Mary Explains It All in a Low Style

Christopher Durang's play is as delightfully absurd as the religious content within it. The discussion of Sister Mary's oratory bears an interesting connection to what Lanham speculates about hight and low style--especially as a matter of public vs. private--and how public renditions of speech (quite like Mary's Q&A-style sermon) tend to vary in terms of sincerity. Sister Mary, a genuine nun despite her ignorance, speaks in a low style which is, to use a few of Lanham's words, informational, plain, transparent, comic, sincere, everyday, natural, etc. Mind you, there is much to be said about the play format enabling Durang to write in this lower style, in part because the concepts she discusses are deliberately low in taste, but also because the occasional stage direction inadvertently aids the reader in understanding the tone, regardless of it being there for the actor/director. There are considerably few stage directions, but when they do appear, they do something peculiar: "(Sudden joyful energy:) Yes, they are! What people who ask that question often don't realize is that sometimes the answer to our prayers is

"no," and later, "(Full of faith and joy:) But every bad thing that happens to us, God has a special reason for. God is the good Shepherd, we are His flock." (390). This is an interesting facet to reading a play rather than ordinary dialogue situated within the narrative, in that it lets an outside authority explain how the text is to be read (or acted), when we are ordinarily left to interpret the text as it is, with no guidance. It would be fairly difficult to register the emotions behind Sister Mary's obnoxious teachings without these various tips. We are told in the writer's notes that Sister Mary is to be portrayed as innocent and mildly lovable, particularly in her relationship with Thomas. I noticed the insubordinate doggie-master situation pretty clearly, but it seemed only a matter of wild degradation and not of love.

Sister Mary's dogmatic teachings are smooth and easy to digest, despite their occasional emotional ambiguity: "When he speaks ex cathedra, we must accept what he says at that moment as dogma, or risk hell fire; or, now that things are becoming more liberal, many, many years in purgatory." (382). This sort of preaching isn't exactly suspensive. It feels very much to the point, even though it's lengthened by a conversational "or." Many of the other statements follow suit in this fair, diplomatic, straight-forward approach. Curiously, the casually honest style conflicts with the disingenuous (or simply ridiculous) thoughts she has. She is devoutly faithful to her God and her teachings, but she is more so faithful to her wonderful self, her wretched personal experiences, and her authority before the highly passive audience. The four ex-students show up merely to embarrass her, and yet she is not the least bit embarrassed.

They allow her to contradict herself in such a way that is beyond embarrassment territory, and falls straight into dark, absurdist humor. Throughout, we trust her to be consistently absurd in her teachings, and yet the final scene is beyond our expectations (I would think), and yet it's still not an earth shattering result. Often times in literature we are offered a foreshadowing, or a great sense of impending doom (take, for instance, D.H. Lawrence's "Rocking Horse Winner") that builds to disaster. Lawrence's higher style makes it all the more clear, whereas the simple style in Durang's play is, while seemingly casual and sincere, actually very deceptive in terms of plot progression. A pensive sermon quickly turns homicidal, and we never even saw it coming.