Kanata’s Agnes Of God offers one Shining Performance

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.

On opening night, despite the many moments of high emotion, one was conscious of how talky the script really is and how hollow its metaphysical arguments and emotions can be.
The dramatic issues are familiar — reason versus faith, the conflict between the spiritual and the secular. But they can also seem time-worn rather than timeless, which perhaps why Pielmeier decided to trigger our interest by more opportunistic methods. The play’s original success on Broadway was less due to its spiritual moorings than to the exploitable aura of trashy sensationalism surrounding the story of a nun who gets pregnant and faces trial for the murder of her infant child. Its commercial potential was further enhanced by widespread rumours surrounding Amanda Plummer’s Tony Award-winning performance as Agnes: thanks to Plummer’s on-stage hysterics, the prevailing gossip was that she was doing cocaine at the time.

Pielmeier was inspired by a real-life incident in which a nun was raped by a priest, but the resulting script takes a far more ambiguous route. So don’t expect Agnes Of God to identify the father of the child by the time the play reaches its overwrought climax. On the other hand, don’t be surprised to encounter hints that the playwright believes in miracles and that in the midst of all the on-stage hysteria, he’s really reaffirming his belief in the Immaculate Conception.

Director Tom Kobolak does his best to make all this work, and there are moments when his production does achieve an ethereal, other-worldly dimension. Such moments are enhanced by Kobolak’s simple but sensitive set concept, with its shimmering stained glass and visions of the Lamb of God, as well as by Zach Andruchow’s careful lighting, Diane Smith’s costuming, Brooke Keneford’s soundscape and the sweet plaintive singing voice of Mary Walsh’s Agnes.

But it’s hard to find a sustained dramatic centre. It keeps slipping out of control.
As the worldly psychiatrist, Cheryl Zimmer seems so twitchy and neurotic at the beginning that she’s in danger of having no place to go dramatically. She falls back on mannerisms — the jerky body language, the incessant smoking, the abruptness of her speech. She does have some splendid moments — for example, her palpable anguish when the psychological baggage she herself carries becomes exposed — but there are also times when Martha Livingstone seems such a nervous wreck herself that you wonder why she was ever entrusted with the task of evaluating Agnes. There is a further problem with the lack of conviction in the scenes in which she hypnotizes Agnes — they’re all surface and fail to convince us of the high stakes involved.

In fairness, however, any actress would face a challenge in having this character make sense. That’s also the problem with Larraine Gorman’s Mother Superior who’s required to come on at the beginning as some kind of hearty, joke-making headmistress only to transform herself into a fierce spiritual guardian and avenging fury against the evils of secularism, while still digressing into moments of jollity. Is this part even playable?
That leaves Emily Walsh who gives the evening’s best performance as Agnes. Walsh even manages to bring genuine nuance to the moments of emotional frenzy — such is the delicacy of her characterization. It is possible to believe in her unblemished innocence. Indeed one suspects that if she were playing Shaw’s Saint Joan she would make us believe that she really was hearing Joan’s voices. That’s the kind of actress she is.

Agnes of God continues at Kanata Theatre to November 16, 2013.

Director and set designer: Tom Kobolak
Lighting: Zach Andruchow
Sound: Brooke Keneford
Costumes: Diane Smith

Cast:
Dr. Martha Livingstone………………………….Cheryl Zimmer
Mother Miriam Ruth……………………………..Larraine Gorman
Agnes…………………………………………………..Emily Walsh