NYC: 100 Saints You Should Know

Seeking Spiritual Bonds and Earthly Ones, Too
By BEN BRANTLEY
New York Times, September 19, 2007

Kate Fodor’s “100 Saints You Should Know,” which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons, is a decent play, with all that the adjective implies. This tale of everyday people in search of faith, directed by Ethan McSweeny and featuring the estimable Lois Smith, is thoughtful, well spoken, humbly aware of its limitations and respectful of its characters.

It is, in other words, the kind of play you could take home to mother. Just don’t expect it to provide you with a transporting night of passion.

“Saints,” developed at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, is the inaugural production in a season that is, unusually for Playwrights Horizons, devoted to dramatists in the early chapters of their careers. (This is Ms. Fodor’s second play.)

For an opening salvo in the name of brave new theater, “Saints” is doggedly gentle and conventional. True, it tackles eminently fashionable and potentially sensational subjects: homosexuality in the priesthood, single mothers with wild pasts and self-medicating, angst-crippled teenagers.

But the story approaches these topical matters with a calm, open mind and a tidy, symmetrical structure that balances and parallels different points of view. It’s like the Platonic ideal of a Lifetime television movie.

Though the play builds to a central crisis that brings its five characters together and sends one into surgery, “Saints” is less a compellingly told story than it is a static arrangement of portraits. Each of the people in the play longs for spiritual connection, and none, it seems, are finding it close to home.

For “Saints” is especially about parents and children, literal and metaphoric. Matthew (Jeremy Shamos), a Roman Catholic priest who has discovered fleshly longings in himself, has taken a leave of absence from his church and is staying with his uncomprehending mother, Colleen (Ms. Smith).

Theresa (Janel Moloney), the cleaning woman at Matthew’s rectory, is at war with her surly but lively teenage daughter, Abby (Zoe Kazan). And while we never meet the parents of Garrett (Will Rogers), an awkward grocery delivery boy, they are vivid and reproachful presences in his conversation.

Ms. Fodor has a fine sense of the forms of emotional aggression, passive and otherwise, that can infuse even the most banal exchanges between parents and children at loggerheads, as well as a good ear for the kinks and curls of speech of people of different generations and education.

These gifts are most appealingly on display in the early scenes that set up these fractious relationships. A Scrabble game between Colleen and Matthew, newly returned to the home where he grew up, becomes a deft and touching exercise in thwarted communication. A standard stalemate debate between Abby and Theresa on the usual teenager-parent subjects (school, sex, bad influences) has a piquant ring of realness that keeps it from congealing into clichés.

An uncomfortable burden of unspoken thoughts infuses these exchanges, which gives the play what little urgency it has. Once subtext becomes text, and everybody starts pondering the nature of God and the itchy emptiness of their lives, the tension diffuses.

“I was looking for something enormous and expansive,” Theresa tells Matthew, “and somehow I ended up with a little scrap of a life.”

“Saints” honorably refuses to offer easy answers to its questing characters. Instead it provides the substitute of a quotation from St. Thérèse of Lisieux meant to define what they are all hungering for: “Prayer is a surge of the heart, a cry of recognition and love.” The phrase, repeated a full three times, obtrudes like a hastily pasted-on decal.

Ms. Fodor, whose first play, “Hannah and Martin,” was about the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, obviously shares her characters’ inquiring minds. But she is unable to generate much electricity from their modest philosophizing, even when a tragic accident occurs.

The uncertainty of the characters in “Saints” seems to have infected the production, which has an unresolved quality throughout. A symbolic silver tree has been planted uneasily in the center of Rachel Hauck’s otherwise naturalistic set. And Mr. McSweeny, who directed the revival of Gore Vidal’s “Best Man” on Broadway, keeps the proceedings at an unvarying simmer.

The acting styles sometimes feel mismatched, with some performers insistently underplaying (Ms. Moloney, Mr. Shamos), and others going for comic broad strokes (Mr. Rogers). But Ms. Kazan enjoyably nails the hostile neediness of an adolescent girl who hates her mother as much as she loves her. And Ms. Smith, who scored an indelible triumph two seasons ago in Horton Foote’s “Trip to Bountiful,” turns Colleen’s first scene into a mini master class in acting.

Ordering groceries over the phone, readjusting her waffled pink cardigan, pouring Scrabble tiles into a box: Ms. Smith invests each of these ordinary activities with the extraordinary charge of a woman desperately eager and reluctant to make contact with her son. Mr. Shamos almost matches her when Matthew combatively recites to Colleen from the writings of a 16th-century mystic.

That’s when Ms. Fodor’s play glows, as she obviously means it to, with the sense that the keenest evidence of the search for God is in the homiest details.

Check the New York Times article for audio interview with the playwright

*

100 SAINTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

By Kate Fodor; directed by Ethan McSweeny; sets by Rachel Hauck; costumes by Mimi O’Donnell; lighting by Jane Cox; sound by Matt Hubbs; production manager, Christopher Boll; production stage manager, Michaella K. McCoy. Presented by Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford, artistic director; Leslie Marcus, managing director; William Russo, general manager. At the Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 279-4200. Through Sept. 30. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

WITH: Zoe Kazan (Abby), Janel Moloney (Theresa), Will Rogers (Garrett), Jeremy Shamos (Matthew) and Lois Smith (Colleen).