"It is so easy to convert others," Oscar Wilde observed. "It is so difficult to convert oneself." Something of both attempts is at the heart of "The Savannah Disputation," the comedy by Evan Smith receiving its area premiere at the Olney Theatre this week.
The play, which had a successful production in New York last year, grabs a subject many people shy away from discussing — religion — and runs with it, finding humor as the dogma flies.
Anyone who has ever answered a knock at the door to find an eager evangelical will, perhaps with a shiver, recognize the plot's set-up: Mary and Margaret, two sisters living together in Savannah, Ga., and content with their Catholic faith, find their lives put off balance when a Pentecostal missionary named Melissa shows up at their house, hell-bent on saving their souls. The sisters' parish priest, Father Murphy, eventually gets drawn into the battle, too.
Smith, a Yale School of Drama graduate who was born and raised in Savannah, has written that his "mother, an Irish Catholic, seemed to look upon Southern Protestants with the sort of benign contempt I imagine English nobility reserve for drunken American tourists."
In the play, one of the sisters, Mary, is something like that.
"The character's first impulse is to slam the door in the missionary's face," says Brigid Cleary, who has the role of Mary in this staging. "Margaret is the sweet one; I'm the mean one. It's not so much that she's walking around being angry all day, but if you feel the world isn't being fair, you look that way."
As for Margaret, her welcoming personality gives the determined missionary more than a foot in the door.
"Margaret tries to see good in every situation, which I can't often do," Michele Tauber says with a laugh. "I wish Margaret were a little stronger. But a beautiful part of her is that she tries to see everyone in some positive way."
For Tauber, one of the intriguing aspects of the character is that "Margaret often speaks in one word, sometimes just a sound. I'm trying to find out what is going on underneath that, what each sound means," the actress says. "It continues to challenge me every day."
There's another bit of a challenge in tackling this role.
"I'm Jewish," Tauber says. "I didn't understand the whole world inside Catholicism. But that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this. It is very enlightening. It has been a journey for me — eye-opening, difficult and rigorous. It asks you to think what it means to have your faith questioned."
Cleary was raised Catholic, making it a little easier to get into the mind-set of Mary. "But what we find out is how little my character knows about her own religion," the actress says, "despite how Vatican II was supposed to make things clearer for everybody."
Part of the fun in "The Savannah Disputation" is the way conflicting religious views collide.
"I read a blurb by the playwright saying how there are always arguments between nonbelievers and believers," Cleary says, "but he wanted to make an argument between believers and believers. You see how ludicrous people can look trying to argue their religion to someone else."
Given such a loaded topic, "we may offend people," Tauber says. Adds Cleary: "You may be equally offended or defended; there's something for everybody."
But, as the actresses were reminded earlier this week, this is still a comedy. "I was a little skittish when we had our first audience, but they laughed their heads off," Tauber says.
Cleary, who laughed aloud when she first read the script, says the humor "comes from real situations. It's not a forced and broad thing," she says, "but just a matter of recognizing human behavior as funny. I think it's a great way to tell a story and to get people thinking and talking. If you can make them laugh, too, you've got them just where you want them."
If you go
"The Savannah Disputation" runs through Aug. 22 at the Olney Theatre, 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, Olney. Tickets are $26 to $54. Call 301-924-3400 or go to olneytheatre.org.