Sacred Hearts, a play in two acts by Colleen Curran
Zeitgeist Stage Company
Black Box Theater
Boston Center for the Arts
Tremont Street, Boston, MA
This play has it all. Relationships, popular culture, religion, miracles, the odd skeleton that’s buried within everyone’s closet, and the piranhas known as the media.
A woman witnesses what is construed as a miracle. The overwhelmed woman’s reluctant and confidential disclosure to her priest is overheard by a church busybody. Within five minutes of the play’s opening scene, the secret is out. For the next two hours, the story deepens, widens, and is resolved - perhaps.
Through an alternating series of deliciously well-acted flashbacks and real time drama, the play gains momentum by the minute. Everyone angles for a way to profit from the “miracle.”
Busloads of the faithful arrive in the small town. Secrets are divulged or divined or speculated. Reputations are maligned. Religion becomes a commodity. Reporters trample over private property and personal rights to privacy. The woman’s veracity is questioned. Speculation becomes news. Talk shows natter.
A sensational event. An all-consuming media response. People on the margins of the story craning their necks or raising their voices to be seen or heard on TV or radio. Does the parade of events sound familiar?
Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist web site
The power of the play stems from the way each character poaches on the personal boundaries of the miracle’s solitary witness, Bridget (Eliza Lay), a dropout law student turned shepherd in rural Canada.
Small town newspaper owner, editor, and married man Evan (Curt Klump) sees a chance to boost circulation. He threatens to use confidences he learned from Bridget as he thought about straying from his marriage when he befriended her.
The parish priest Father Phil (Ed Peed), apparently shuttled off to this Canadian outpost because of his radical activities on behalf of the poor in El Salvador, sees a chance to reinvigorate his advocacy for Third World causes.
Bridget’s brother Tim (Greg Maraio) visits with an agenda to persuade her to complete her degree and return to the lawyerly destiny he sees as hers.
If you’re lucky, you witness one over-the-top performance in a play. “Sacred Hearts” has two and several excellent ones. They drive the plot with the force of a pile driver. Gretchen and Violet sparkle. The audience in the tiny Black Box Theater spontaneously applauded after scenes in which these actors shined.
Gretchen (Melissa Baroni) dreams of becoming the next Geraldo. Disarmingly ditzy and possessed with exquisite comic timing, she nonchalantly invades Bridget’s home with a video camera and an agenda to manufacture an “investigatory feature” on why the miracle occurred to Bridget. Her mimicking of a Fox News-type reporter is farcical and a terrific send up of how networks sensationalize news.
Violet (Renee Miller) is consumed with the fact that a miracle has occurred in the midst of this small town. The fact that she’s learned of it by eavesdropping on a confidential conversation does not deter her from wanting to trumpet it to the public. The fact that Bridget doesn’t want anyone but her parish priest to know sets Violet off on a “public’s right to know” crusade. Violet’s belief that she’s acting on behalf of the “faithful” is unshakable. That we begin to wonder whether she’s got a point is a credit to Miller’s simple fervor and conviction.
Lay’s Bridget anchors the drama. Bridget’s life is complicated and messy but on a scale we can relate to. She’s smart, vulnerable, and has faith in her religion. The miracle she may have experienced ironically threatens to unearth a secret that propelled her to migrate to this tiny village and abandon a promising career. In the back of our minds, mightn’t we all wonder whether a secret in our lives could surface to embarrass us if our lives were put under a microscope, as Bridget’s is?
Playwright Curran and Director David J. Miller provide us with complex, very human characters, not stereotypes. By the play’s final scene, we have enough knowledge to think that their basic humanity may insulate them from the brittle ending that might befall them if Geraldo Riviera were to come to town.
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