Mind games II

Agnes of God is still a blank slate

January 29, 2008 4:12:00 PM

Absolute opinions, whether divinely or intellectually inspired, can ironically lead to confusion rather than certainty. That’s the thrust of John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God, now being staged at Providence College (through February 3).

The 1982 play was based on an occurrence in Rochester, New York, a few years before. The facts that correspond to the play are that a nun gave birth to a baby that she killed and placed in a wastebasket in her room. She denied memory of not only the birth and murder, but even of her pregnancy, which had been hidden by her nun’s habit.

Although the real-life nun was well-educated — a teacher, in fact — the playwright made her more interesting by wiping away all but two influences, turning her into a blank slate. This Agnes (Sarah Bedard) was kept isolated by her mother, kept out of school until she entered the convent of a contemplative order at 17, four years before the incident, never having read a book or seen a television program.

The other two people in the play are her Mother Superior, Mother Miriam Ruth (Nancy Anastadis), and her court-assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Livingstone (Malika Jones). A tug of war ensues, threatening to rend not only the fragile mind of the young novice but the truth of what occurred.

The playwright doesn’t resist the melodramatic opportunities offered by the situation, and he even adds a few, in case the stakes aren’t emotionally charged enough. The chain-smoking psychiatrist, for example, had a young sister who died in a convent because medical attention wasn’t sought. For her part, Mother Miriam doesn’t approve of psychiatry. “You’re a surgeon,” she says, “and I don’t want that mind cut open.” When that does happen, all sorts of things slither and flap out of the tortured imaginings of Agnes. Her mother had abused her, in ways that would make any child break away from reality for survival.

Agnes is presented as a Holy Fool, singing hymns in an ethereal voice, yet insisting when complimented that the songs didn’t come from her. The intensity of her devotion, or delusion, has even resulted in dripping stigmata, mysteriously appearing holes straight through her palms. She angrily accuses the psychiatrist of wanting to take God away from her and says to Dr. Livingstone that God won’t listen to her, “because you don’t listen to Him.”

This isn’t a play to prompt profound thoughts about the nature of miracles and faith, if only because the source of such inspiration is, well, a psychopath. Pielmeier apparently would like to provoke such a conversation, but that doesn’t really happen here. Neither does this play carry a brief against religion. The psychiatrist is an avowed atheist, yet she chirps optimistically that “God isn’t out there. God is you — or rather, you are God.”

Neither is the play a whodunit, by the end. On the likely date of conception — determined by Agnes destroying bloody sheets that didn’t coincide with her period — there were no males at the convent, nary a potentially culpable altar boy. (In the case that the play is based on, the nun had attended a teachers’ conference at the pertinent time.) This muddies the plot waters, since it’s hard to assign religious significance to a virgin birth, or even parthenogenesis, happening to an hysteric.

Psychological conclusions are the only ones we can draw. In the first words of the play, Dr. Livingstone says that when she was a child she wished so hard for happy endings that she convinced herself that there existed somewhere a hidden last reel of the film Camille, in which Greta Garbo doesn’t died of consumption. Pielmeier doesn’t root her theological observations any more deeply.

Bedard gives Agnes a convincingly earth-bound innocence, not reducing her to a human Bambi; Amastadis makes the Mother Superior a strong-minded woman but not off-puttingly arrogant. As the shrink, Jones similarly reigns in the role, although self-righteousness comes through more than compassion. Director John Garrity has placed the audience in bleachers on three sides of the characters, looking accusingly down at them in a small performance space that is empty except for the psychiatrist’s chair. That creates an intimacy and immediacy very appropriate for this small, intense play. Agnes of God takes place in the imagination more than on a stage, after all.