Playwright Joe Pintauro will have to stop hoping that critics forget he was a Catholic priest, especially when it comes to his excellent play “Cathedral” in current production at Manhattan Theater Source. Built upon the blueprint of an earlier work, “The Dead Boy,” “Cathedral” takes place in an entirely Catholic setting, limning a territory similar to that in John Patrick Shanley's “Doubt,” — with no more certainty, but plumbing the depths of a deeper guilt and emotional space. Pintauro's earlier play responded to the infamous improprieties at New York's Covenant House, a shelter for homeless boys, from the '90's. Pintauro's “cathedral” is more an emotive state than a religious edifice: a priest known as Jake (a fine Jon Ecklund) wants to leave the order after a sexual awakening with a young hustler Will (an engaging Cary Woodworth). Implied in the popular mind about such cases of abuse by the clergy is that the young are innocent. But what if the priest is the prey? Innocence among these characters is not the issue. No one, not even the cardinal, with Tom Godfrey in that role, is unblemished, that is, free of obsession with sin. As a damaged, reckless and needy liar for whom childhood never existed, Will shifts the conventional discourse. When a reporter (played by Kate Middleton) comes to investigate the subject, she too is subjective, her job as arbiter of facts compromised. If religions deal in absolutes, suggests Pintauro, man can only fail. Man's “cathedral” is mutable, which is why Jake must seek freedom elsewhere. This play is an ambitious query into the human psyche, and well worth the challenge.

     

Only in Canada will you get money to write a play about the U.S. Supreme Court was the joke opening night of Epic Theatre Ensemble's “A More Perfect Union” by Vern Thiessen, a playwright from Alberta who now lives in Queens. A pas de deux of two Supreme Court law clerks, “Union” is a love story that plays with our notions of justice. Melissa Friedman and Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. perform as the clerks, one to a conservative judge, the other to a liberal, reminiscent of the real life marriage of Republican Mary Matalan to Democrat James Carville. You have to wonder what that's like in bed. In “Union,” audiences will learn a great deal that will resonate with current events as Obama now must fill a Supreme Court seat. The title “A More Perfect Union” works for the love story as well as the ideals of American democracy that emerge and twist and turn as the clerks review cases in the law library to heated effect. Another phrase that comes up often in their well-timed comedic and very entertaining banter could have served this timely play as well: “Dirty Little Secrets.” 

Regina Weinreich

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