Stage

...Francis's undressing in the street and, at the end, he divests himself of his robes, steps out of the pulpit and speaks the saint's words directly to the congregation/audience, "Let us begin...

...The dramatic truth of Mass Appeal, the quality that makes it so attractive as a theater piece, lies in the relationship between the two men, the slow-growth of respect, affection, love even, and the sense of loss when Mark's high expectations of the older man are disappointed...

...Father Farley announces with regret that Sister Rosalie's Maryknoll Marionettes will not be able to perform the morning service...

...In the curtain raiser to the play, The Actor's Nightmare-a standard Durang parody pastiche which, against my better judgment, I often found funny-the baffled protagonist talks about having been an altar boy and about all the people he knows who went to Catholic school...

...The insulated life he has built for himself is not as easeful as he pretends it is, and he uses wine, the thoughtful gift of appreciative parishioners, to disguise the truth from himself...

...There are suggestions now and then that such a process is underway - moments of pleased response to Father Farley - but Mark's role is exemplary in this story of the teacher taught...

...Mark complains that his Sunday school teacher used Peanuts as a text so diligently that he thought for years that Christ was a beagle...

...Michael O'Keefe, who did such a good job as the son in The Great Santini, told a New York News interviewer recently that he likes the role of Mark Dolson because it gives him a chance to play a character who is not having an identity crisis: "He knows where he's been, what he wants and is absolutely straightforward.'' I suspect that that is a limitation in the play, that Mark should be learning even as his implacability leads the priest to face himself...

...I can imagine a devastating comedy about the worst aspects of Catholic education, c. 1950, but Durang is more cartoonist than comedian...

...One such creature can be found in Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You...

...In David's title there are many puns...

...The scenes with the little boy are less successful whether she is surreptitiously fondling him or rewarding him with cookies for knowing his catechism...

...It is a familiar enough human encounter-father-son, teacher-student-and the play is successful somewhere to the secular side of its deeper concerns...

...There is no evidence on stage of either Father Farley's past or Mark's present faith...

...Father Farley, a street preacher in his youth, sees some of his lost fervor in Mark and sets out to educate (domesticate) him enough to let him survive the seminary and achieve ordination because - he says at a first-act curtain - the church needs such lunatics...

...as presented here the nun has the credibility of Miss Piggy in love...

...Mark Dolson is a prickly young man, who does good, speaks his mind and manages to upset both Father Farley's congregation and the staff of the seminary...

...One of the difficulties is that so much is told us in the play and not enough shown us...

...he adds, almost as an afterthought, "I don't know any Catholic adults...

...Sister Mary Ignatius explains why...

...matters of deep spiritual signficance may be easier to envision, to hear in Canterbury just before the martyrdom than in an urban Irish parish over a glass of the bubbly...

...it would be easier to take seriously this somewhat genteel version of the whiskey priest if the author and the director (Geraldine Fitzgerald) did not play his multiple wine caches as an audience-pleasing joke...

...Durang retreats from direct didacticism into black farce as the pistol-toting Sister Ignatius starts knocking off her pedagogical failures...

...His Sister Mary Ignatius, played with a fine touch of malevolent lunacy by Elizabeth Franz, is pure caricature, and often very funny in the early sections of the play when she answers, edits, or ignore questions that have presumably been handed in by the audience...

...Early in the play he discusses the significance of St...

...TIM, SISTER SADE ANGUISH & ANGER Shortly after the phenomenal success of Going My Way in 1944, strangers took to stopping Barry Fitzgerald on the street to tell that Protestant boyo that only a good Catholic like him could have been so convincing as the crochety old priest...

...Similarly, it is not easy to accept Mark Dolson as the "man of compassion" O'Keefe says he is...

...Father Farley cannot save Mark from the official disapproval of the head of the, seminary, but he does speak out at the end, risks offending his parishioners not only by defending Mark but by exposing his own loss of faith and the concomitant withdrawal from genuine human contact...

...I suspect something less serious...

...The comparison may be unfair...

...Going My Way came to mind, I suppose, because Mass Appeal concerns the confrontation between a priest and a seminarian (in the film it was a younger priest...

...Judging by these two plays and the earlier A History of the American Film, Durang is a satirist whose vision is impaired by two many years of pop culture and an impulse to go for the gag instead of the jugular...

...Milo O'Shea's Father Farley, whether he is in the parlor or in the pulpit, is a nicely conceived character, at once funny and defensive, but-even though the final moments are theatrically effective-I have a little trouble feeling, believing in his spiritual anguish...

...We get the biographies of the two men...

...1 take comfort in that bit of show-business history as I set out to review for the readers of Commonweal two plays on - stretch a point - Catholic education...

...It is possible that Durang believes that there is a mass murderer hidden in every knuckle-rapper or-to make a metaphor of his demonic finale-that Catholic education of this variety is destructive...

...we get direct statements about Father Farley's loss of faith, about Mark's love for the people in the congregation...

...I do not presume to know how a playwright and his performers can convey such a thing, but one might begin by listening to Robert Donat's voice break on Thomas a Becket's "soul's sickness" speech in the recording of Murder in the Cathedral...

...The play goes to pieces with the arrival of the accusatory former students, particularly the one who hates Sister Mary Ignatius because she believed the teacher...

...Although Mass Appeal has its share of soft sentiment and easy laughs, . Bill C. Davis's play wants to do something more than wring our hearts...

...These jokes may not be exaggerations, but they represent only the idiot end of a continuum which, in its healthier sections, would free the church from old rigidities which have less to do with doctrine than with the political,social, sexual prejudices of the men and women who confuse spiritual leadership with martinetism...

...if it were not for Franz's air of unending surprise, the latter joke would have become tedious much earlier than it does...

...Father Tim Farley is a likable and well-liked priest, a teller of cozy tales and comfortable jokes, whose ministry is based on desire to sidestep disturbing situations and issues...

...GERALD WEALES...

...The church that has created and been created by Father Farley in Mass Appeal, that cries out for Mark's lunatic, for the new beginning, is an institution that has been trivialized to make God and Christ charmingly accessible as in a television advertisement which elicits faith (in a soap powder, say) by preaching through entertainment...