Banned in Seven States
I am currently acting in a provocative satire on Catholicism, by Christopher Durang, and am aware of a possible negative backlash against our production. The play shows us the eponymous Sister Mary, a Catholic nun, espousing vehemently homophobic, pro-life, bigoted opinions, all in the name of salvation. Responses from my Catholic friends have been mixed. I decided to find out what a man who has devoted his life to his faith would think of it all, by speaking to Brother Paul.
I asked Brother Paul for his first reactions upon reading the script of Sister Mary. He expressed "a mixture of amusement and annoyance, and an immediate sense of a bad aftertaste." His feeling about the play now is that it contains a frustrating mixture of good and bad. "Some bits I quite like. Aspects of Sister Mary herself I found very funny. What she does to Gary [a gay Catholic] was also amusing." Other sections annoyed him. "Some of what Sister Mary says is a distortion of Catholic teaching, and although humorous, it annoyed me that people might not know the difference." He also feels that maybe Catholicism is considered to be a legitimate target in the way that other faiths aren't, musing "What would the reaction would be to say, a play about an evil Rabbi? If you did a similar thing with Jews or Muslims, there would be outrage."
Christopher Durang was raised a Catholic and turned against his faith partly because of his mother's long and painful death from cancer, which he writes into the play in my character Diane, who is also raped as a teenager. Paul feels that "Whoever the author, balance is needed. Some character, even a minor character, should give a sane viewpoint. The two leads, Sister Mary and Diane, are both loopy and so cannot be taken seriously." However, he understands Diane's violent reaction against her original faith; "It is a problem if you've experienced a lot of suffering, it can make you less religious. Or more. But in the case of Sister Mary, Diane is fighting against an obviously inadequate way of looking at the world." I asked whether Paul found the play's violence objectionable, which he did not. "The violence in itself I didn't mind. Its part of the exaggerated conclusion. Diane and Sister Mary are as bad as each other." Paul's final thought on the play was that it "Attempts to be humorous and address serious issues at the same time, and it hasn't. The humour has pushed any fairness aside." I largely agree with that, but the play is polemical and born of very personal issues for the playwright; where fairness is not the aim.
27th Feb 2003