"The Boys and the Nuns": Theater's New Zoom-Native Generation (Theater)

If the pandemic has gutted any industry more than restaurants, it is perhaps theaters. While diners found ways of patronizing, however meagerly, their favorite eateries, playhouses large and small sat dark. When, we wondered, will we ever get back to the stage? Will there even be a stage to return to?

The answer, still in its early formation, seems mixed. Doubtless some stages have seen their last scene. But others are springing back, sometimes in different forms. A friend of mine is at the forefront of such innovation, directing The Little Mermaid live this spring. Outside. Just imagine: planes banking over your head on their approach to the airport while Ariel and Prince Eric perform their iconic kiss six feet apart. No really, just imagine. ‘Cause that’s as close as they’re going to get.

Another innovation is the streaming of live theatre events to viewers all over the world. Having directed a few shows, I find the logistics of such a performance dizzying. What does blocking even mean when actors are trapped in boxes? Should they look at their screens or “toward” each other? The thought of taking on such a challenge gives me hives. (Outsized kudos to Stage Manager Gianni Carcagno and Technical Director Justin Snyder for tackling such a formidable hydra.)

So I was perplexed to find myself feeling a familiar comfort—one I haven’t felt since before COVID—as I settled into my couch to watch Loyola University Chicago’s live Zoom performance of The Boys and the Nuns, written by Sandra Delgado. It’s a show whose native habitat is pandemic life. First workshopped in the spring of 2020, the musical makes the most of its online existence. The actors, coming at you live from five different time zones, truly interact across their boxes, looking toward each other instead of at their cameras, and occasionally handing props “across” the dividers in ways that feel if not natural, at least plausible. The original music, written by Michael McBride, blends the feel of contemporary Broadway with the energy of the 80s. “A lot of new music today is actually pulling on the sound and energy of the 80s,” McBride told me, “so this show fits nicely into this cultural renaissance already in progress.”

The story follows a coterie of Boystown gays (and one adamant lesbian) and the unlikely group of nuns who befriend and defend them as Chicago considers passing the Human Rights Ordinance in the late 1980s. Pablo (Marlon Alexander), a closeted, emerging songwriter, is torn between his conservative Catholic Latina mother, Carmen (Mercedes Inez Martinez), and his burgeoning sense of self and his love for a pianist, Michael (Greyson Smith). Pablo’s sister, Sophia (Wency Hernández Rubio), is a novitiate at the nearby convent, and must decide whether the love that she and her Sisters have for God compels them to fight for or against people like her brother. The show juxtaposes Pablo’s and Sophia’s otherness: Both eschew the heteronormative family. Neither will give Carmen the grandchildren she desires. Each experiences disenfranchisement—Sophia as a woman within the Catholic patriarchy, and Pablo as a penniless, Brown, gay man from a neighborhood where gentrification is erasing Puerto Rican and Colombian families like his. The affinity between the boys and the nuns here is so natural that viewers will begin to wonder why Catholics and queers don’t get along better overall. And yet the animosity towards the gay community from leaders within the Church has not changed much in the past forty years. Pope Francis, for all his progressivism, is still describing queer people as “disordered.” The Equality Act, a descendant of legislation like Chicago’s Human Rights Ordinance, is still awaiting final passage in Congress. In McBride’s words, “This show is not a historical piece. It’s still the story of today.”

As the show started, I was skeptical of the Zoominess of it. Perhaps predictably, the very feature one might think would have the most to offer showbiz, virtual backgrounds, was the one that occasionally spoiled the magic (just as it does in most Zoom calls). But it took me half of the first act to realize I was watching live theatre instead of prerecorded and edited scenes. Moreover, there were moments that I’m quite sure were more effective on-screen than they would have been on stage—intimate scenes where I felt like I was sitting in the room with the actors, much like we have more or less been sitting in each other’s “rooms” for the past thirteen months as we taught and talked and drank and cried our way through the pandemic. Watching Pablo and Sophia or Michael and Ella (Levi Welch) truly see and love each other was spellbinding. And that’s a word I never thought I would use to describe a Zoom experience. 

I don’t know if theater will ever return to its former self. Who knows if any of us will? But The Boys and the Nuns proves that while we mourn our losses, we need not fear the brilliance in our future.

—Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Fiction Editor

The Boys and the Nuns
Written by Sandra Delgado
Music by Michael McBride
Co-directed by Sandra Delgado and Mark E. Lococo
Presented by Loyola University Chicago Department of Fine and Performing Arts
Runs April 17–25, 2021. Two-hour runtime with one ten-minute intermission.
General admission tickets begin at $10 and benefit the Arts Department.