Agnes of God by John Pielmeier

First published: 1982

First produced: 1980, at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky

Type of plot: Miracle play; tragedy

Time of work: The late twentieth century

Locale: A convent

Principal Characters:

• Dr. Martha Livingstone, a doctor of psychiatry
• Mother Miriam Ruth, the mother superior
• Sister Agnes, a young nun

The Play

Agnes of God is a tragedy. Sister Agnes, a twenty-one-year-old nun, is accused of strangling her newborn child and discarding it into the wastebasket in her convent room. Her pregnancy and the birth of the child were kept secret, until Agnes is discovered unconscious and bleeding profusely outside her room. Sister Agnes professes no knowledge of the baby’s birth or death, offers no reason for the presence of the body in her room, and, until she is hypnotized, claims to have no recollection of ever conceiving. Mother Miriam believes Agnes exists on a different spiritual plane from others, shrouded in an innocence that she views as miraculous.

Mother Miriam is also highly protective of Agnes, afraid of how court-appointed psychiatrist Dr. Martha Livingstone might dissect Agnes’s psyche and diminish or destroy her fragile spirit. Mother Miriam tells Dr. Livingstone, “I don’t want that mind cut open.” The psychiatrist comes to the convent to evaluate Sister Agnes’s sanity. As a trained professional Dr. Livingstone wants to help the “hysteric” Sister Agnes; she is convinced that this pregnancy is not an immaculate conception, that Agnes is a seriously disturbed person who is psychologically scarred from childhood trauma, and that a sexual encounter produced the pregnancy. She is initially open to the idea that someone other than Agnes may have killed the baby, as she seeks to uncover a logical explanation to the crime and to help Agnes confront realities not rooted in religious doctrine, but in the doctrine of psychological well-being that emanates from love and the empowerment of self.

The play portrays two different hypnosis sessions in the second act. The first session reveals a childhood of tortured abuse, and complicated denials emerge from Agnes and Mother Miriam. The second hypnosis constitutes the climax of the play, when there is finally a confession about the baby’s birth and death, as well as a rapturously disturbing description of the act of the baby’s conception, leaving the audience wondering, Who really is the father?

The story is complicated by what one learns of the characters through private reflections, their exchanges, and the dynamics of belief systems that seem opposed. Dr. Livingstone was raised Roman Catholic but is now an agnostic. She resents the Church because of the death of her sister in a convent and her belief that not all women should be mothers. Early in the play she describes her smoking as an obsession that began when her mother died and describes her relationship with her mother as obsessive, indicating that “I’ll stop smoking when I become obsessed with something else.” By the second act she has stopped smoking because she is obsessed with Agnes; she wants to “free” Agnes, prove her innocence, and make her well.

The audience also learns that Mother Miriam was unhappily married and raised two daughters prior to becoming a nun. She is Agnes’s aunt, and Agnes came to live at the convent at age seventeen, when her mother died of complications from alcoholism. It becomes clear that Agnes’s mother, Mother Miriam’s sister, abused her daughter in many ways, one of which was isolating Agnes from the world, and the doctor believes that Mother Miriam continues Agnes’s isolation.

Agnes believes that the child she carries is a gift from the living God. Yet, Agnes also believes that nuns should not have babies, that there are good babies and bad babies, and that the way babies are born determines if they are good or bad. “Bad babies come from when a fallen angel squeezes in down there, and they grow and grow until they come out down there. I don’t know where the good babies come out,” she says. She believes she is too young to have a child and is afraid of babies; she fears she will drop one, as she was dropped as a child, making it “simple” as a result. Agnes’s mother told her she was not a “wanted” baby. As punishment, Agnes’s mother applied a burning cigarette to her daughter’s vagina. When Agnes’s baby is born, its vaginal birth makes it a “bad baby,” one that can only be saved “by giving her back to God.”

