Not to say that Durang doesn't have an apparent axe to grind with his Catholic upbringing and the dogma and social politics of the church. It's not that he considers nothing sacred, it's just that in order to know what is, can, or should be so, one has to put everything on the table. Staged in three-quarter round in the intimate McCoy space, Sister Mary places the audience in an urban Catholic school, Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. These former students also bring with them a great deal of animosity toward Sister Mary. She calls Diane a murderer and tells Gary that, as a sodomite, he is going to go straight to hell.
Some people escape into fundamentalism to abnegate the responsibility of personal conscience.
Durang underscores his points with two theatrical devices that work quite effectively. There is a bracing dramatic dissonance between our notion of a loving, conscientious teacher, helping to form a young life, and the interaction that unfolds between this innocent child and what is slowly being revealed as an insidious agent of corruption. And the bad emotional and ideological chemistry of the confrontation between nun and former students ends in an unexpected conflagration that sends the audience out of the theatre with the play's big open-ended questions hailing down like hot ash. The cast is good. Spratley opts for a smoother, more complacent Sister Mary than is sometimes the case.