The Gospel According to Busch

Charles Busch’s latest work of rarefied lunacy takes comic aim at Hollywood’s depiction of nuns. The set of St. Veronica’s, cheaply yet inventively designed by B.T. Whitehill, looks like a shoestring high school effort, with sponges standing in for bricks on the pillars of the front gates, and stained-glass windows depicting steaks being grilled and a garden watered. But it’s meant to be a run-down parish—think of The Bells of St. Mary’s. No matter: the action of this canny satire belies its shabby look. It is sublime nonsense whose pleasures outweigh those of many bigger-budget productions. Busch, an expert on Hollywood melodrama (he’s provided authoritative commentary for Warner Brothers DVDs of The Bad Seed and Dead Ringer), slips in references to The Sound of Music, The Trouble with Angels, Agnes of God and even The Da Vinci Code, but there’s also a snappy homage to His Girl Friday in a flashback that lets Busch appear in the regular drag he's famous for. If the more beatific moments of the actor’s performance as Mother Superior of a bizarre convent don’t remind you of Loretta Young, you may connect his occasionally throatier growl to Rosalind Russell (the star of both Trouble and His Girl Friday).

Busch has surrounded himself with equally comic cohorts. Mother Superior’s second in command is Sister Acacius, equipped by Julie Halston with a thick New Yawk accent and simmering Sturm und Drang. Whether she’s on a tirade about the propensity of young postulant Agnes (Amy Rutberg) to see the face of a saint in stained underwear and perform miracles; listening to the sexual exploits of an old friend (the strapping and lively Jonathan Walker, who doubles as a slouching, nefarious monk); or taking exception to an unprintable phrase that she’s misheard from Mother Superior, Halston is a riot.

Mother Superior must contend not only with Agnes and Acacius, but with a visiting nun from the mother house in Berlin. Voiced by Alison Fraser with a thick Germanic accent seemingly filtered through a dying kazoo, the suspicious Sister Walburga, who wears black gloves, radiates menace. Later on Fraser has the opportunity to do an outrageous Irish accent as a slatternly cleaning woman (dressed by Fabio Toblini in a sweater and skirt, with outrageously pendulous breasts; it appears to be the designer’s homage to Agnes Moorehead in Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, although it makes Moorehead’s costume look elegant). The actress is vocally brilliant at both.

The convoluted plot defies explication. Suffice it to say, it involves saving the convent by getting money from a notoriously stingy atheist, Mrs. Morris Levinson; fending off the plot of an evil albino monk with a secret that could shake the foundations of Christianity; and discovering the real parents of not one, but two, orphans. And, of course, there must be an interlude or two for Mother Superior to pick up a guitar and sing a song. At times the plot seems just a bit overburdened, but under Carl Andress's direction, the cast brings a high level of energy and commitment to the proceedings, and the parody never becomes tiresome.

Busch’s script gives everyone a plateful of comic opportunities: Walker and Levinson have a scene reading a letter from Sister Acacius in which each gets to do an impression of her. Levinson also plays a young convent student, a boy who endures teasing and bullying from students who call him a faggot, and Mother Superior offers him some indulgent solace.

Though Busch has great affection for the subject matter, he also saves a few juicy comic digs at Catholicism for himself. “A new clinic just opened around the corner, devoted to women’s health and reproductive choices,” Mother Superior informs an old flame. “We’ll see what we can do about that!”

Make It Hurt So Good

The Atheist , a solo show written by Irish playwright Roonan Noone, and starring the charismatic Campbell Scott (recently of ABC's Six Degrees ) is the Culture Project's and Circle in the Square Theatre's latest engaging and precocious brainchild, currently running at the Barrow Street Theater. The character of Augustine Early -- a newspaper reporter of Machiavellian sensibilities and a Midwestern trailer park upbringing -- is inhabited so gleefully (and with no little charm) by Campbell Scott that he manages to securely carry the audience over narrative waters that occasionally strain credibility.

Augustine cites his lack of faith in God (and the two broken legs that resulted from an early attempt to fly off of his childhood trailer) as almost a corollary to his rabid ambition. Possessed early on with an appetite for fame, he sets out already willing to walk over bodies to secure headlines (of appropriate size and font) on the front page of the newspaper.

His first slippery steps involve injecting some leading adjectives into his coverage of a rape trial. The heady rush that Augustine embodies physically upon seeing how much history depends on who is telling the story is akin to watching an addict prepare for an even stronger hit. Scott’s skill is most evident in passages like this one, as he somehow manages to present a unlikable personage as a man merely invested in presenting a sort of undeniable human logic.

The next chapters of Augustine’s sordid career involve athletic sex with an aspiring actress and a starring role in pornographic videos filmed via a tiny camera planted in her bathroom by non-other than the Governor himself. While this set-up can stretch the limits of believable convenience, it seems a natural “Aw Shucks” moment in Scott's hands as he recounts Augustine's rise to power.

