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For Schreck, a playwright and performer perhaps best known for her appearance in Circle Mirror Transformation at this same theater five years ago, the matter is considerably more nuanced. Forgiveness, she posits, is a quality that has to be earned, developed, and respected. It's not automatic, and those who treat it that way or take it for granted are those probably least likely to receive it when they need it most. As long as Schreck focuses on this, she has no trouble keeping her play, which has been given a rock-solid, unsentimental production by Kip Fagan, engaging and relevant. At the center of it all is Shelley (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), a habit-free nun who runs a Bronx soup kitchen, she's praying, but not on her knees—it looks as though she's speaking to a microwave in mid-cook. But this isn't blasphemy. As we learn later, she's been struggling with her prayers of late, and the microwave's timer function is helping her spend one minute, then two, and hopefully soon five, renewing her relationship with God. She needs all she can get, too, upon the arrival of a new volunteer, Emma (Ismenia Mendes): Only 19 and unaccustomed to serving others, she's both eager to learn and eager to go her own way, even when that runs counter to Shelley's tight ship. Emma has plenty of ideas of her own, including starting up employment counseling and job referral services, which Shelley grudgingly accepts; she's also more than a little, uh, playful with security guard Oscar (Bobby Moreno), though he makes no secret of having a serious girlfriend. But Shelley and Oscar put up with all this out of sympathy for the young woman, who reveals early on that she's suffering from leukemia, and is receiving chemotherapy from a center just up the street. Some of her transgressions, however, are severe tests of their patience and holiness, especially one late one that casts a cruelly different light on all of Emma's other actions. Until this point, Schreck and Fagan seem invigorated by the challenge of explaining how Emma's selfishness and general evolution into a more compassionate, understanding person pose unique difficulties for those around her. Even the set design, by Rachel Hauck, is oddly inspired, its industrial kitchen façade graced with aura of simple peace that strongly suggests that God's reach does not end at either of the doorways. (The lighting, by Matt Frey, contributes well to the effect, especially during the shadowy scene changes.) The most remarkable creation on view here is Shelley, a compelling blend of classical ideals and modern acceptance, a nun who's a part of the real world of today, but one who's struggling to view it through the Catholic lens that's always before her. Bernstine is excellent in the role, too, feeding off every clue we're given about Shelley's troubled past and turbulent home life to fashion a woman who could believably find the refuge—if not exactly the absolution—she needs within her vows. There's plenty of brittleness, but also love for the demanding path she's chosen, and Bernstine has no trouble making Shelley warm, recognizable, and relatable. Her portrayal beautifully sets the stage for the towering, if not outright catastrophic, collapse it's clear will eventually come. Unfortunately, the final third of the play, which documents Shelley's final trials in the wake of Emma's greatest deception, is almost a start-to-finish stumble. Abandoning much of the character development from earlier and starting much over from scratch (or at least something resembling scratch), Schreck makes it incredibly difficult to accept that events would unfold as they do. Shelley hangs on past the obvious last straw, for nebulous reasons that her own rapidly disintegrating faith is not enough to justify. Emma's enhanced godliness suddenly evaporates, and she becomes more reckless and devastating than she was before her "conversion." Though Oscar's fate makes a bit more sense, it too stretches credibility given what we know of him and those he surrounds himself with. That neither Oscar nor Emma ultimately satisfies is not the fault of the actors; Moreno's tough-edged likability and Mendes's wide-eyed, not-so-little-girl-lost personality are absolutely correct. But Schreck leaves them feeling like arbitrary people who make arbitrary choices; even Emma's most landscape-altering lie, the central fulcrum to the plot, hangs from an unconvincingly tenuous thread. And the presence of one homeless man, named Frog and played as well as possible by Lee Wilkof, to represent both the teeming, worse-off masses outside the door and a yardstick by which everyone's spiritual progression is measured, is a shaky device that adds to the running time and laugh count but greatly dilutes the far more pressing issues at the play's core. Schreck does return to those in the final scene and wrap everything up, but it's a concession to form that, positioned after the wild swerves of the preceding few scenes, comes too late. It's too much to expect Schreck, or any playwright, to resolve questions of how religion may be successfully integrated into a world that often seems to promote contrary precepts; humanity's been struggling with that one for thousands of years. But her clever, thought-provoking spin deserves an execution and conclusion worthy of it; two things that, despite a superb setup, it does not fully receive in Grand Concourse.
Grand Concourse
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