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The play is an essay on the artistocracy of the insane: Whom the gods wish to embrace, they first drive mad. Agnes is a strange young woman, singing in an Angelus-clear soprano and obey voices no one can hear. It remains for Martha and Miriam to translate these sounds into the lumbering prose of reason. Pielmeier orchestrates the examination deftly and leavens the weightier speculations with airy talk-show humor. But as Agnes soars into catharsis and Martha tries desparately to anchor her in the explicable, Pielmeier allows himself to take leave of dramatic sense. He offers too many motivations to save the mystery, and too few to sastisfy the scrupulous plot watcher. The result is an off-center Equus.
But if Pielmeier flunks his metaphysical, he gives his players every chance for a sublime, exhausting workout onstage. Forget Equus; think of The Exorcist. Watch Plummer as she scales the sloping back wall of Eugene Lee's set, as blood gushes from the stigmata in her palms, as she wrenchingly relives her murdered child's birth. The show, not the play, is the thing here. And Plummer— a scarily gifted actress with a waif's face and a voice that intones words as if she had learned them at Berlitz school on Mars— puts on an extraordinary show. Her co-stars are almost as riveting: Page, at once the fussy authoritarian and mischievouse child; Ashley, making her role more urgent by playing it post-Talllulah, with traffic-cop gestures and a sexy voice that can break in mid-syllable like a Fernando Valenzuela screwball. If Agnes of God just fails as an example of the playwright's craft, it shines as a demonstration of three actresses' seductive art.
The four young playwright's— Davis is 30, Durang 32, Pielmeier 33 and Kurtti 26— form no cohesive group, no lapsed-Catholic Mafia. They have responded to their shared history in tones ranging from reverence to rage, and no divine law ordains that they must continue to wrestle with the cassocked and habited specters of their youth. Instead, these veterans of Catholic schooling are following the first law of creation: write what you know. The nuns and priests of a generation ago impressed their small charges more than they realized. The steel-edged rulers with which they whacked so many knuckles are being raised against them. The mystery of faith has become a frightening conundrum, and the Baltimore Catechism a joke book. And so it has come to pass: the children of Sister Mary Ignatius have taken their revenge—by Richard Corliss