Stage

...In the past, he has used his taste for caricature in the interest of dramatic or visual truth...

...they even had a form of "Catholic evangelicalism" which led men and women to religious conversion and to sacramental practice...

...The playiis sprinkled with moments in which a character displays love, affection, protectiveness toward another, but the effect of the play as a whole is to suggest the impossibility of a happy relationship between a man and a woman or a healthy closeness within a family...

...Jake's mother dotes on him and tries to return him to the womb of his childhood room, evicting his sister in the process...

...Ann Wedgeworth plays Beth's mother as a gently demented women, nervously upright in her fluffy mules...

...I had not thought of Fool for Love in those terms, although the comedy in it, as in the other Shepard plays, is often center stage...

...With Notre Ill I THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC EXPERIENCE A HISTORY FROM COLONIAL TIMES TO THE PRESENT Jay P. Dolan Doubleday, $19.95, 504 pp...

...Not only religious historians but historians of immigration, labor, education, the family, and women have provided valuable new information about the American Catholic experience...

...GERALD WEALES Books: A MURAL IN PROGRESS D t~ING the last fifteen years professor Jay P. Dolan of Notre Dame has led a revival of American Catholic historical studies...

...The heart of the book lies in Dolan's subsequent discussion of the immigrant church from 1820 to 1920...

...The play, as one expects with Shepard, is absorbing, but a kind of attenuation has set in...

...On the night that I saw A Lie of the Mind, Harvey Keitel was out of the cast...

...A major new Shepard play is always an occasion, but A Lie Commonweal: 86of the Mind seems to have extended Shepard's staying power without enriching his art...

...Parishes continued to arise most often from lay initiative...

...Shepard has been having a run on peculiar mothers -- in Curse, in Buried Child, in True West -- but the two in A Lie of the Mind win blue ribbons for eccentricity...

...It has no images as sharp and compelling as the corn shucking in Buried Child or the nude man with the lamb in Curse of the Starving Class...

...There is incident aplenty...

...Lay leadership was less apparent among Italians and Hispanics, who also brought a more family-centered style of religion which maintained channels to the divine, independent of the church...

...In the new play, he cuts back and forth between two families and their homes on opposite ends of the stage, jumping from one painful or comic sequence to the next...

...on the other side, Frankie and Beth embrace in an ending that would be a more comforting final clinch if her parents were not laboriously folding an American flag into the triangle that suggests a funeral...

...in the process, Raymond lost script as well as bed linen and had to scramble around to retrieve the' pages, which he did without ever losing Jake or his histrionic bad temper...

...The event that triggers the minimal action of Lie is Jake's jealous beating of his wife, which sends him back to his home thinking he has killed Beth, and sends her, brain-damaged but slowly recovering, to her family...

...Jake has made his way from California to Montana -- that is, has crossed the stage -- where, after having been tortured by Beth's brother, he begs everyone's pardon and gives Beth to Frankie...

...The book complements James Hennesey's American Catholics, the only other current general history...

...Since Shepard directed Lie and presumably chose the performers, the excessiveness in the production must be what he wants...

...Beth's father shoots Jake's brother, mistaking him for a deer, when Frankie comes to see if Beth is alive or dead...

...Avoid-' ing the simplistic reductionism of earlier forms of social history, Dolan took faith seriously...

...His replacement as Jake was Bill Raymond, who had just been hired as understudy and had to work with script in hand...

...He is still working in short scenes, as he has been since he turned up off-offBroadway in the 1960s...

...At one point, he stiffens like a board and falls flat on his back...

...After all, he seems to have built his performance as Eddie in the Fool for Love film out of bits and pieces of Gary Cooper...

...While overwlaelmingly working class, ethnic groups usually found middle-class lay leaders who played a crucial role in organizing the community...

...and the mutilated Jake and his mutilator are somewhere in between, each self-exiled from his uncongenial family circle...

...Both homes are loveless, Jake's father having long since walked out on his mother and died in a drunken accident for which Jake may have been responsible...

...Continued on page 89) 14 February 1986:87...

...As a graduate student under Martin Mart), at the University of Chicago, Dolan decided to apply the techniques of the "new social history" to American Catholicism...

...His first book, The Immigrant Church (1968) resulted from almost four years research on parish life in pre-Civil-War New...

...they met human needs and assisted adjustment to American culture...

...With A Lie of the Mind the cartoon quality of the characters becomes pervasive, so much so that the knockabout often robs the play of the kind of powerful image that Shepard so often comes up with when a potentially comic situation or character turns suddenly painful or lyric...

...Now Dolan has drawn together the results of that research into a comprehensive social history of American Catholicism...

