Theater Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Church ladies
Neary mixes Catholicism and comedy
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Beyond Belief or, Catholics Are People Too!
Written and directed by Jack Neary. Set by Janie E. Howland. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Christopher Ostrom. With Bobbie Steinbach, Ellen Colton, Cheryl McMahon, Lindsay Joy, Christopher Loftus, and Robert Saoud. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through February 1.


The trio of old ladies occupying the porch in Jack Neary’s Beyond Belief are true-blue Catholics — the blueness extending to what they’re willing to discuss, which ranges from presidential blow jobs to what one of them initially dubs " homeless sexuals. " Neary invented feisty Gert, prim but prurient Marjorie, and out-of-it Alma in 1999, in a 10-minute play created for the first Boston Theater Marathon, where it was an immediate hit. That playlet, " Oral Report, " in which Gert and Marjorie coyly try to explain to Alma just what it was that Monica Lewinsky did to Bill Clinton that didn’t in his view constitute sexual relations, is the opening sketch of Beyond Belief. Neary then brings the ladies back for three more sessions on the porch, intersperses a couple of unrelated songs and sketches, throws in the crisis currently afflicting the Catholic Church, and calls it a play. There ought to be a Law against it. But then, they ran him out of town.

Don’t get me wrong. The first three porch plays are very cute, with some genuinely funny bits of blank riposte. Gert, attempting to bring Alma up to date on the derivation of the term connoting gays and lesbians, asks her friend what it means to attach the prefix " homo " to a word. To which Alma replies, bewilderedly, " Milk? " But these little comedies have almost exactly the same structure, and by the time you’ve heard three in a row, you’re convinced you could write one using a kit.

Moreover, having established Gert, Marjorie, and Alma as broad-comic (not to mention broad-accented) types, Neary cannot then make them figures of bonding, tragedy, and threatened faith, as he tries to do in the last play, " Secrets, " in which the three friends confront the recent crisis in the Church. The dime the playwright turns on is just too thin, though Ellen Colton, hilariously abstracted in her earlier turns, gives a lovely, moving performance as a now-wiser Alma, who has learned the hard way what " pedophilia " means.

Bobbie Steinbach as sweat-suited, tough-talking Gert and Cheryl McMahon as embroidered and pursed-lipped (but loving every dirty revelation) Marjorie also exhibit timing worthy of a Swiss watch. Indeed, the interplay and the expressions of the performers contribute as mightily to the porch ditties as the writing does, and director Neary calibrates it all nicely, treating his nosy, titillated, ever-decent ladies with both an elbow to the ribs and an arm around the shoulder.

The other songs and sketches in Beyond Belief just aren’t very funny. There’s a make-out session sidelined by the young man’s delusion that he’s a celibate superhero called " Catholic Man. " Robert Saoud, pushing a broom like some neighborhood janitor, wafts his way through a truly lame rewrite of " Love and Marriage " in which " Sex and Catholics " go together like oil and water. And there’s a bit in which Santa Claus, having committed a Christmas Eve indiscretion with a young mother who laid out more for him than cookies, comes to Confession. This sketch does manage to encompass the lyrics of " Santa Clause Is Coming to Town, " but if you think Saoud’s Santa is padded, check out the material.

It’s understandable that Neary, having gotten such positive feedback for Gert, Marjorie, and Alma (who again pondered the joy and inconceivability of sex in the 2000 Boston Theater Marathon), might try to turn them into a cottage industry. Look at what Dan Goggin has done with his Nunsense franchise; the porch he’s sitting on must look like the veranda at Versailles. But like the Nunsense frolics (which have been a big commercial success), Beyond Belief doesn’t get beyond its formula. And in the sub-porch plays, it doesn’t even rise to it.

Issue Date: January 9 - 16, 2003
Back to the Theater table of contents.

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us

 © 2003 Phoenix Media Communications Group