The Trying Nun

Having been educated in a suburban public school rather than in a Catholic school, I admit I’ve never understood the fascination with making nuns into entertainment. Though movies like The Trouble with Angels (starring a rowdy Hayley Mills sneaking cigarettes in the church basement) and various productions of Nunsense and Sister Mary Ignatius have amused me over the years, I towed a good ex-Catholic along to Late Night Catechism, which opened last week as the first coproduction of the Theater League and Union Station.

My friend’s upbringing in Northeast Kansas City and upstate New York left him with wounds a Methodist kid like me can’t fathom. I wasn’t even sure what catechism meant, but right from the start, everyone in attendance was there for one: a class in dogma that alternately plays like a game show and an interactive performance-art piece — and a class in dogma. Vicki Quade and Maripat Donovan’s script assumes that audience members may have had Protestant, Jewish or otherwise-affiliated upbringings, and leads them by hand into the weird, wacky world of parochial education.

Kimberly Richards plays the nun at the blackboard, filling in for an absent priest. (No fair assuming what he’s up to.) The theater is transformed as much as possible into a classroom, though, thank God, we don’t have to sit at those sadistic school desks. The lights never go down, allowing Sister to spot flagrant gum chewers, talkers and cheaters. She demands a buck or two from particularly disobedient students, with the proceeds going to support (buy, really) pagan babies overseas.

Sister throws out pop quizzes on vocabulary words such as limbo and immaculate conception, and hands out prizes like glow-in-the-dark rosary beads for correct answers — a part of the show that’s guided by a script but dependent on the improvisational skills of the audience. When she’s not interacting with the house, though, the evening slows to a crawl, and the lectures interspersed among the high jinks feel like a college class that fights sleep for dominance.

Richards is well-cast but may be too genial to really ignite the show. My friend remembers seeing an earlier production in which Sister was quite a bit crankier — and, in his memory, funnier. Many in the audience (parochially trained, I suspect) howled with delight, as nostalgic baby boomers are wont to do when they’re reminded — from a distance — of times marked by Dickensian cruelty. When the show began to deplete its tank, Sister made an open call to the audience, asking people to share their stories of being whacked with rulers; after that, there was an open question-and-answer period. By then, the night was running on fumes.

Quade and Donovan have obviously tweaked the show over the years, adding references to J. Lo and the Survivor series but leaving creaky references to, say, Crystal Gayle untouched. It’s asking a lot of one performer to engage an audience for two hours, and Richards earns a solid B-. She’s never less than in charge and has a respectable rapport with the audience. During the stories of Saint Victoria and some of the others so beatified, though, minds may wander.

Postscript: Kansas natives striving to make an impression in Los Angeles don’t have to be homesick. The not-for-profit Kansas Connection is an organization of writers, actors and other industry folks whose mission is “to simultaneously promote and support Kansas professionals in the entertainment industry.”

“A lot [of the group’s members] are from Overland Park, some are from Wichita, but they are from all over the state,” says the group’s Judy-Anne Goldman, a former Kansas Citian herself. “Our president is from Liberty, Kansas. And a lot of our actors have a strong presence in the Los Angeles stage community.” Among the head shots on their Web site (kansasconnection.org) are former Miss Kansas USA Kathryn Taylor and rugged stuntman Shawn Patrick Nash, along with familiar faces from television and film.

Kansas Connection holds quarterly meetings and a puts on a screenplay-reading series. But it’s not all academic — there’s plenty of schmoozing. “There are pool parties and a summer barbecue,” Goldman says. “Kansas City Masterpiece and Gates have sponsored it in the past. In fact, I pulled out the Gates sauce last week for some chicken.”

Now writing and directing, Goldman says she worked on the area’s two biggest film shoots of the past fifteen years, Article 99 and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge — “and lots of TV movies.” Seven members of the group were in Kansas City last weekend, with film credits in some of the Kansas City Filmmaker’s Jubilee offerings, and several will convene this weekend at House of Blues Hollywood to coincide with the Kansas Film Commission’s appearance at the annual Location Expo in Santa Monica.

But really, why do Kansans feel compelled to maintain such a group? “I think we’re just solid people with clear goals, a lot of drive and intuitiveness — that Midwestern work ethic,” Goldman says. “Yet there’s a cosmopolitan perspective at the same time.”