By Katherine Luck
pnwtheatre.com
May 10, 2010

Catholic school: it’s a surreal place to visit, and you definitely don’t want to live there.

The world-premiere of Gracie and the Atom at Artists Repertory Theatre serves up inside jokes about the saints, enthusiastic cheerleading for the transformative power of physics, and the tantalizing possibility of redemption, all set to a sonorous soundtrack by Portland singer-songwriter Christine McKinley.

Grieving her father’s recent death—and so very angry—adolescent Gracie (Beth Sobo) makes a graceless, growling arrival for the first day of school at the Catholic boarding school, Our Lady of Rose. Baseball may allow you three strikes, but Our Lady only permits two before you’re out; exiled to dreadful Saint Zita’s, where you don’t get a diploma when you graduate, but a hairnet. It isn’t long before Gracie’s sarcastic snarls earn her strike one.

Salvation for agnostic Gracie is more likely to arrive via Sister Lidwina’s enthusiasm for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle than Sister Francis’ assigned essay on Saint Christina the Astonishing. Between the first day of school and Christmas, Gracie struggles to accept her father’s unintentionally absurd death by lightning and establish a conciliatory communion with her fellow students. Will she gain faith? If so, will it be faith in God, or in science?

The production boasts a bevy of Catholic school stock characters — the humorless nun, the slutty schoolgirl, the pious papist. The all-female cast has melodic fun with the old standbys, backed by a four-piece band and dominated by a stained glass cross adrift in an atomic whorl. The intimate space of Artists Rep’s Alder Stage is ideally suited for the subtler moments in the production, from the students’ upbeat paean to “Clean White Socks” to the world’s first Ouija board fashioned from a periodic table.

As fun as the catchy tunes and the witty one-liners are, Gracie herself does not evolve much beyond the hostile, hurting creature who slumps into a seat in Sister Francis’s theology class and spews venom about the gospels, which she has never read.

McKinley, a member of the band Dirty Martini, originally conceived of Gracie and the Atom as a “concept album.” During the production’s workshopping process in 2009, according to McKinley, “I knew the songs, had the idea, and was clear on the concept, but didn’t know how to manifest that into a script. I knew the inner life but needed the outer details.”

The time-worn plot proves this out. The songs are rocking and solid; the action that impels them much less so. Gracie grouches her way down the well-trodden path of grief, trapped in the anger stage for the entirety of the two-act musical. It takes one of the oldest of deus ex machinas—the Convenient Letter That Solves All—to integrate hostile Gracie into what could be called a happy ending.

Nonetheless, Gracie is a bright, bubbly and boisterous musical treat.

Gracie and the Atom is onstage in Portland through May 30. Visit www.artistsrep.org for more information