gestapo in wimples. Among those destined to burn in hell are Roman Polanski, Big John Holmes, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. On Broadway and off, these glosses on Catholic dogma are raising smiles, nostalgic shudders and the occasional hackle, as young playwrights sculpt wicked ironies from the gothic fantasies of their parochial school youth. Last week two new "Catholic plays" joined the pair already on the New York boards. No doubt about it: nuns' stories are paving the Great White Way.

This string of rosaries and remembrance began quietly enough. Last fall a gentle comedy-drama by a novice playwright tiptoed onto Broadway, after a run at the Manhattan Theater Club. Bill C. Davis' Mass Appeal lived up to its title, and this study of a wise, troubled priest and a rebellious young deacon is still going strong 160 performances later. Around the same time, Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You exploded off-Broadway. Written with the vindictive passion of a Jacobean tragedy and performed at a tempo the Marx brothers might have found taxing, Durang's one-act delight appeared on a sheaf of Ten Best lists. It has since moved to a larger Manhattan showcase, where it continues to win adherents.

Catholic School Girls, which opened off-Broadway last week, is unlikely to bend anyone's faith--though the sight of Shelley Rogers' dark eyes and impish beauty could trigger instant puberty for any twelve-year-old boy in her class. Rogers is one of four young actresses who alternate roles as students and teachers in a Yonkers, N.Y., parochial school back in the '60s. All the tribal rites reprised here have been done before, and better, and too often--at alumnae gabfests, if not onstage--for Playwright Casey Kurtti to pretend to freshness. Alas, freshness--make that impudence--is all School Girls has going for it. The play's antireligious broadsides are clumsy enough to make the viewer resolve to take a nun to lunch.

Agnes of God, just opened on Broadway, begins with a grisly anecdote: a young nun gives birth in her convent, strangles the infant and stuffs it in a wastebasket. From this tabloid tale, John Pielmeier has fashioned a mystery play about an enduring theological riddle: the virgin birth. Who sired Sister Agnes' child? A visiting priest? A local farm hand? Perhaps God himself? To determine whether Agnes (Amanda Plummer) is fit to stand trial for the murder, the court appoints a psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Livingstone (Elizabeth Ashley), to examine her. Soon enough, Agnes' superior, Mother Miriam Ruth (Geraldine Page), appoints herself as guardian of the girl's interests, and her own.

The play is an essay on the artistocracy of the insane: Whom the gods wish to embrace, they first drive mad. Agnes is a strange young woman, singing in an Angelus-clear soprano and obey voices no one can hear. It remains for Martha and Miriam to translate these sounds into the lumbering prose of reason. Pielmeier orchestrates the examination deftly and leavens the weightier speculations with airy talk-show humor. But as Agnes soars into catharsis and Martha tries desparately to anchor her in the explicable, Pielmeier allows himself to take leave of dramatic sense. He offers too many motivations to save the mystery, and too few to sastisfy the scrupulous plot watcher. The result is an off-center Equus.

But if Pielmeier flunks his metaphysical, he gives his players every chance for a sublime, exhausting workout onstage. Forget Equus; think of The Exorcist. Watch Plummer as she scales the sloping back wall of Eugene Lee's set, as blood gushes from the stigmata in her palms, as she wrenchingly relives her murdered child's birth. The show, not the play, is the thing here. And Plummer-- a scarily gifted actress with a waif's face and a voice that intones words as if she had learned them at Berlitz school on Mars-- puts on an extraordinary show. Her co-stars are almost as riveting: Page, at once the fussy authoritarian and mischievouse child; Ashley, making her role more urgent by playing it post-Talllulah, with traffic-cop gestures and a sexy voice that can break in mid-syllable like a Fernando Valenzuela screwball. If Agnes of God just fails as an example of the playwright's craft, it shines as a demonstration of three actresses' seductive art.

The four young playwright's-- Davis is 30, Durang 32, Pielmeier 33 and Kurtti 26-- form no cohesive group, no lapsed-Catholic Mafia. They have responded to their shared history in tones ranging from reverence to rage, and no divine law ordains that they must continue to wrestle with the cassocked and habited specters of their youth. Instead, these veterans of Catholic schooling are following the first law of creation: write what you know. The nuns and priests of a generation ago impressed their small charges more than they realized. The steel-edged rulers with which they whacked so many knuckles are being raised against them. The mystery of faith has become a frightening conundrum, and the Baltimore Catechism a joke book. And so it has come to pass: the children of Sister Mary Ignatius have taken their revenge--by Richard Corliss

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