Against Law Sin is an affecting document BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Sin: A Cardinal Deposed Adapted by Michael Murphy. Directed by David Zak. Set by Tom Burch. Lighting by Jared Moore. With Steve Best, Patrick Gannon, Naomi Landman, Patrick Rybarczyk, Jim Sherman, and Mark A. Steel. Presented by Bailiwick Repertory Theatre at the Regent Theatre, Arlington, through June 27.

Some rise by sin," says Shakespeare in Measure for Measure. And as is cathartically demonstrated in Sin: A Cardinal Deposed, the mighty may fall by it, too. Culled from 1000 pages of transcripts of the depositions of Bernard Cardinal Law in the clergy sexual-abuse cases that rocked the Boston archdiocese in the early years of this millennium, Michael Murphy’s documentary theater piece debuted this spring in Chicago, in the 90-seat studio space of Bailiwick Repertory Theatre. Now it has come home to roost, with straightforward effectiveness, nearer the soiled nest.

On its own, Murphy’s treatment of searing actual events lacks the complexity of Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, in which many divergent voices are uncannily replicated, or even of Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, which charts the painful growth of a community in the wake of a tragic event. It’s deliberately more focused than Abby Mann’s quintessential tribune drama Judgment at Nuremberg. And Murphy, sticking to the public face Law wore in deposition, does not delve into what must have been roiling regrets. Actor Jim Sherman, not all ecclesiastical bombast, does exude grandfatherly concern, at least in retrospect, for the abused. It’s just not at the center of his agenda.

But the play does what it sets out to do — which is to demonstrate the Church’s callous disregard, over decades, for the victims of abusive priests — simply and successfully. And the Bailiwick production, performed by a sextet of non-Equity actors under David Zak’s direction on a simple set of utilitarian tables bearing water glasses (it looks like Spalding Gray in stereo), combines deep emotion with lack of theatrical effect in such a way that the material is as moving as it is infuriating. Although rooted in fact, the piece sometimes leans toward Theater of the Absurd, its blustering Cardinal Law apparently never having received in 18 years a single letter he can recollect.

Relying only on the depositions themselves and on documents (incorporating 38 characters) presented therein, Murphy divides his play into two halves, the first dealing with Law’s decade-long failure to deal with the canker of pedophile priest John Geoghan (who was subsequently prosecuted, convicted, and murdered in prison), the second focusing on the much-trumpeted but likewise ignored sins of "man-boy love" advocate Father Paul Shanley (since defrocked and awaiting trial). In the matter of Francis Leary and 86 other plaintiffs versus Geoghan, Law is questioned by attorney Mitchell Garabedian; in the second, Roderick MacLeish Jr., who represented multiple clients in a negligence complaint against Law himself, takes over.

In the presentation, there is some hectoring on the part of the attorneys that probably would not have been allowed. (In the most effective performance, Mark A. Steel’s near-insouciant MacLeish goes down on his knees like Al Jolson at the cardinal’s feet before rising for an incredulous and impassioned finale.) But the pattern, based on the records, is as astonishing as it is hard to deny. Arrogant and aggressive albeit embattled, Sherman’s white-haired Law defends with a battering ram his lack of action over 18 years of cover-up, in which the good name of the Church and the priests whose "pathology" he hoped might be cured were put above the welfare of the children of the faithful. Toward the end, you think that if the cardinal refers once more to the "delegate" who was supposed to have ministered to the victims, the duck will come down.

The final speech of Sin’s Cardinal Law is his announcement in December 2002 that, having theretofore held on with stubborn pomp and white knuckles, he would resign as head of the archdiocese. Sherman delivers this in tired quietude and dim light before exiting. But Law’s is not the last word. That goes to very vocal victim Patrick McSorley, whose remembrance of having been abused as a 12-year-old taken for ice cream by a seemingly sympathetic Geoghan is rendered by Patrick Rybarczyk with a nervous numbness, even a tight little smile, that conveys pain locked down and undiffusable. In February of this year, McSorley was found dead in a friend’s apartment.

Opening night in Arlington was followed by a talk-back with the playwright (who made it clear that his criticism is not of faith but of management) as well as the cast and the director. It became evident that the audience included, in addition to attorney Garabedian, a number of survivors of clerical abuse. One man related that, shortly before intermission, he had had an urge to throw a baby stroller another patron had brought to the theater at the actor playing the cardinal. You don’t have to have been there, violated and terrified, with the ice cream from a cone bribe melting down your arm, to understand the impulse.