And the carnage continues with blackmail of the governor, which leads to a full-time job on the paper, and internet leakage of a revealing video from the governor's private collection which ultimately aids the career of Augustine's girlfriend, the actress pejoratively known as Jenny the Jugs. (Women in this piece, and Augustine's view, seem far more one-dimensional than the men).

If all of this sets the stage for a grand-slam expose on the Governor, it also eventually leaves the governor's seemingly innocent wife open and vulnerable to succumbing to the charms of Augustine himself. Or is it the other way around?

Obviously the media's role in cultural presentation is lambasted here, and there is considerable play on the notions of victim and victimizer and image and the image creator/journalist. Perhaps that is what is signified by the film noir backdrop (created by set designer Cristina Todesco) to which the show defaults at alternating moments. It gives Augustine's image a greater life than his own for a few moments, perhaps in a sort of Plato's cave allegory.

Most of all it's fun to watch a good actor be verbally dexterous and relish playing a villain whom he presents as a man with a mission who simply lost his way. In short, The Atheist , offers an entertaining evening for journalism junkies and theatergoers alike, and represents a real acting achievement for Mr. Scott.

Connect the Dots

We crave narrative so much we see it everywhere, from the stars to the dirt. We seek out the stories of things because stories assure us that those things really do matter. And when no story exists, no matter; our imaginations connect the dots into whatever picture or pattern we desire. And so when the affable bunch of theater misfits behind Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind declare they're going to cram 30—30!—plays into 60 minutes of over-caffeinated, adrenaline-fueled downtown entertainment, the mind exclaims, "So many stories! So little time!" When they add that the audience plays an important part in picking the order in which those plays are performed—shout out a number when you hear the prompt "Curtain"—the mind simply reels.

But two minutes is hardly enough time to get the whole story, so we're invited to connect those dots and see patterns of ourselves in the dialogue, monologue, and dance. We see ourselves failing to connect, and then goofily managing to, in the wordless dance piece "Wind Up." We see our prejudices hammed up and spelled out in "Housekeeper," a biting deconstruction of liberal biases. We see and can laugh at our stubbornness and folly in the well-played "Smoldering in the Silence of an Apology."

We see our insecurities heightened into sharp, self-conscious relief during "Do-It-Yourself," a confessional between two minority actors (Yolanda Kae Wilkinson and Desiree Burch) who make a plaything of the divide between real and fake as they discuss the six new company members, almost all of whom are white. Yes, the mind says, I recognize that kind of non-PC, self-involved talk; despite the limitations of race and gender, I recognize the jealousy and the fear of encroachment, and the need to protect what's mine. I recognize it so much that I'd like the backstory, or at least the rest of the story.

But no. They've yelled "Curtain," and it's time to move on. And move on we do.

Too Much Light is the New York imprint of an improv-short play genre mash-up that began in Chicago in 1988. It requires patrons to determine their own ticket prices with the roll of a die and promises to get audience members involved in the process. Once the hour is done, someone from the audience is asked to role the die to determine how many new plays will be added to the menu the following week. Cast members collaborate, writing and fine-tuning as many as six new plays for the next show, a feat that explains the palpable energy level in the room.

On the night I saw the show, one of the most compelling plays, "East of Eden," consisted of two actors (Justin Tolley and Sarah Levy) who speak, respectively, as the narrator of a Genesis-inspired creation story and a modern-day woman. Their back-and-forth seems like the fractured dialogue between two people trapped at opposite ends of history; the male in an impersonal tone decreeing that this is how it is, while the female intimately meanders her way through a relationship.

All the while, the actors use Scotch tape to enclose an apple that has been cut in two in a square maze of lines and restrictions. Once they were done, they stopped and looked at what they had made and saw that it was pretty good. They sat in the middle of the box and taped together the apple. What exactly did it mean? Forgiveness? Resilience? The reimagination of generations-old wounds and the mending of that original rupture?

But I didn't have time to think it out. The actors yelled "Curtain" and thankfully managed to snatch me back out of myself. Back out into the space where narratives are being flirted with and discarded, like so much Scotch tape on the floor of a black stage.

Of Excess and Incest

Behind its pomp, the Italian city of Parma festers and pullulates with lust and greed. Everyone has secrets, and is faithless to them. Violence, nihilism, and corruption rule the day; love itself is just a lubricant to more swiftly fetch one to the grave. The atmosphere of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, John Ford's 17th-century classic play, is like the black calk on a mirror's back, reflecting Romeo and Juliet's lightsome and impassioned Verona in macabre distortions. Whereas Romeo and Juliet were merely star-crossed lovers, the lovers in 'Tis Pity are double-crossed as well. As dramaturge Ben Nadler writes, "In Ford's play the nurse ends her life being tortured, the friar gives up on his young ward, the clown is wrongly assassinated, and the lovers just happen to be incestuous."

A bright young scholar, Giovanni, falls in love with his innocent and beautiful sister Annabella