Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and the Actor's Nightmare

Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and the Actor's Nightmare by Durang, Christopher. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780822210351.

This biting, irreverent and uproariously funny satire aims its barbs at organized religion and strikes home with hilarious results. In it, Sister Mary’s long lecture on Roman Catholicism starts conventionally but grows in morbidity and even horror as it proceeds. Sister Mary Ignatius, a teaching nun who is much concerned with sin in all of its various forms, delivers a cautionary lecture to her charges. The lecture is interrupted by four of her ex-students, who present a religious pageant, then reveal how far they have strayed from her teaching. Their stories are disturbing, but also very funny – and it is quickly apparent that one thing they all have in common is their loathing for Sister Mary and the unyielding dogma which she forced on them in their formative years. In the end there is mayhem and bloodshed – but with this, the unsettling feeling that, amid the laughter, some devastating truths have been told.