Our Lady of 121st Street is a beautifully deceptive play. It seems like a slice–of–life play: a series of encounters by people gathered for an event, randomly organized, without an obvious narrative trajectory. It is, in fact, a carefully orchestrated series of scenes, timed to the rhythm of redemption.
The instigating event of the play is a death: Sister Rose, a teacher in a Catholic grade school has died and her former students return to attend her funeral. An obstacle arises, presented in the first scene of the play: Sister Rose's body is missing — the funeral cannot proceed until her body is recovered. This pause — created by the mystery of her disappearance — precipitates an interval during which the various characters, gathered for the funeral, encounter one another and confront their shared past.
The metaphor invoked by the disappearance of Sister Rose is, roughly stated, where is the body of our collective and individual past? Somebody died (our younger self) and the death cannot be properly grieved until the body is recovered (until our past is confronted, found again, and recognized). The people of 121st Street are living, each of them, with an inability to bury a part of their pasts — a moment, a relationship that recriminates — that keeps them stalled, unable to properly grieve and bury the past in order to embrace the present.
Sister Rose as the symbol of the one's past, is, significantly, a vexed figure: she is remembered as both nurturing and fearsome. She is both a representative of the sacred in her capacity as a nun, and a profane figure — capable of violence, perhaps alcoholic. When her body is found, it is, consistent with the split in her character, half a body. The recovery of Sister Rose (a religious figure) as half–a–body is echoed by the character of Father Lux (Father Light) in his wheelchair — again, the sacred principle, when embodied, is a crippled presence, a divided self. If Sister Rose serves as a metaphor for the childhood self — the past, the personal history of the characters in the play — finding her (and so the past) means recognizing the divided nature of identity: seeing, in ourselves, both the sacred and profane nature of our character. Even her name, “Sister Rose” is significant in pointing toward the divided nature of that which she represents. The rose is a highly complex symbol of both heavenly perfection and earthly passion in traditional symbology: it is both time and eternity, life and death, fertility and virginity. The play, by invoking Sister Rose and Father Lux as representative figures from the past, features the dual nature of our human experience: like them, our past is a confluence of the sacred and profane manifestation of our natures. Laying the past to rest requires that confession and its absolution. Thus, the continuing confessional of Rooftop, the disclosure by Balthazar of his parental neglect and regret, the admission by Edwin of his culpability in the injury to his brother.
Duality as a theme is also represented structurally. It is a two–act play in which the first act proceeds, rhythmically, at twice the pace as the second act. After the first act introduction of the characters in a series of seven scenes and six locations, the second act slows down to a pace of three scenes in two locations. This structure suggests what I have earlier described as the rhythm of redemption: first, a lot of talk, a lot of activity, a lot of characters and life and movement, and then, a centering, a limitation, a drawing in, a sustain during which, in the dark hours of the night, admissions are made, vigils are acted, bodies are recovered. The flurry (and the fury) of our daylight life (our youth) dimming and the darkening produces a sustain. In the dark, (the confessional condition), we SEE ourselves (under the watchful eye of Father Lux).
Our Lady of 121st Street issues a challenge in its rough and tumble collision of the sacred and profane. The language of the play is vernacular, irreverent, occasionally obscene. The characters are limited in their ability to articulate their experience. But it is a play that can speak to all of us, no matter what our social niche, because it addresses the fundamental human experience of loss and recovery. Recovery requires — always — an admission of limitation, a loss of our heroic self. As the structure of Our Lady of 121st Street demonstrates, we are ensemble players to life: members of a crowd, a network of individuals with a shared past. We attend the funeral of our childhood selves (which is only half–buried) so that we can face the dawn of a new day. I hope, very much, that you will listen to the play on all of its levels. It is, as I said, a skillfully deceptive play. It makes you think that it is easy, tossed off, random. It is, instead, deeply thought and felt, theatrically canny and, finally, a solace: Confession brings light (Father Lux is there). And then day breaks.
Martha Lavey
Artistic Director