Sinner

Last week I attended a new off Broadway production that took place at the Nuyorican Café situated smack in the heart of what once was an “Alphabet City”.
The fact that I dared to park my car east of “C” and was able to withdraw cash from the real bank ATM at the corner of “C” and 3rd is a testament enough to how far this area had progressed since the “bum slum” days of 1980’s when I was roaming this neighborhood in search of graffiti, decay and gang members to take pictures of – easy to find, but occasionally hard to photograph.
Yet unlike its surroundings Nuyorican has seen little change if at all.
In fact it stayed exactly the way it was, both in appearance and ambiance not-too-cozy as if the time had passed over touching nothing and not mending anything.
Still, one will not find a better spot for a medium scale Avant-garde production as its Eisensteinian interior offers ideal backdrop to any play of the genre.

The Sinner is written by Michael Swift, directed by Brett Ziebarth and brought to life by a very talented cast: Conor Brooke (priest), April Perez (woman) and Mike Berberich (man).
Action takes place in the present day New York City.
The main character, the priest (Conor Brooke) is a reserved and at times confused individual who is tormented by unresolved conflicts of his youth and somewhat passively pursues the occupation possibly not of his choosing.
Challenged by Man (Mike Berberich) and Woman (April Perez) to accept the world defined by their intensely subjective points of view, the hero begins his own search for the true meaning of life that takes him outside of the physical and emotional comfort zone provided by the Church and into the world where good bad and ugly are defined on a person by person basis rather than as a system of morality and behavior.
In the end hero returns home without conclusively resolving his quest for self-fulfillment, yet capable to better understand the confusion and the pain that permeates the world.
The play is dynamic, well directed and the cast performance is outstanding.
In fact I watched it twice in a row and had not missed a beat.

It was later at night that I began to develop some reservations regarding the story line itself.

Starting with the way the play had ended, I felt that the lack of clarity related to priest’s resulting attitude could probably be fine for a layman but hardly expected from the man of cloth, and while writer attempts to handle many controversies related to faith as a whole and Catholic Church in particular, the priest’s character never mounts a coherent or passionate defense on its behalf, somewhat denying the play a “conflict” that could have propelled it beyond the realm of specific issues and thus denying the “priest” a chance to act out his frustration in a more comprehensive and sophisticated manner.
In fact I thought that the Church had been excessively depicted as merely a business corporation where child molestation and hypocrisy are running amok.
While leaving the “priest” to strike his own balance, author invests Man and Woman with sufficiently grotesque, aggressive and very “actable” monologs (and dialogs).
At times I could see a glimpse of the Michoels’s "Tevie the Milkman" in Mike Berberich’s rendition of “Man”.
Yet when the dust settles you feel that those characters are not playing by the rules of the game and with all the energy vested in them have nothing to prove or apologize for. Without any apparent reason they denigrate the priest’s lifestyle and rituals, yet they never present a consistent position of their own. And while they eagerly talk about the worldly pleasures the priest could be missing and promote sex as one of the greatest gifts man could ever experience, they offer no substitute for the Church’s system of belief or behavior, and to confuse matter further depict sex as something dirty and lacking respect and hardly the experience that enlightens. Such inconsistency – intentional or not – should probably have invited hero's counteroffensive that never came.

Yet, all reservations aside, this is a wonderful play, very well performed, very well directed, and I guaranty that the intensity of performance will render all of the above mentioned concerns as irrelevant and subjective ramblings of a very picky individual.