Fran De Leon and Lorne Green (Photo by Brian Hashimoto)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Critical Mass Performance Group at Boston Court
Through Dec. 7
RECOMMENDED
What’s a nice Jewish girl like you doing in a place like this?
That question lies at the crux of Nancy Keystone’s (created in collaboration with her Critical Mass Performance Group) devised performance, stemming from Keystone’s attendance at a Catholic School, and the many issues which that experience provoked.
The setting is, indeed, a Catholic School, circa 1974, depicted in Keystone’s set that’s designed largely in two dimensions, with the exception of very three-dimensional school desks and a bookshelf to one side. Most of everything else is sketched in, such as a clock, a wall-sized sketch of the Virgin Mary, etc. At issue is an upcoming school pageant, honoring The Virgin Mary. This literally sets the stage for a cartoon, underscored by Lena Sands’ school uniform costumes, knee-length pale blue skirts and white blouses. (Near the performance’s close, the action jumps to 2024, and the costumes morph accordingly.) Add to that the casting of three males playing schoolgirls and performing in drag.
Keystone has been developing this piece for well over a decade.
The performance style is very much in the now storied tradition of local companies performing devised work: Ghost Road Company, Theater Movement Bazaar, theatre dybbuk and, to get national for a moment, The Wooster Group. The ensemble here (Amir Levi, Fran de Leon, Gabriela Bonet, Lorne Green, Russell Edge and Valerie Spencer) work together in a choreography with drill-team precision. A school bell’s sharp blare severs short scenes, and we move on to the next sketch. The principle here is not dramatic tension, but the theatrical exploration of an idea. That idea, that core — to get Old Testament for a moment, call it an apple core — lies in the Virgin Mary, the mystery and miracle of how she got pregnant with Jesus, and why she simply didn’t reply to God, “I don’t really feel like doing that, but thank you for the opportunity.”
This inexorably spins into the questions of women’s roles in men’s designs, mythologized into New Testament scripture, which in some ways, most ways, is bonkers. Compelled to answer the question of how Mary became pregnant, the children proffer earnest theories such as she was drenched in holy sperm, for which they get smacked with a ruler — here depicted with a blast of red light accompanied by a buzzer. Sort of like that old quip, “The beatings will stop once morale improves,” the spectacle blends the absurdism of Monty Python with playwright Christopher Durang’s 1979 Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, hauling that 20th century baggage into the 21st century.
A Latine student worships the Mexican Catholic icon, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and is brought up short for that. Another aches to become a priest: forbidden! Classes in being “lady-like” (how to stand, how to sit, legs always crossed, how the purpose of women is to comfort men, who have such stressful lives) have the 1950s ethos of boot camp for female submission. And so, a prevalent through-line is that of cult-like indoctrination, blended with repression. How could that not explode with a blast of hypocrisy? The scandals of priests molesting children goes unmentioned here, but it’s born of the same repression that defies the essences of being human, and humane. This is far from being exclusively a Catholic conundrum, and Mariology addresses that, too, hinting at the authoritarianism sweeping across the year 2024.
This is all a massive sweep of ideas, erupting from the single question of how the Virgin Mary could have birthed a child. It rolls out implications and innuendos and then asks us, the audience, to do the heavy lifting of stacking them into something coherent. This is possible. The elements are there, but the piece is as much a provocation as it is a vision.
The production elements are fantastic.
Critical Mass Performance Group, at Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 pm, Sun., 2 pm, some Mondays, 7:30 pm; thru Dec. 7. www.bostoncourtpasadena.org. Running time: 80 minutes without intermission.
