Sister Mary

What is readily apparent about the play, is how much control Durang has over it. His protagonist is at the core of it, this is her world and these are her rules, but above Sister Mary, Durang is God.
Every line in the play is working towards something, be it bubbling to the end or tapping to a punch line. The presence of a playwright is apparent as the piece abandons every trace of realism and has its lines acting as gears with a clear purpose.
Sometimes, it feels too contrived. Durang, it seems, had a list of issues to address in their catholic context (homosexuality, abortion). Without easing us into this or any subject, Sister Mary jumps from a family anecdote to sharing her views on abortion. The transition is unnatural, but the play never claims to be anything but. If fact, the play takes the liberty of taking the protagonist’s scattered, forced way of thinking and applying it to it’s format.
Again, this is Sister Mary’s world, and she has decided this will function as a Q and A of sorts, a perfect excuse for Mr. Durang to touch on a myriad of subjects without easing in an out of them, or even weaving them in any way. The play allows itself to be as choppy as the character, and gets away with it for the most part.
In many ways it’s like being inside the nun’s head. We get the sense there is no filter between her thoughts and her words, she firmly believes everything she speaks which works in pro of the play’s decidedly disturbing tone. Repetition emphasizes the restrained insanity (restrained at least at the beginning).
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
There’s something frightfully robotic about Sister Mary. She is savvy with her delivery, conveying the scary notion that she is scholarly, in her own way. Her repetition sometimes works towards a punch:
“Dear God, please make my mother not be crazy.” God’s answer: No.
“Dear God, Please let me recover from cancer.” God’s answer: No.
“Dear God, please take away this toothache.” God’s answer: All right, but you’re going to be run over by a car.”
It is in these instances of controlled rhythm and masterful delivery that Durang succeeds in entertaining. There are a number of rhythmic paragraphs that tap their way to the punch line, drawing in the laughs. “It is a sin to follow horoscope… Christ was warm, loving, ad not attracted to anybody. Give me a cookie, Thomas.” Durang suspends the tension until the very end, we expect it and are anxious to see what it will be.
In fact, this is the stylistic roller-coaster-like skeleton of the play. We start out slowly, but steady go up and then descend into insanity, as Sister Mary’s dialogue gets more aggressive and the plot intensifies. Durang is at the end of the ride, going “ta-dah!”
These structured segments of dialogue mirror Sister Mary’s systematic way of thinking. Religion is no mystery to her, it’s an easy to grasp (even if tricky) bureaucracy. Prayer to St. Christopher was forwarded to St. Jude at a specific moment in history- it’s like they’re clerks at an office.
Sister Mary knows the exact population that turn s a city into Sodom and a precise range of years one could spend in purgatory. She knows God, almost intimately. She knows he’s not attracted to anyone, that sometimes he gets “grouchy” and that he’ll cut her some slack for killing Gary.
Her ideal students are robotic. Little Thomas is deprived of personality, he simply memorizes and repeats. Diane comes in as a point of comparison.
Her dialogue is heartfelt, human, doubtful. There is pain and skepticism in her sentences, she is perhaps the only “real” person in the play. We get the sense that Durang created her to showcase the results of painfully catholic upbringing- she’s part of his agenda.
Praising him, Frank Rich from the New York Times said that “only a writer of real talent can write an angry play that remains funny and controlled even in its most savage moments.”
But perhaps his anger eludes him sometimes, particularly where he pokes fun without there being a grander reason for it. In the pageant, Mary says she’s still a virgin and points at Joseph saying “he’s not the father.” His list of hell-bound celebrities also exists for the sake of comedy, however one of the main missions of this play is entertainment. But sometimes the jokes feel contrived, like a defense mechanism that mask resentment.
Sister Mary is the star of the show, she succeeds and earns our laughter, we don’t agree with her but we always laugh with her, never really at her. Her antagonists are for the most part bland, I don’t think anyone in the audience wanted this oddly-lovable nun dead. It’s here where Durang is successful- he creates a monster we can’t get enough of, he doesn’t render Catholicism as simply villainous and horrible, he seduces us with it. Ironically, everything in his play happens for a reason, which for the most part is very successful, even if sometimes he twists and bends the plot and words much in the way Sister Mary molds dogma in her favor.