Sister Rose’s death -- and subsequent disappearance from her casket -- serves as catalyst for the arrival of Guirgis’ clan of old friends and foes, who meet at the funeral home only to learn that their beloved teacher has vanished. Once the blame game gets underway, each schoolmate bares their own individual set of issues plaguing their lives now. Guirgis’ script is swollen with bloated egos and plenty of saucy speeches (crabby Victor asserts his disapproval with acidic lines such as, "demons should shit in his mouth daily "), which makes for sensational writing from the author of Jesus Hopped the "A" Train. And under the microscope lens of director John Vreeke, Our Lady is always engaging.

Vreeke’s terrific ensemble uses all available playing space, moving up and down all over the place in a constant rush of motion, much like the streets of upper Manhattan. And thanks to the traffic noises and music designed by Mark Anduss, it sounds as though we’re already there.

Woolly’s strength is always in its superb casting. Doug Brown is the center of catharsis for Guirgis’ storyline, and his portrayal of disc jockey Rooftop only solidifies his standing as an actor unafraid of emotional exposure. John Dow is perfect as a sympathetic priest who has suspended his trust in God, and Roseanne Medina is as deliciously caustic as her name -- Nasty Norca -- suggests. Craig Wallace is a standout with his tempered performance as the afflicted half of a gay couple, and Brian McMonagle is a riot as his partner, an "exceedingly gay " actor from Wisconsin. McMonagle’s stereotypical, limp-wristed portrait earns him the title he is bestowed by Wallace as "Drama Empress. "

Joyce Carol Oates, Venturing Into Parallel Universes

By Jane Horwitz

Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page C05

"It's been a very collaborative experience. Already I've done a lot of revisions," says Joyce Carol Oates of her play "The Tattooed Girl," slated for a world-premiere run Jan. 11-Feb. 20 at Theater J.

Famously prolific as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, poet (and professor of literature at Princeton), Oates wrote "The Tattooed Girl" simultaneously as novel and play.

"I would write a scene as if it were a play. Then I would work on [the scene] as if it were a novel," filling in "description and interior psychological" details, she says.

She's taken the approach before: In 2000, her novel about Marilyn Monroe, "Blonde," was published and her play on the subject, "Miss Golden Dreams," was performed at the Contemporary American Theater Festival.

The tattooed girl is Alma Busch, a poor, uneducated drifter damaged by an abusive childhood and an equally rough young womanhood. She takes a job as assistant to a celebrated but very private author with a debilitating neurological ailment. The author, Joshua Siegl, made his name with a much-praised novel about the Holocaust based on the fates of his paternal grandparents. Alma, who grew up listening to anti-Semitic rants, nurses a hatred for her employer, plotting against him with her lowlife boyfriend. Siegl, meanwhile, is attracted to Alma and eager to educate her.

Inspiration for "The Tattooed Girl" came both from Oates's family history and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She learned fairly recently that her paternal grandmother was Jewish, from a family that left Germany in the 1890s. She's writing a novel about that, too. "It's something that's very mysterious to me and has a lot of emotional significance for which I have to find a metaphor," Oates says.

In the novel version of "Tattooed Girl," Alma comes to a violent and tragic end, her anti-Semitism more or less unchanged. Oates says she decided to let Alma evolve a bit in the play and to live, at least through the final blackout. "I saw a way that the play could be more harmonious and more optimistic about the future. When you end something bluntly, there's a sense that there's no future. [But] after 9/11, there was 9/12."

The novel "seems to be making the point that an anti-Semite will be punished . . . but the play allows an anti-Semite to change," the author says.

During an early rehearsal, actors Michael Russotto (Siegl) and Michelle Shupe (Alma) did a highly charged scene in which Alma says the Holocaust may have never happened. Oates suggested that Siegl's voice could be "quavering with rage" while he cited evidence of the genocide. Director John Vreeke agreed, then proposed a substantial cut to the scene, which Oates didn't protest.

"I gained some trust from her that I wasn't going to impose my own take on the writing," says Vreeke, after Oates, a D.H. Lawrence scholar, saw his stage adaptation last spring of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," with Shupe in the title role. "Joyce knows . . . what she has written, and if I go astray, she'll tell me and pull me back," he says.

The Mourning After

New York playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis writes about what he learned in the urban trenches, first in the prison story "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train" and now in "Our Lady of 121st Street." The Woolly Mammoth production runs through Jan. 2 at the Kennedy Center.

"I was a violence prevention specialist and HIV educator in prisons and hospitals and shelters," Guirgis says, an experience that shows in how his characters haul their emotional baggage. Many of them are struggling to face "the truth of their circumstances or of themselves."

"Our Lady" opens at a funeral home, where the body of a nun, everyone's favorite Catholic schoolteacher in the Latino and African American neighborhood, has been stolen from the casket. One mourner, Vic (Brian Hemmingsen), is ranting profanely as the play begins.

"What's underneath all his anger is a tremendous amount of sorrow," says the playwright. "For him, it's easier to . . . scream and yell and bellow than it is to get to what the real thing is, which is grief.

'Our Lady of 121st Street' at Wolly Mammoth

Joyce Carol Oates, Venturing Into Parallel Universes