Through three Marys across centuries, Katie Cappiello’s play uses sharp humor and heartbreak to ask who gets to decide what happens to a woman’s body.
I spent the summer working in New York City with the feminist writer (and my professor at Smith College) Jennifer Baumgardner. The work was … eclectic—a hodge-podge of unexpected missions.
One July day, I wandered the sticky-hot streets of the East Village with a roll of oversized posters featuring bloody underwear under my arm and a bowl of clumpy homemade glue in my hand. Pre-production for The Body of Mary: A Play in Three Acts (of God), a new play written and directed by Katie Cappiello, was in full swing, and I was both part-time production assistant and a fly on the wall: I delivered the hot water with lemon to the actors in rehearsal, went door-to-luxury-door in SoHo to source a large black box needed for a prop, and wheat-pasted posters to construction fences and mailboxes that were already plastered with flyers.
So enmeshed was I in this show that, by the end of summer, when I left for junior year at Smith, I was pretty sure I could have performed a one-woman version on demand.
I was not prepared, therefore, for what I encountered last weekend when I finally saw the fully produced Body of Mary in a black box theater in the storied Greenwich Village church, Judson.
Nor was my mom, visiting from Denver to celebrate my birthday. I had purposely kept her in the dark regarding the show’s plot, and as it unspooled before us, she was downright shellshocked.
“Life-changing,” my mom said as we rose shakily from our seats. “I’ll need a minute to process it all.”
While she’s processing, let me back up.
Katie Cappiello is a playwright, director and theater teacher most known for her plays Now That We’re Men and SLUT: The Play, the latter of which was adapted into the 2020 Netflix series Grand Army. Cappiello has an ear for how people (especially young people) really speak, as well as a keen feminist radar. Her work frames the everyday horrors of being a girl or woman in a sexist world, without devolving into banal messages, trite tidiness or moralizing.
The Body of Mary—which runs Sept. 8-Oct. 8 at The Gym at Judson and grew out of weekly work sessions with her best friend, the aforementioned Jennifer Baumgardner—tells the story of three different Marys.
Act I is about the Virgin Mary, as in Jesus’ mom. We all know this Mary, at least on sight. We’ve seen her gaze at churchgoers with downcast eyes from her perch in stained glass windows or huddle peacefully with Joseph in life-size Nativity scenes outside churches.
But here, portrayed by Annalisa D’Aguilar, she looks a little different. Her dreamy eyes glow in the stage lights as she smiles broadly up to heaven. She embodies a peculiar joy, given her task of scrubbing laundry—until she hurls into a bucket. Mary wears the classic cobalt blue dress you’d see in any depiction of the Virgin, but her feet are shod in white high-top Converse (much like my own). Cappiello modernizes the distant “ancient” times in order to remind us Mary was a real person—a girl. She’s 13 years old, we’re told. She even wears a red ribbon in her curly hair.
Mary is not a serene servant of God—she is terrified. This story was one of betrayal, not holiness. … How was a religion built on top of *this*?
Mary is pregnant, though no one has let her in on this fact. Enter Gabriel (played hilariously by Ben Cook) who claims to be an angel sent to make a very special proposal to Mary: God wants her to be the mother of His child!
Mary is confused. Gabriel and Mary’s parents come up with more and more outlandish reasons why a virgin pregnant via God-magic makes perfect sense. The laughs keep coming—fast, furious and clever, like a good sitcom—until it suddenly isn’t funny at all.
“How can I already be with child?” Mary asks her father. “You said I was a virgin … no matter what that Roman did to me.”
By scene’s end, a railroaded Mary of Nazareth is physically trapped between her grinning parents, trying not to cry as she thanks a smug Gabriel for “this opportunity.”
Despite having read the script a dozen times over, I found myself welling up. In Cappiello’s annunciation, Mary is not a serene servant of God—she is terrified. This story was one of betrayal, not holiness. I couldn’t help but think, how was a religion built on top of this?
Act II introduces us Cardinal O’Malley—played by David Hull, Mary’s father in Act I and a virtuoso of subtle menace—who is little more than a frat bro with a frightening amount of religious authority.
He pitches 59-year-old Mother Mary Joseph, the selfless head of a busy New York City order (and played with heartbreaking strength by Tracy Sallows) another annunciation of sorts: to be implanted with abandoned embryos created in the service of IVF.
