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For nuns, the stage and screen can be habit forming

Both Broadway and Hollywood have had a long, lingering romance with nuns – on stage and the silver screen, that is.  In everything from searing dramas to lyrical comedies, convent-dwellers have been the subject of plays and musicals on the Great White Way, of award-winning films at your local movie house, and have even flown across your home television screens … not to mention making a few stops at the Willows Theatre in the guise of the Little Sisters of Hoboken and now Over the Tavern’s Sister Clarissa. What follows is a sampling of some of those heavenly offerings:

Works written for the stage have long mined the lives of nuns for the inherent drama, poignancy, and conflict which characterize their calling. In the absorbing drama The Runner Stumbles, playwright Milan Stitt explored a real-life event from 1927 in which an intellectual priest in a poor mining town falls in love with a spirited young nun only to be charged with her murder. In John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God, a psychiatrist is sent to a convent to do a psychological evaluation of a novice who gave birth to a baby and then killed it. Tackling questions of spirituality and the miraculous, it explored the fine line between faith and science. As for the comedies, a more satirical note is struck in Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You. And in Danny Goggin’s popular series of Nunsense comedies (no stranger to the Willows stage), the sisters bring the house down with their unexpected and bottomless theatrical showmanship. But perhaps the most iconic portrayal is found in one of our John Muir Summer Festival offerings — The Sound of Music. The musical tale of the conflicted novitiate Maria draws its most delightful and poignant moments from the choices she is asked to make between the two worlds which tug at her heart. And of course, is there any more stirring moment in the show than when the Mother Superior counsels Maria to “Climb Every Mountain”?

The roster of performers who have graced the screen as nuns is quite impressive. Audrey Hepburn wrestled with the challenges of cloistered life in The Nun’s Story; Ingrid Bergman traded gentle barbs with Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s; Rosalind Russell endured the pranks of two mischievous convent school students in The Trouble With Angels; Whoopi Goldberg tamed a rowdy high school class with music in Sister Act;  and Susan Sarandon guided a death row inmate to a spiritual peace in Dead Man Walking. Even Monty Python’s Eric Idle, currently the toast of Broadway for his hit musical Spamalot, joined the sisterhood in the caper comedy Nuns on the Run. Audiences also have been fond of the endearing Lillies of the Field, in which Sidney Poitier portrays a handyman who thinks he’s just passing through a small town but ends up staying to build a chapel for a cluster of German-speaking nuns. But perhaps the strangest nun’s tale is an odd experiment in 1960s social relevance called Change of Habit, which pairs Elvis Presley as a ghetto-clinic doctor with Mary Tyler Moore as an incognito nun. Moviegoers were less than all shook up at the prospect.

Television took to the skies for one of its few forays into the life of nuns when a young Sally Field starred in The Flying Nun, which ran on ABC-TV from 1967-70. The series concerned the adventures of Sister Bertrille, a young novice at a convent in San Juan, Puerto Rico, who discovered that her habit’s peculiar headgear had certain aerodynamic properties. When the winds blew just right, the 90-pound novitiate flew like a bird. The series was a favorite among children of the time as well as many adults, and was actually praised by Catholic nuns for its portrayal of convent life.