Just some pecking cardinals

Last Confession, by David Crane: The Pope and friends argue through an intense thread of crime and intrigue.

If nothing else, I know my dad would hate this play. He would have a cow. He would have thrown down the pages and, full of righteous indignation, gone straight to his favorite online Catholic book supplier to buy an arsenal of commentaries on the term of Pope John Paul I. As soon as he could get his hands on some citations, there would be a slew of editorials, op-eds, and letters to Catholic magazines unearthing the heresy on Broadway. He would start angry arguments with everyone—that’s his favorite part of being religious—but this play would always make him feel uncomfortable because it would force him to divorce dogma and true belief, and as we know, divorce is not allowed in the Catholic church.

That, among other things, is why I thought the play was great.

I wasn’t sure about it at first. The number of characters is a little daunting, and in the beginning the long conversations didn’t always keep my full attention. By the time it progressed a few scenes, though, I was completely taken in. Benelli’s weakness made him all the more appealing, and whatever kind of person Villot was in real life, it will be hard to reconcile him as a good person in my mind after the way he was portrayed here.

In my very Catholic family, it was always assumed that religious leaders exist on some kind of higher plane than all the regular Joes, and until you’re officially ordained as something or other, you can’t really aspire to be anybody particularly holy. This play does a terrific job of pointing out that in the end, religious leaders are still just people. The Pope eats too much candy. He hides from cardinals he wants to avoid talking to. Even members of the Vatican wonder sometimes if there’s really a God. As for John Paul, I think he was radical, but man was he on the mark. I hope he was everything this play makes him out to be.

Regardless of any preconceptions I had going in, I ended up with an almost Stoppardian feeling of relativism at the end. Everything is relative: the dogma of the Church, the importance of tradition, the legacy of a Pope. Everything depends on your perspective. I loved it. If you enjoy The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, this one might also be a good choice. It’s the same feeling of suspense amid clashing values where everyone makes a mess in the name of saving the Church.

After I finished reading, I actually wound up doing some of my own research into the term of Pope John Paul--not for argument’s sake, just because I was interested. While the information about the conspiracy theories is pretty tenuous,reading the play at least makes you feel like you have some kind of inside track. You also start to wonder what they really do around the Vatican all day. I really recommend this one highly for anyone--just maybe not my dad.

A few more than fifty

50 Words, by Michael Weller: Jan and Adam's night of total marital explosion.

There are some plays I've read that just make me feel naïve. When I start reading, I go along with the plot, thinking, “What an interesting play. What unhappy characters. Glad it isn’t real.”

After a while, though, if the play is good, there are lines here and there that jump out at you. You hear them like they started in my own head instead of on paper. Then you make excuses: “This is someone else’s life. Someone might have problems like that, but it could never be me.” The same kind of excuses I make when I'm watching the news. I see something terrible that’s happened to someone halfway across the country, and I think, “Man, that’s awful,” and keep flipping channels.

If it’s a great play, though, it’s too hard to keep making excuses--there’s nothing left to do except shrug and think, “Oh yeah, I guess that does happen. It could happen to anyone, even maybe someone like me." FIFTY WORDS was a great play. I didn’t want it to be, but I bought into it. I believed it. And it's scary.

Realism here is never a problem. I’ve seen couples just like this, who miss understanding each other by one angry comment or one sarcastic remark every time. They argue, but never actually say anything because neither one is willing to communicate. I’ve been in relationships like that.

Very often, the women are the worst. As a member of the club, I can say honestly that most of us have Jan’s attitude. Women don’t ever want to tell you how they feel; men should already know. We want compliments, just so we can deny them and force men to say them again, all the while asserting our own modesty. Men, on the other hand, should never need compliments. They should simultaneously want to spoil us like children and treat us like intellectual and moral superiors. Even though I know I’ve been guilty of it, it still irks me to see it in print. As bad as Adam is in the play for cheating, I liked him better than Jan. For all my morals and thou-shalt-nots, I liked him better. I’m really annoyed at myself about that.

The tipping point for me was that Jan didn’t expect Adam not to cheat, she just expected him not to let her find out. I can’t understand that attitude. And it's at that point when you stop being sympathetic--when she admits she would rather live in a lie than know the truth she doesn’t want to hear.

Whatever your opinions about marriage are, the universal issue that this play really gets at is one we all struggle to understand: the sometimes invisible and seemingly impossible transition from a good relationship to one that doesn’t work anymore. Don't expect this one to affirm your notions about great, lasting relationships, but expect to gain some perspecitve into what makes good relationships good, and when it's really time to throw in the towel.

Eddie and Grandma

Edward Albee's The Sandbox:

It's never a good idea to start with unrealistic ambition. 

Oh well.

I picked up The Sandbox after two-hundred and twenty-three bruisingly dysfunctional pages of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and was sure that there couldn't be the same kind of dramatic ambiguity in some little fifteen page one-act. It's practically a skit, I pish-poshed. Eddie wouldn't do that. 

 Well, Eddie would. Granted, it's not incoherent; his dedication gives away pretty much the whole thing, in fact. Mommy is appallingly mean to Grandma in her feeble old age. Grandma, wiser than Mommy and Daddy suspect, gives her charming performance of decline in a sandbox that reminds me alarmingly of the litter-box my cat sleeps in when she's angry. Done and done.

I'm afraid, though, that there's one point that keeps sticking me. I'm pretty sure that even the better informed theater-goer would not look at the cast on stage and peg the hunky guy in the short shorts as the Angel of Death. Luckily, the reader gets the memo when the character is introduced ("He [Mr. Speedo] is, after all, the Angel of Death"), and the audience is also privy to a subtle window on his character ("Young Man: Hi, I am the Angel of Death."). Not exactly Albee's usual vagueries.

But I can't keep criticizing because, you know, it's Albee. And it has a number of perfectly redeeming qualities; minus the on-stage calisthenics I enjoyed reading it a lot. Grandma is deliciously quirky, Mommy is more realistic than we'd care to admit, and hey, Mr. Speedo certainly doesn't hurt the scenery. Technically, the scene is also clear--the characters are well understood for the most part, and the dramatic action is plainly evident. 

I may get the guts to tackle one of his more major works at some point, but for now, a little sand and family cruelty are a big enough first bite.