John Pielmeier’s 1980 Agnes Of God is about a battle for a soul — the soul of an illiterate novice nun accused of strangling her new-born baby and depositing the body in a waste basket.

The protagonists are Dr. Martha Livingstone, an edgy chain-smoking psychiatrist assigned by the courts to assess Agnes’s sanity, and the convent’s formidable Mother Superior, a woman determined to protect this child from the outside world and those alien cultures, including shrinks and the courts, which fail to understand that Agnes “belongs to God.”
This is a troublesome play, one that is often vulnerable to its own excesses yet cunning enough in its structure to be able to engage us with a series of dramatic revelations and keep us wondering what will happen next. A superior production can achieve that end — but Kanata Theatre doesn’t quite make the grade. …

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Photo: no attribution. Published in “Ottawa Life”

The chief virtue of Black Sheep Theatre’s frenetic and often irritating production of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hansom Killer is the presence of an engaging dynamo of a performer named Emily Windler.

She’s so enjoyable in her multi-character contribution that you can almost forgive her for being involved in the creation of this sophomoric, self-admiring attempt to send up the Sherlock Holmes genre.

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Leslie Stevens’s 1958 Broadway hit is the sort of period piece that was once considered daring by both producers and audiences. So some may question the wisdom of reviving – more than half a century later – this comedy about a sexy young Swedish blonde who arrives in the household of a college anthropology professor and his wife, who just happens to be that institution’s dean of women, with an astonishing proposition.

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