Lights flicker in the interior castle: Summit Performance fully stages 'The Convent'

Tricks of the mind account for contrasting ways of taking in a play between a staged reading and a full

The Mother Abbess has her act down.

production. When I encountered "The Convent" initially in the summer of 2021 in the outdoor space behind the District Theatre, I filled out what proceeded in front of me by imagining a complete production. At the same time, I worked on simply understanding the play, as one does the first time around, even with straightforward drama free of intellectual puzzles.

Summit Performance Indianapolis has now mounted Jessica Dickey's play in the full form it deserves. This show contains one big surprise whose surprise value fades the second time around. That's inevitable, but that's true with anything worth seeing more than once. What needed explanation when it was new is already sketched out in your memory. To pull a mainstream example almost out of a hat, already knowing how Oscar and Felix stop being roommates in "The Odd Couple" inflects how you process their conflicts along the way.

Unexamined friendship of Dimlin and Bertie will be scrutinized.

Overall, "The Convent"'s gain in a renewed encounter, especially with crucial cast changes, is unmistakable. Plus, everyone is off book, the design elements are in place throughout, and the characters move with appropriate freedom and directness. Opening tonight on the Phoenix Theatre's Basile stage, "The Convent," seen in preview Thursday night, checked all the right boxes under the direction of Summit's founding artistic director, Lauren Briggeman. Performances continue through April 9.

Starting with play selection, women in theater in all aspects of production are the company's focus, fully professional and polished, from the time of its spectacular debut, "Silent Sky," five years ago. 

Presenting the essentials about the 2021 introduction of this play to local audiences, I was nonetheless  extra "thinky" in my response. I saluted the cast's commitment to the emotional charge that runs through the piece. But was it useful to present my slight knowledge of the "nomens" that the participants in the retreat are required to adopt? Was I taking too seriously the cobbled-together structure the Mother Abbess imposes on participants in her yearly convent gathering? Was I hypnotized by how the play treated the perpetually serious business of trying to improve oneself?

I basically thought I was conveying my understanding. On second acquaintance, the nomen assignment and several others add up to farcical excuses for the Mother Abbess' control. As with many leaders in the personal-improvement game, a faux-compassionate agenda may veil pretensions to selfless service.

In addition to calisthenics, free-form prayers and observance of the canonical hours,  the self-styled abbess assigns as "nomen" (name) medieval female saints about whom each participant is charged to learn as much as possible and adopt as a guide for her experience.  And then there are evocations of slaughtered kings, whose sculptured heads open portals to uncensored revelations. As Mother Abbess, Jolene Mentink Moffatt exercised vividly the forcefulness of a character whose own vulnerability becomes increasingly clear, prodded by the most recalcitrant participant, a retreat veteran, Patti (Dekil Rongé). 

Wilma offers her prayer in a group meeting.

In "The Convent," religion turns out to be an apparatus, not  subject matter for our assent or skepticism. Rongé's bristling performance Thursday made that clear, and illuminated the difficulties that each of the other women, all first-timers, have brought with them to a repurposed convent in the French countryside. Like much religious imagery the Mother Abbess exploits, finding the light is a matter of self-education and insight, the light presumed to live within each woman's "interior castle."

The connotations of "interior castle" were clear to me last time, but now the more familiar image of light as being the goal of emergence from spiritual darkness took on new meaning. I applied to what happens in the course of "The Convent," particularly to the Mother Abbess and Patti, something I learned recently about the attraction of moths to bright lights.  This may again be a matter of mental overreach, but I've taken it as a key to this production's emotional impact.

One of the theories explaining moths' attraction to bright lights has to do less with the intense light itself than the illusion of dark places threaded throughout the glow closest to bright lights. These false phenomena, known as Mach bands and common to many creatures' vision, create areas of dark that seem darker than anywhere else in the night sky. The moths appear to be headed toward the light itself, but they could be seeking those darkest places for their own safety, some scientists believe.

Moths to humans — a ridiculous stretch, still too much in my own head? It may only work as a
metaphor, but it turned "The Convent" into a lesson that emotions can take on physical force and that the cliched journey of seeking the light may actually be more about finding a dark place of rest – going directly into the source of negativity as much as one can, and knowing that that's what one needed all along.

This is the spiritual journey that is refracted through the changes wrenched from the repressed friends Bertie (Chynna Fry) and Dimlin (Carrie Ann Schlatter), note-taking goodie-two-shoes Jill (Maria Argentina Souza), cheeky Tina (Shawnté P. Gaston) and Wilma, a real nun in unresolved bereavement (Miki Mathioudakis). The playwright's creation of full-bodied characters out of what could have been a two-dimensional parade of women's issues is borne out by the excellence of the performances.

The humor of the project is robustly evident, but so is the pathos of sometimes out-of-control methods for transcending personal pain. This is a funny play, and putting the medieval trappings in perspective— which the design team of Mara Ishihara Zinky (scene), Brittany Kugler (costumes) and Laura E. Glover (lighting) manages superbly — is a revelatory way to process both the skewed mirth and the cauterizing significance of what these seven women undergo.

[Photos: Ankh Productions]