Sister act

Backstage with Maripat Donovan

by Bill Rodriguez

Maripat Donovan charges into her dressing room like an entire College of Cardinals on a bathroom break. It's 56 minutes to show time on opening night, but she's not anxious about that. Instead she's overflowing with heartfelt apologies about being a trivial four minutes late for an interview. This after bucking traffic all the way from Philadelphia.

Jewish Guilt, I'd like you to meet your heaviest possible competition: Catholic Guilt and Responsibility.

Donovan is co-author and creator of the role of Sister in Late Nite Catechism, which has become an instant and tenacious hit wherever it has opened in the last five years. Chicago. Australia. Off-Broadway. It will through August at the Providence Performing Arts Center. If the resulting nods and head shakes of recognition in PPAC could be harnessed for energy, everybody at Narragansett Electric could go on vacation for the summer.

Donovan is sporting Nikes, blue jeans, a lime green T-shirt, smiling blue eyes, and a single blond braid. Quite un-nunlike, unless you're talking about those peace-marching hootenanny nuns with headbands and visible knees. Of them, Sister (as pre-Vatican II as they come) would smile indulgently and tsk-tsk, as though facing a catechism class student who is unaware that sandals in church are just a step up from rubber duckies in the holy water font.

Although the 44-year-old Donovan comes across more like a Welcome Wagon hostess than a nun, she couldn't be more comfortable in the role, even after 61 months. "It's so exciting for me all the time. I'm never bored by it, never," she declares, adding: "I'm never bored by it and never scared."

And never ever out of ideas for the largely improvisational act. No wonder. She attended a parochial grammar school, aCatholic secondary school, and Loyola University, for -- uh -- Pete's sake.

"I had a good jump on everything, because I had 16 years of Catholic education. My mom was very religious. I've always been fascinated by the saints, so I know a lot about the lives of the saints. The Catholic Church and the Catholic school system were huge milestones in my life. Formative milestones. So I've got a lot of material to draw from."

Growing up in Chicago, she gave the teaching sisters the kind of hard time that Sister is now doing penance for with every heckler. Donovan has noted with amusement that her high school drama teacher predicted that she would grow up to be either a hoodlum or an actor.

"I was not a good student. I was bad. I was wild," she confesses. "I was in high school between 1968 and 1972 and the world was on fire. We wanted to be hippies and Black Panthers and the nuns wanted us to be Betty Crocker homemakers. It was a whole conflict. So I was wild. Not wild bad, but for a Catholic girl's high school. I used to wear red, white, and blue socks and stuff like that."

Donovan later worked as stage manager at Chicago's Second City -- the virtual birthplace of improv -- and performed in a different improvisational troupe there for several years. Working on and off as an actor, she joined up with friend and journalist Vicki Quade as a writing team in 1992. Sister and Late Nite Catechism were born the next year, eventually discovered by the artistic producer at Theatre-by-the-Sea, to be cloned across the country and on the other side of the world by their touring affiliate. By her count, there have been about a dozen other incarnations of Sister confiscating chewing gum from audiences from Dayton to Melbourne.

Donovan and Quade are working on a sequel, which will probably include film clips from Sister's favorite films with nuns in them. She figures it will be ready in a couple of years.

What about the performer herself and the church? Does it still have meaning in her life, or is it just -- forgive this -- an empty habit?

"Oh, I'm Catholic. I never would consider myself a former Catholic. I'm a for-sure Catholic, and I will be always, because I can't not be," Donovan explains. "It's like being Jewish. You never have to set foot in a synagogue your whole life, and you're still Jewish.

"That whole experience makes you a cultural Catholic," she points out.

Which is why so many people who might never again set foot in a church will be seeing Sister in theater after theater for the foreseeable future.

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