Last fall (2024), I needed a few tethers to keep me from free fall in my new life, new apartment, new job, new freedom. So my friend Katie Cappiello and I instituted a weekly meeting at my apartment on Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to noon. There were no rules about what we did with the time (she, too, was processing lots of change): we could vent about the world and our personal lives, we could gossip, we could bounce ideas off each other, anything goes. We did all that and also began talking about Roe’s overturn, and how using women’s bodies is the origin story of civilization. Take Mary of Nazareth. She was thirteen and just trying to steer clear of marauding Roman soldiers when she learned she’d been chosen for something super special! Her pregnancy, the result of rape, was rebranded a few decades later as the birth of God’s son, a.k.a. Christianity. This conversation reminded us of a meeting we’d had earlier that year with a priest who embarrassed himself with his bro-ish mien—manspreading replete with arms folded behind his head, bragging about his trips to the Vatican, dropping F-bombs (kewl). The next week, Katie showed up with pages from what became Act II of a new play. That scene concerned Cardinal O’Malley as he lobbies Mother Mary Joseph, a fifty-four-year-old nun who has devoted her life to New York City’s neediest, running shelters for unhoused trafficking victims. Cardinal O’Malley has a pitch for her and her sister nuns—an exciting new way to serve. We’d read the parts out loud during our meetings. The scene worked.
Next Katie wrote Act I: The Virgin, excerpted here. We did our makeshift table read. Again, it worked. So she wrote Act III, based on actual post-Roe headlines, about another Mary of Nazareth (Texas). She is nineteen and taking out the trash at the end of her late-night shift at Dairy Queen when she hears a baby crying from inside a dumpster. This time we had students at Smith read it, to see if it held up—and it did. So we staged it at Dixon Place’s annual HOT! Festival last July. (Our show was totally sold out.)
In a triumph of feminist hanging out, we had something new on our hands: The Body of Mary: A Play in Three Acts (of God). It’s a show about controlling the means of reproduction and the narrative, by controlling Mary. It’s funny and it’s true, so it’s also horror story.
