Is A Rare Bird With A Captive Audience

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — This year, with its jointly running productions of Menopause the Musical and Late Nite Catechism, Long Wharf Theatre is pragmatically attempting to boost its revenue by filling its normally empty-for-the-summer theater seats with audiences who do not normally subscribe to the New Haven repertory company’s regular season.

The idea is to go with a bunch of friends for a good time and lots of laughs, prompted by jokes and details that strike a familiar chord in the minds of many.

Menopause is a huge success, albeit largely with women over the age of 40, because it offers a quartet of highly talented performers, and a non-stop hit parade of evocative songs from our past, reworked with hilarious lyrics. What’s not to enjoy?

Vicki Quade and Maripat Donovans’ Late Nite Catechism is somewhat different.

Featuring Denise Fennell as the supremely complacent Sister, this is a one-woman, “interactive” recreation of an adult catechism class, required for those lapsed or indifferent Catholics who suddenly want to become godparents. Like reluctant attendees who have been sentenced to safe driving or anger management classes, ticket-holders find themselves members of a captive audience who are going to be brought in line by an old style (pre-Vatican II) parochial school third-grade teacher.

There have been a number of shows that rely on the immediate reflex reaction that many people have to long black habits and starched white wimples they remember from childhood. The tremendously successful Dan Goggins’ Nunsense (and all its spinoffs) is a kindly farce that allows he sisters to sing, dance and perform variety burlesque. In contrast, Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All is an angry and cynical portrait of abuses of power, both physical and intellectual.

Catechism fits neither of these categories. Rather, it belongs to the kind of fond self-mockery that sometimes pervades African-American or Jewish humor, playing on stereotypes and prejudices. This is in no way an anti-Catholic show, but its main character is totally devoted to the kinds of surface trappings that are most easily ridiculed, as in Sister’s devotion to plaster (or plastic) statues, and her cheerfully horrific accounts of  martyrdom by blessed saints, as well as her use of public humiliation of students as a means of classroom control.

Fennell is definitely convincing, and she had her audience laughing as she made her unfortunate victims squirm, when she singled them out for whispering or inappropriate dress, while rewarding others with special prizes from the religious objects store.

Probably the idea behind the show is that Catholics can laugh because they know implicitly that the true religion is totally opposite to what Sister, in her dogmatically rigid concreteness, imagines it to be. Further, you don’t have to be Catholic to recognize a form of classroom control that was once quite common.

Still, this was kind of a one trick pony, whose success depends on the anxiety of each person in the audience hoping to escape Sister’s notice, even though they laugh with relief when she picks on somebody else.

The night we saw it the audience included a group of about sixty real nuns from Mount Carmel. Some of them appeared to like it, but they all seemed a lot more merciful than Sister.

(Performances continue through August 26. Call 203-787-4282 or visit LongWharf.org for details.)