Requiem for a Nun (by William Faulkner) is a journey through the dark night of the soul with a hint of dawn beyond. Its characters do not have the stature for tragedy, yet it is dense with guilt, pity and terror, and it frequently grips the audience in its palm like sinners in the hands of an angry God.
"Yes, Lawd. Guilty, Lawd. Thank you, Lawd," says Nancy Mannigoe, lifting her eyes serenely above the Mississippi bar of justice at which she stands condemned for throttling a six-month-old infant to death in its crib. Nancy is a Negro ex-prostitute, but her crime is a mere postscript to the horror-gorged life of her mistress, the dead child's mother, who is enslaved to the devil in the flesh. Mrs. Gowan Stevens was formerly Temple Drake, society-girl heroine of Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, to which Requiem for a Nun is a sequel. While the law has dealt with Nancy, it is the Furies of the past that hound Temple Drake.
Goaded by her uncle-in-law (implacably played by Zachary Scott), Temple tells all in a flashback confessional. It is a litany of lust and degradation. Eight years before, Temple had been kidnaped by a spiderish hoodlum named Popeye, kept six weeks in a Memphis brothel, and ''loved it." ("Nun" is a 19th century word for whore.) A year later Temple married the slack-spined Virginia gentleman, Gowan Stevens, who had been too drunk at the time of the kidnaping to protect her. It is only when Temple proposes to relive the bad old days with an ex-lover's younger brother that Nancy pleads with her to break the cycle of evil for the sake of her two children, and with the reasoning of utter despair kills the younger child to save a home for the elder.
At play's end Temple Drake begs Nancy's forgiveness. "Believe," says Nancy. "Only God can forgive sin, only God can make sense out of human suffering, just believe." Humbly, Temple Drake prepares "to save my soul, if I have a soul. If there is a God, and if he wants it."
In the role of Temple Drake, expressly written for her by Faulkner, Ruth Ford is altogether memorable. She flicks out her lines with an invisible riding crop, aristocratic in disdain, febrile in sexuality, empty-eyed at the soul's abyss. Scott McKay plays husband Gowan with just the right blend of weak will and good intention. And Bertice Reading's Nancy is a mixture of smoldering dignity and rock-like faith.
True in feeling, Requiem is sometimes hollow in logic. Temple's behavior is baffling except in terms of innate depravity. Nancy's sinner-into-saint switch is an abuse of poetic license. But to a theater often governed by the spirit of commerce, Faulkner has brought a play whose commerce is solely with the human spirit in its torment, in its aspirations, and in its vagrant moments of nobility.
Rashomon (by Fay and Michael Kanin) is essentially a stage remake of the eight-year-old Japanese film classic, and some of the charm and power of the film has spilled away in transit. Culled originally from two short stories by Japan's late mordant satirist, Akutagawa, Rashomon poses a philosophic question that means all things to all men: What is truth?