...Dolan examines the church from the point of view of the people...

...Will Patton, as Beth's brother, gives a frenetic physical performance as though the character's anger has gone to the actor's nerve ends...

...His second book, Catholic Revivalism (1975) examined parish missions...

...It is possible, I suppose, that Raymond's presence disoriented the production to some extent, but the disconcerting broadness in so much of the show was clearly a deliberate decision of Shepard and his cast...

...In the final moment, Beth's mother looks across the stage and comments on the fire which is presumab!y burning hundreds of miles away, thus providing the connection-disconnection image which indicates that the lie of the mind is not simply the false promise of love, but the geography of shared loss...

...David O~ Dame's help, he established the Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism which has sponsored publication of a string of excellent monographs by Notre Dame Press, offered small fellowships to research scholars, provided information on current research through an excellent newsletter, published a series of"working papers" arising from an ongoing seminar at Notre Dame, and held several excellent conferences, including one this fall on "Catholicism and American Culture...

...This led him to the study of popular religion, already well advanced in Europe but not yet applied to American Catholic subjects...

...nor does it manage the intensity of True West or Fool for Love, even though many of the scenes are two-person encounters...

...Geraldine Page, as Jake's mother, mugs and punches relentlessly, as though she were finally getting a chance to perfect her Made Dressler imitation, a reading which should suit Shepard...

...In addition to his own pioneering work, Dolan assumed leadership in the historical profession...

...Beth's mother is servant and burden to her husband, a Montana rancher who seems to prefer the deer he hunts to his family...

...there might be religious as well as functional reasons why Catholicism worked...

...All of the characters are overstated, but none of them has quite the flamboyance of the two mothers...

...Here the serious side of the play is so compromised by the cartoon atmosphere that Shepard sometimes seems to be mocking the themes that have given substance and force to so much of his recent work...

...Vincent Canby, reviewing the movie version of Fool for Love (New York Times, December 15, 1985), called the original play "a live-action Maggie and Jiggs cartoon for which there is no exit," a label that he intends as descriptive, not pejorative, since he admires the play in preference to the film...

...At the end of the play Jake's mother, on one side of the stage, is burning her house down and getting ready to go to Ireland with her daughter to visit probably non-existent relatives...

...Abandoning a chronological for a thematic framework, he examines parish life, religious beliefs, education, charities, and social action...

...From this perspective, Dolan offered new insight into American urban life and some tentative answers to the question of Catholic success: why did this apparently European and very conservative church not only survive but thrive in American cities of the nineteenth century...

...While Hennesey recognizes the importance of social history, his survey concentrates on the institutional church and on religious ideas...

...When I used the adjective minimal with action, I intended to suggest that there was no dramatic development of importance...

...He knew the business, he knew the character...

...York...

...Jake throws a tantrum, knocking a bowl of soup out of his mother's hand and ripping his bed apart...

...Given the complexity of immigrant adjustment to American society, and the diversity of classes and ethnic groups which made up the church, few firm generalizations are possible, but with admirable modesty Dolan succeeds in offering a picture of American Catholic life at the family, neighborhood, and parish level...

...Catholics, it turned out, had revivals, just like Protestants...

...he even knew most of the lines, and the pages he carried interfered with his performance only once...

...Beth, who perceives in fragmentary ways, decides to marry Frankie and gets herself tarted up for the occasion...

...Among other immigrants, the congregational parish of the republican period was replaced by "the devotional parish," organized around religious activities which required the services of the priest...

...Over the course of the last decade innumerable scholars have benefited from the Center's services...

...The most startling thing about A Lie of the Mind is the broad comedy in it...

...Shepard is on familiar ground in A Lie of the Mind, dealing once again with the disintegration of the American family, as in Curse and Child, and with the violence and mutability of sexual love, as in Fool for Love...

...Dolan wrote this history "from the bottom up," as the social historians put it, examining baptismal and marriage records, census data, newspapers, sermons, catechisms, devotional manuals, all to provide a detailed account of how Irish and German parishes were organized and paid for, which people joined them and why, what parishioners believed and how they passed their faith on to their children...

...at another he throws himself on the ground and drags himself under the step in a single fine sweep of exasperation...

...After excellent chapters on the colonial period, including a superb portrait of Catholic life in colonial Maryland, Dolan explains how Catholicism in the early national period experienced a "republican interlude" marked by lay initiative, a congregational church polity and a personalist spirituality centered less on the church than on the individual's relationship with God...

...Combined with the organizational requirements of American pluralism and the centralization of power and authority which flowed from Vatican I, the new devotionalism created a very priestcentered church and a spirituality which emphasized sin, ritual, and "religious practice...