Plays about intense religious experience need to tread carefully, avoiding sensationalism, preaching, or mockery. It's a delicate subject, which makes the Lifeline Theatre's absorbing production of "Mariette in Ecstasy" all the more rewarding.

The Lifeline's master adapter Christine Calvit has re-created Ron Hansen's 1991 novel for the intimate Lifeline stage, where it is receiving its world premiere. It would be no surprise if this play found a healthy afterlife in regional theaters across the country following its Lifeline run. The show might even gain acceptance in the tough-minded New York theater scene with the proper sensitive staging.

Hansen sets his story in a rural upstate New York religious community for women called the Sisters of the Crucifixion. The year is 1906. The community is isolated from the outside world, existing in its own world of prayer, hard work, and daily routine. The tightly knit community has its share of gossip and jealousies, and there is a hint of subliminal lesbianism that channels itself into religious fervor.

Fracturing the quiet and regulated community life is the appearance of attractive 17-year old Mariette Baptiste. Mariette seeks to become a nun. From the outset she shows a heightened love of Jesus Christ, claiming that Jesus has often talked to her in the past. In the eyes of some of the nuns, Mariette is a model of piety worthy of adoration. In the eyes of the more skeptical and envious sisters, she is a transparent example of religious hysteria or pride.

As Mariette divides the convent into opposing camps, the internal conflict is intensified by the appearance of the stigmata on Mariette's hands and body. The play then becomes a kind of mystery story. Are the stigmata genuine miracles or a hoax perpetrated on the community by Mariette for unknown reasons? The girl seems sincere and the wounds on her hands and body heal as spontaneously as they appear. If Mariette is a fraud, she's a remarkably ingenious fraud.

The issue of the stigmata doesn't arise until the second act. Until then, the play is largely a collection of character portraits of the religious community as the nuns go about their prayers and chores in an unbroken lifestyle that may be tedious and arduous but provides comfort and structure to the lives of the sisters.

To its credit, the play and the novel offer no facile answers to the questions it raises about Mariette's stigmata and the authenticity of her devotion. At the end, Mariette is sent away from the convent into the everyday world not because she may be a deceiver but because she is a disrupter. The girl departs with regret but not bitterness, the veracity of her religious experience unresolved.

The play introduces the audience to nine members of the community, plus the community's priest. The nine women each have sharply etched distinctive personalities. The three novices, played by Sarah Goeden, Sadie Rogers, and Elizabeth Olson, are young and girlish, almost like giggling members of as college sorority instead of the rigorous Sisters of the Crucifixion. The sisters cover the spectrum from hardheaded realists who harbor serious doubts about Mariette and her "miracles' to women eager to believe in miracles and the sanctity of Mariette's belief.

The Lifeline ensemble performs superbly under Elise Kauzlaric's sensitive but unobtrusive directing. Each actor locates the individual personality of her character with spot-on accuracy, not an easy task when the actresses blend together in their identical garb of black for the novices and white for the sisters.

The company casts Brenda Barrie in the central and difficult role of Mariette. Barrie plays the teen-ager with persuasive understatement and modesty. It's difficult to believe her Mariette is a trickster or a hysteric but there is such subtlety and depth in her performance that the matter remains open ended, and properly so.

In addition to the novices, the sisters are played by Patrice Egleston as the current prioress and Mariette's older sister, Morgan McCabe as the former prioress, and Melinda Polus, Janice O'Neill, Kate McLean, and Allison Cain as the other sisters. There is a fine humane performance by Brian Perry as the community's priest and Shole Milos plays Mariette's doctor/father, a worldly man who attempts to explode his daughter's presumed "miracles.'

Alan Donahue has created an effective multi-level set that admirably establishes the various spaces within the convent. Branimira Ivanova designed the authentic-looking religious costumes and Sarah Hughey the complex lighting plan. Tim Hill is the sound designer and Joseph Burt is the musical director responsible for the splendid Gregorian chant singing by the ensemble.

"Mariette in Ecstasy" takes its place in the canon of other twentieth century plays and films that explore supernatural religious experience, like "Saint Joan," "The Song of Bernadette," and "Agnes of God." It's a play of warmth, sympathy, humor, suspense, and humanity. Well done all around.

The show gets a rating of four stars.

Back