The Winding Road to Nirvana

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The New York Sun

Sister Mary Ignatius would not be amused by Christopher Durang’s “Miss Witherspoon,” an undisciplined but very funny shaggy-god story about one woman’s reluctant road to nirvana. That makes one of us.


The chipper, cookie-dispensing, murderous nun who made Mr. Durang one of American theater’s leading provocateurs back in 1979 with “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” had plenty to say about the afterlife. “Your way is clear: You have this infallible Church that tells you what is right and wrong, and you follow its teaching, and then you get to heaven. Didn’t you all hear me say that? Did you all have wax in your ears?”


Mr. Durang has discussed in interviews his circuitous route from Catholicism to a battery of other religions, so it’s no surprise that his relationship to the great beyond has also been tweaked. But while the details have changed, he once again filters his acid observations through the voice of a gifted comedienne capable of careering from one ludicrous extreme to another.


This time Kristine Nielsen, a frequent Durang muse, is the lucky recipient of his fractured theological rantings. Her wild-eyed, irresistibly imbalanced Miss Witherspoon is a performance for the ages. Miss Witherspoon is an “antidepressant-resistant” agnostic who has killed herself and finds herself in the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of purgatory, which director Emily Mann and set designer David Korins have conceived as a blue sky and a lawn chair.


As Miss Witherspoon’s Hindu guide Maryamma (the suitably radiant Mahira Kakkar) explains, you get the afterlife you deserve in more or less the package you expect. Christians get the pearly gates and St. Peter. Jews get something much like “prolonged general anesthesia,” which sounds pretty good to Miss Witherspoon. Alas, she gets the bardo,a sort of way station between repeated reincarnations until true wisdom is attained.


And so she finds herself being thrust extremely reluctantly into the world “like some soldier sent to the front over and over and over,” forced to start each time as an infant (or puppy, in one memorable case). This being a Durang play, these iterations tend to go very poorly.


The current off-Broadway black comedy “Mr. Marmalade” offers a 5-year-old who attempts suicide. Big deal. One of Miss Witherspoon’s incarnations beats that record by four years and 50 weeks – and succeeds, ultimately causing the death of two innocent people 16 years later. “Suicide isn’t an out anymore,” she complains. “It’s just a doorway to another awful life.”


Since realism is in short supply, Mr. Durang is able to indulge his habit of throwing reams of material on the stage and seeing what at least sort of works. Colleen Werthmann and Jeremy Shamos play two different sets of parents for our heroine, and all four parts are surprisingly thin, as are two other roles for the versatile Mr. Shamos. More fortunate is Lynda Gravatt as two very different spiritual guides in Miss Witherspoon’s development, a sensitive schoolteacher and a sassy Jesus Christ. (This latter development isn’t nearly as daring as Mr. Durang seems to think it is.


Luckily, he and Ms. Mann capture lightning in a bottle with their everhanging leading lady. Nothing seems to come easily for Ms. Nielsen’s Miss Witherspoon: She never smiles when she can leer, never feels blue when she can droop and writhe. She wears her emotions not just on her sleeve but seemingly several inches into the air around her.


Harnessing that bizarre energy into the metaphysical inquiries that litter “Miss Witherspoon” takes work, and a little of Sister Mary’s certainty could have come in handy during Mr. Durang’s more rambling moments. The upbeat resolution is also a bit cozy, given everything that precedes it. But Ms. Mann and the nonpareil Ms. Nielsen turn this sad, somewhat ridiculous woman’s odyssey into a surprisingly rich and affecting experience. Who would have guessed that crippling theological ambivalence could be this much fun?


Until December 18 (416 W. 42nd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, 212-279-4200).


The New York Sun

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