THEATER REVIEW
One wacky Sister spreads her version of holiday cheer

By Anne Marie Welsh
THEATER CRITIC

December 5, 2005

The contradictions that make "The Church" a conundrum to recovering Catholics gleefully coalesce in Maripat Donovan's "Sister's Chris tmas Catechism."

Chicago writer Donovan's follow-up to her well-traveled "Late Nite Catechism" opened a holiday run at North Coast Repertory on Saturday.

Though so-called "non-Catholics" may find the wacky dogma in this audience-participation comedy exotic or even off-putting, the wonderful improvisations in actor Kathryn Gallagher's performance as Sister go right to the heart of parochial school education in the , 1920-80.

Gallagher's Sister possesses that scary combination of naiveté, devotion, humor and intermittent sadism that taught generations of Catholic kids to diagram sentences while quaking in mortal fear of getting whacked to the tune of those three little words: "straight to hell."

These were the women, in fact, who helped assimilate the Irish kids in Boston and Buffalo, the Poles in Chicago, the Germans in Milwaukee to an American culture their parents both feared and wanted desperately to join. If Donovan's shows, based on a sure-fire populist formula, don't exactly cut it as theater art, they've done something almost as interesting.

When Gallagher's riffs ended, her Sister announced that she would be passing out holy cards and chocolates, and taking up a collection outside the theater. Parish teaching nuns, she informed the patrons, often worked into their 80s because their religious orders set aside no money for their retirement.

The , in its infinite wisdom, had "opted out" of paying into the Social Security system.

These nostalgia-laden catechism shows have proven something of a substitute. In the 12 years since Donovan's first "Late Nite" launched in Chicago, the many acting "sisters" have raised more then $2 million for nuns in retirement homes.

The Chris tmas version unfolds in a facsimile of an elementary school classroom, complete with blackboard, Vatican flag, Papal portraits and light-up plastic statues of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus. There Sister welcomes her class to a combination religion lesson, Nativity Pageant, Chris tmas party, and detective challenge.

If that sounds like a bit much for one show, it is – or at least it was on Saturday night when the audience fed such good material to Gallagher that the mystery of who stole the Magi's gold from that infant savior's cradle took about 30 seconds to solve. The fun came elsewhere.

Gallagher's Sister asked those audience members game enough to meet her gaze to state their baptismal and confirmation names. Those of the Jewish persuasion got the oh-so-tolerant response that Jesus was a Jew "before he converted," but pity the poor women showing cleavage or the men chewing gum. The first got Kleenex to cover their brazenness, the second to dispose of their Beech-Nut.

Never forgetting a name when it came time to cast her pageant, Sister cast a bear of guy as ox, a sexy woman who'd lifted a few glasses with dinner before the show as an extremely reluctant Virgin Mary, and three, uh, older gents as the Wise Men wearing shower curtain capes.

Though she was never as crude as, say, Don Rickles, Sister was nonetheless insistent with her ox, her ass and shepherd, her old St. Joseph and hip Little Drummer Boy. Exactly like those underpaid, overworked teachers who taught the unwashed and unwilling way back when.    

Cast Writers: Maripat Donovan, with Marc Silvia and Jane Morris. Set: Marc Silvia. Costumes: Catherine Evans. Cast: Kathryn Gallagher.