BWW Reviews: EPAC Presents a Chilling, Thought-Provoking AGNES OF GOD

AGNES OF GOD is in some ways a misleading title for a show. Although the show is undoubtedly about the novice nun in question, she's hardly the central character. She is the center of a mystery, one that another character wants to solve and the third doesn't quite want to discover the truth about.

John Pielmeier's 1982 Broadway play is currently on stage at Ephrata Performing Arts Center, where the set is as stark as the reality of the play. The starkness - a sketchy set that is supposed to be a psychiatrist's office but that also intentionally suggests a church - and the lighting are as much parts of the play as the three characters are. Those characters are Sister Agnes (Juliana Wardle), a novice nun who's just given birth and whose baby has been killed - two things both not supposed to happen in a convent, the Mother Superior - "call me Sister" - of the convent, played by Robin Payne, and Dr. Martha Livingstone (Meegan Gagnon), charged by the court to determine is Sister Agnes is insane.

How did the pregnancy happen? Who is the father? What happened, that the baby had its umbilical cord wrapped around its neck? Mother Superior wants, against all late-Twentieth-Century reason and sensibility, to believe that God is responsible somehow for the pregnancy, even if not the child's father, and that somehow, some unknown person killed the child. The audience may find itself, since it occasionally will be aghast at Mother Superior's almost-preposterous defenses of Agnes, wondering if she was the murderer, trying to hide a nun's pregnancy from scandal.

Asked to name an innocent novice nun who sings, one might ordinarily think of Sister Maria, later Baroness Maria Von Trapp, from THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Maria and Agnes are alike only in the barest details. Agnes is not at all practical, not at all schooled or educated in any way, and a survivor of hideous child abuse by her real mother that has scarred her beyond anything the convent can heal. She is no optimist and her singing is not cheerful; her beautiful voice, which calls to God in the Mother Superior's mind, is more dirge-like. She has no love for herself, no self-esteem, not because she is self-effacing but because she is psychologically damaged.

And yet she is not the central figure of the play, but the central question. The story is the battle of intellects and wills of Livingstone and the Mother Superior, both, in their own eyes, trying to protect Agnes - one by getting to the truth, and the other by mythologizing. There are secrets and lies on both sides, each of the women scarred as well by her own past. Livingstone is a rationalist-atheist former Catholic; Mother Superior lives by faith, and each wants the other to understand her point of view perfectly. But the reasons for Livingstone's lack of faith, and for Mother Superior's lack of discernment where Agnes is concerned, are mysteries of their own that each must uncover about the other.

Meegan Gagnon's Martha Livingstone is the irresistible force pushing at Mother Superior's immovable rock, and she does it more than capably, willing to tear away her own defenses in the process of trying to make herself heard and understood, possibly trying to heal her own wounds while she heals Agnes. Gagnon is willing to leave herself raw, which is the only way to play Livingstone, and she peels away the layers of the character enough to show the blood. It's a magnificent performance. Payne's Mother Superior is indeed immovable, though she's torn between showing her emotions and throwing up walls to prevent her secrets from coming out as well as to shield Agnes from her own truth. She's got stern and implacable down to a fine art here, and she's equally a pleasure to watch.

Wardle's performance as Agnes may be slightly weaker, though to her credit it's a difficult part. While she's quite splendid in the moments of Agnes' fits and breakdowns, Agnes is difficult to play when she's not so emotional; what should come across as a combination of naïve and otherworldly, just possibly saintly - or, on the other hand, completely deranged - seems a bit as if Livingstone has already started her patient on the Thorazine; she's more numb, more detached, than either ethereal or Ophelia-like. This may be the one flaw in John Gancar's otherwise excellent direction.

The one question with regard to the set is the raked stage - although it's called for, and though it's intended to signify ascent (the church trappings are upstage, the office trappings downstage), the angle of this particular set, which is quite steep, doesn't quite work for the side seats at a thrust-stage theatre, and the effort the cast puts into walking up the incline and otherwise navigating the angle is sometimes a bit too visible. Otherwise the set design, as indicated, is quite perfect for the show.

Ephrata Performing Arts Center has once again successfully brought a truly thought-provoking play to its stage. Although the subject matter now lacks the shock value it once had, and the play's plot is now well-known, the real issues underlying it - those of determining sanity, of how one's own background colors one's approaches to reality, and of what causes us to search for, and to find, faith, are still important to all of us. AGNES OF GOD is still jarring and still chilling, because these matters are buried within everyone, and because the right cast, like Gagnon and Payne, make them so raw and so close to the surface for us.

At EPAC through June 28. Call 717-733-7966 or visit www.ephrataperformingartscenter.com for tickets and information.