Abetted by his sadistic Irish sycophant (Mary Jo Mecca, who also plays Mary’s colluding mother in Act I) and a spineless Father Donato (an agile Ben Cook again), O’Malley won’t stop until Mother Mary is vanquished.
Cappiello has referred to Act II as “absurdist,” but it felt realistic to me. Not just because of the references to our modern life like the Chick-fil-A wrappers littering the desk or when the Cardinal mentioned almost apropos of nothing that he’d “never met Jeffrey Epstein,” but the ubiquity of this kind of character: the smiling “nice” guy who nonetheless pushes past a woman’s no.
As this act draws to a close, a worn-down Mother Mary invokes Mary of Nazareth, and the theater is filled with the haunting sound of the “Ave Maria.” To my delighted surprise, the song was performed live by the young opera singer Lu Yi Peng. As she walked onstage and remained for the scene change between Acts II and III, my mind flooded with memories of the few church services I went to as a kid and the peacefulness of the hymns. Leave it to Cappiello to expose the horrors of the church and remind you of the beauty that is also tangled up in any relationship with religion—this is no simple hit job. The beautiful music stays with you and it’s jolting to remember that it was the soundtrack to Mother Mary’s forced implantation.
Cappiello has referred to Act II as ‘absurdist,’ but it felt realistic to me … the smiling ‘nice’ guy who nonetheless pushes past a woman’s no.
Act III: We’ve reached our final Mary. She’s from Nazareth, Texas. The state is ground zero for so-called “pro-life” laws that are in truth anti-woman and anti-child.
This Mary (Gracie Conn, a revelation), just off her late-night shift at Dairy Queen, commands the stage alone for the whole scene, accompanied only by her best friend Nevaeh (Annalisa D’Aguilar) on a never-ending phone call. Mary finds a baby in the dumpster outside of the DQ, and although physically alone, this is the first Mary to have anyone on her side to help her figure out what to do. The two actors have a wonderful, goofy back-and-forth that is so genuine, I feel like I’m on a call with my friends. Together they come up with schemes to save the baby without harming the mother, displaying empathy in a way that I’m desperate for after Mary I and II. It’s no coincidence this solidarity is coming from two teenage girls.
“The mom could, like, be our friend,” Mary says.
“This is what I’m saying,” Nevaeh responds.
“She could be us,” says Mary.
They decide against calling the cops, despite having no idea how to even feed this newborn, in case the baby’s DNA could be used to arrest the mother. The girls intuit the powers-that-be are not to be trusted. They have to rely on themselves and their compassion for the baby’s mom, who is a girl in an fucked-up world, just like they are.
Because the scenes are so funny, the audience is caught off guard by their horrifying implications.
This emotional whiplash is a Cappiello specialty, she said in the talk-back after the show, because “humor invites the audience to let their guard down, and open themselves” to the hard truths—like how Mary was “chosen” not by God, but by ordinary men. Or how Mother Mary Joseph had already given her “whole life to the Church,” so what choice did she have other than to comply with their latest demand?
Without spoiling the ending, Mary of Texas at least avoids the fate of the first two Marys.
“This is low-key Handmaid’s Tale!” Mary of Texas shrieks after she successfully gets the baby out of the dumpster.
Yes, so much of life is low-key Handmaid’s Tale—like my mom’s former boss, who literally advised her to “marry an old, rich man” when she asked for a raise. Forcibly impregnating nuns might be a degree of horror we haven’t seen yet, but no one would be surprised if that was a New York Times headline tomorrow. We’ve all had enough interactions with Cardinal O’Malleys to know that sort of manipulation is possible.
My mother and I navigated the busy streets of Greenwich Village dinner traffic, still shaking from our theater experience. Once my mother took her “minute to process,” she had plenty to say.
About Cardinal O’Malley: “I hated watching him. I’ve met that man too many times in real life.”
She was amazed thinking about the Christian teachings of her childhood and how unquestioningly she had absorbed the lore, no matter how ludicrous, despite having counter-knowledge derived from her own experience becoming a mother (twice).
“Of course Mary got pregnant the ‘normal’ way,” my mom said, meaning via rape or sex. “How did I never realize that before?”
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Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
