Who Would Have Thought Catechism Could Be This Fun?

“Late Nite Catechism” Tuesday night, Nov. 3, The Met

Wow. Some of the students in this “Late Nite Catechism” class really got in trouble Tuesday night.

Like the man who said that the Immaculate Conception was “a Doug Flutie pass.”

Sister, a.k.a. actress Aubrey Manning, stared at him hard and finally said, “That was just a desperate cry for attention.”

Or like the woman who wore a nice pin depicting a Russian family.

“That’s nice,” said Sister, in a sweet voice masking iron. “Wouldn’t a little cross be more tasteful?”

Or the woman who said she buried a small statue of St. Joseph in her yard, in order to help sell her house. The trouble was she forgot to dig him up afterward.

“You’ve got to go back and dig him up!” Sister said, indignantly. “Otherwise, that house will just sell and sell and sell!”

Or the entire sold-out crowd, which had to endure Sister’s withering stare when it became clear that more of them knew the name of “evil singer Madonna’s baby” than knew the definition of Immaculate Conception.

“Late Nite Catechism,” the one-woman interactive theater smash brought in from Seattle for a one-night-only benefit, is the most fun anyone can ever have in catechism. The show essentially consists of a written framework, mostly about saints and the glories of a Catholic school education, filled out by two-plus hours of hilarious improvisation. Manning, who has been doing the show in Seattle for months, proved to be a brilliant - and surprisingly knowledgable - improviser on all subjects Catholic.

She asked most of her nervous subjects a few stock questions, such as whether they went to Catholic school. Those who didn’t were told, “Your parents didn’t care very much about you, did they?”

When a woman was asked to say a prayer of penance, Sister had to correct her pronunciation.

“No, you’re not ‘hardly sorry’,” she said, “You’re ‘heartily sorry’.”

A man named Wade was told, with disapproval, “I don’t think there was a Saint Wade, was there?”

Those people with good saint names like Veronica or Theresa were treated to long, funny, and amazingly accurate discourses on the lives of their particular saints. Manning obviously knows her stuff. I’ll bet even the bishop, sitting in the front row, was impressed.

At times, I forgot I was watching an actress and I began to think I truly was listening to a church spokesman (spokes-nun?). This is not as alarming as you might think, because, despite some irreverent discourses on women in the priesthood, this show is actually quite affectionate about all things Catholic.

Yet, above all, Manning is a comedian. Her quick instincts and sharp timing were apparent in passages like these:

Sister: How many children do you have?

Woman: Five.

Sister: (without missing a beat) That’s a start.

This show was a one-time-only event in Spokane, sponsored by Catholic Charities. With the terrific word of mouth this show will undoubtedly receive, someone should bring it back for an encore. Barring that, you can drive to Seattle to see Manning do the show at the First Covenant Church on Capitol Hill. This hilarious show will probably be running for a long, long time.