Theater: Gift of Grace

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MASS APPEAL by Bill C. Davis

On the stage, as in films, men of the cloth are sometimes made out of whole cloth. That is not the case with Mass Appeal, where as playgoers, we come to know and cherish two men as creatures of flesh and blood, and perceive in them aspects of our common strengths and weaknesses.

The drama puts a complacent middle-aging priest, Father Tim Farley (Milo O'Shea), in sometimes stormy but under-lyingly tender conflict with an ardent, rebellious and idealistic seminarian, Mark Dolson (Eric Roberts). In its simplest terms, this is the perennial skirmish between youth and age, between those who have seen too little and those who have seen too much, between those who want to change the world radically and those who have made their abject peace with principalities and powers.

Father Farley has made his peace and lost his vocation. In one agonizing moment late in the play, he shakes his head in bewilderment and says, "I don't know what I believe any more." The scene is made all the more poignant since we have been seeing what he does put his faith in. He is a potent tippler of sparkling burgundy and relishes his Mercedes. With Gaelic guile he manipulates parish politics from his pulpit. He does not so much preach to his flock as poll it. What his parishioners want to hear, he tells them. He salves the consciences he was pledged to arouse. In the sad coldness of his heart, he knows all this.

By contrast, Mark Dolson's heart is on fire for the Lord, and a fresh blaze it is. He has a trigger-lipped contempt for clerical authority. He believes that women and gays should be admitted to the priesthood. He loathes "consumerism" and, worst of all, has a fervent conviction that the words of Jesus, once heard and acted upon, will render the church redundant.

Mark has been remanded to Father Farley for remedial taming, and this results in some of the funniest scenes in a play that, for all its tensions, bubbles with surprising laughter. When Mark seeks to deliver a sermon on the evils of "mink hats, cashmere coats and blue hair" Father Farley shows him how to palliate his anathema "in a Norman Rockwell setting." Perplexed as to how to console parishioners who have lost a dear one, Mark is told by the Father to "bring common grief to the level of the inconsolable by saying something inane," and he proffers some blackly humorous examples.

Linking the two men ever closer as mentor and student, surrogate father and son, brothers in Christ, Playwright Davis fashions a glowing parable on the indivisibility of love. At the apex of his craft, O'Shea could enter an actor's Hall of Fame with this one performance. Mettlesome, high-strung, bursting into a boy's wounded tears or unlaced laughter, Roberts' Mark is a worthy foil. But perhaps the most exciting find of the evening is the directorial debut of Actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. Subtly and surely, she weaves a mantle of sentiment without sentimentality, and provides off-Broadway's Manhattan Theater Club with a luminous seasonal swan song. —T.E.K.