THE STAGE

...The play seems at first to worry about the role of the church in relation to its parishioners and about the struggle between the two ways of approaching God that Charles Williams called the Ways of the Affirmation and the Negation of Images, but the doctrinal differences are revealed as a vehicle for suppressed sexuality...

...As Nancy Donohue plays her, Sister Rita seems constantly in motion, a gush of words, a shower of gesture that bathes Father Rivard and Mrs...

...The courtroom scenes, in their turn, break whatever emotional force the growing love between the principals might have been expected to produce as unacknowledged passion begins to fracture the characters' self-defined exteriors...

...By the end of the play, we see that Sister Rita is not really a humanizing influence in a church of rules, but that she is a nun by default, almost by accident, that she wants a home not the church, a family not a vocation, a particular not a generalized love...

...In the big scene, the one that we have been teasingly promised for so much of the play, Father Rivard declares his love and then withdraws it, and Sister Rita moves from the burble of expectation to the scream of frustration...

...Confusion of purpose aside, the play and the production have some technical problems...

...Sister Rita, who arrives lilac in hand, is a toucher, physically and spiritually, a believer in God's beautiful world, a teacher of joy not pain...

...The runner who stumbles over Sister Rita is the boy who runs away from his own crippling compassion-in a childhood story he tells about diphtheria's wiping out most of his family-to escape into the austerity of withdrawal from human contact...

...the mystery is solved in an off-hand way when the priest's lawyer remembers seeing lights up at the deserted rectory and hauls in the missing housekeeper for the obligatory witness-stand confession...

...We do meet a couple of parishioners and a visiting cliche from the bishop's office, a fastidious bureaucrat of a monsignor, but the center of the play lies with the theological and sexual triangle of priest, nun and housekeeper...

...DOING SISTER IN THE STAGE In an article in the New York Times [June 15], the story of Milan Stitt's The Runner Stumbles and its eleven-year journey from Yale Drama School script to Broadway production, Richard Eder reports that Stitt's first agent complained that Runner was really two plays, one about conflicts within the Catholic Church, the other a murder mystery...

...But it is even more splintered than that two-way split suggests...

...I was reminded of the woman who spouts tears in Chaplin's A Dogs Life and was moved, not to weeping as Give Barnes was, but to speculation about the performer's facility...

...Shandig in demanding affection...

...Father Rivard is something of a problem...

...Since the play is essentially conventional in form, it might better have dispensed with the shifting focus, a device which many plays-James Baldwin's The Blues for Mr...

...The courtroom drama, skeleton of the play, is an excuse for the flashbacks, but it has no melodramatic tension in its own right...

...Stitt has borrowed from Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip (Father Rivard mentions photographs of babies in coffins as though they were grotesque horror fetishes and not the simple mourning pictures that he could have found among Catholics too...

...He seems as cold and distant as Sister Rita thinks he is, acting distress not anguish, and the final jet of tears that he manages is less a culmination than a technician's trick...

...even when Donohue comes to rest, she seems always about to lift off again...

...It still is...

...Set in 1911 on the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, where the real murder on which the play is based took place, The Runner Stumbles is about a tiny Catholic community, isolated from the alien and hostile Protestant towft near which it is situated, the town itself cut off from the larger world by geography, weather, prejudice and platitudes...

...gerald weales...

...When we learn about his lost love for the girl with sausage curls, about his difficulties wth the diocesan conservatives, he comes across as a runner always stumbling, and the priest that Sister Rita faces has not enough validity, philosophically or personally, to provide a fit antagonist for the young nun...

...To make matters worse, Stephen Joyce's Father Rivard is no banked fire about to burst into flames...

...He is purposely cold and distant, on the assumption that the priest is a figure set apart and that the church's job is to provide rules for conduct in a world in which only pain is to be expected...

...He is also kind and understanding beneath his rigidity, and he was exiled to this remote (I almost wrote "godforsaken") parish because he was an embarrassment to the diocese in his enthusiastic disregard for rules...

...Sounding a bit 1960s for a nun in 1911, she considers herself a person first, a nun second...

...Charlie, for instance-have shown to be more effective for didactic than for dramatic purposes...

...The community consists, for dramatic purposes, of Father Rivard, Sister Rita and Mrs...

...In retrospect, so much that seemed charming about her early in the play becomes incipiently hysterical, and Donohue's Sister Rita emerges as a complete character, the central figure in a tragedy of an unfulfilled human being...

...This dichotomy is dramatically important since the first of the Father Rivards is to be tested by Sister Rita with the reluctant support of his hidden other self, but Stitt loads us with so much biographical material that the priest refuses to take shape...

...Serious, earnest, almost prim, The Runner Stumbles is an unusual play to find on Broadway these days, but it remains more an anomaly than an artistic or intellectual experience...

...In the process, however, what she stands for in the ideational play disappears, the human impulse in the house of rules becomes not an alternative approach to mission but a mask for sexual and social longing...

...Shandig, the priest's housekeeper...