Agnes seems to be “other-worldly,” so intense is the fervor of her belief and strength of faith. Her hands have spontaneously bled, mirroring the stigmata, or wounds of Christ. She sings, as both Dr. Livingstone and Mother Miriam note, “like an angel” and with a restorative grace. Agnes’s voice helps restore Mother Miriam Ruth’s own sense of faith, as she recognizes it as a voice that resonated with her at an early age. As she hears Agnes sing, she says “. . . all my doubts about God and myself vanished in that one moment.”

Dramatic Devices

A play set in two acts, Agnes of God was originally conceived to be performed on a bare stage, with the fifteen scenes moving from one to the next without pause, except for intermission between the two acts. Because John Pielmeier views this as a “play of the mind, miracles, and light and shadow,” his concept allows characters to appear and disappear, to be present onstage when not in a particular scene, and to flow from one context into another. For example, when Mother Miriam is speaking with Dr. Livingstone, telling her about conversations she has had with Sister Agnes, the account to the doctor becomes a displayed conversation between Mother Miriam and Sister Agnes. Similarly, when under hypnosis, Sister Agnes is able to “move” from the context of speaking to the doctor to her room at the convent, where the birth and death of her child have occurred.

The use of transitional scenes and poignant monologues to provide expository reflections is an important device in the play. It allows the audience to understand the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. Livingstone’s sister at the age of fifteen in a convent, and the doctor’s own recognition that she cannot be impartial with respect to her beliefs. She also reveals how she comes to be acquainted with Agnes, how her repressed anger with religion is rekindled by meeting Agnes, what her professional responsibility toward Agnes is, and her ongoing desire to have alternative “reels” to change unhappy film stories into ones with “happy endings.” The “reel” image is revisited in act 2 as the doctor describes a dream she had that evokes a choice she made earlier in life not to have a baby when she discovered she was pregnant. She was certain she could not be a mother then, and she reexamines that certainty in this monologue. This monologue restates her constant desire for happier endings, foreshadowing the tragedy of the play. These transitional monologues expose the riddle Dr. Livingstone has created for herself, as her desire for happy endings plays out: “I had begun to believe that someone else had murdered her child. Who that person was, and how I was to prove it, were riddles of my own making that I alone could solve.”

The songs Agnes sings are largely religious and sung in Latin, the original language of Roman Catholic services. Agnes denies that she sings these songs, believing instead that they are the voice of “the lady” she serves. Agnes’s singing often appears just prior to one of the doctor’s monologues, thus bridging the actions of one scene to another and symbolizing a catalyst to the doctor’s musings. The two songs that are not sung in Latin serve to emphasize flashbacks. For example, the hymn “Virgin Mary Had One Son” is part of the story Mother Miriam tells the doctor about the night Agnes’s bed sheets were missing. The hymn helps transition the account into an actual scene between Mother Miriam and Agnes in flashback. The second non-Latin song that Agnes sings is also the final song of the play. In the final act, Agnes describes how the baby was conceived by an angel who sings as he lays on top of her, “Charlie’s neat and Charlie’s sweet . . . he gets his girl some candy.”

Critical Context

Agnes of God was produced in several American cities before its acclaimed debut on Broadway in New York City in 1982. The staging of the play elicited many comparisons to Peter Shaffer’s 1973 psychological drama, Equus, about a psychiatrist’s treating of a young boy who, in a moment of uncontrolled rage, blinded several horses. One primary difference in the plays seems to reside in how belief and passion are emphasized: Agnes of God emphasizes belief while Equus emphasizes passion.

Pielmeier adapted the play into a screenplay in 1985 for Columbia Pictures, and many encounter the story first through the film, which should not be the stopping point for exploring Agnes of God. The screenplay omitted monologues and “extraneous dialogue,” and added new characters and that which Dr. Livingstone so desperately seeks: a happy Hollywood ending. In 2000 a new sound recording of the original play was introduced and received mixed reviews.

Pielmeier’s subsequent work continued to focus on the tensions between what is deemed rational and irrational, what is real and imagined. For example, in his trilogy titled Haunted Lives (pb. 1984), each one-act play addresses a story of murder or murder-threat. Voices in the Dark (pr., pb. 1998) is a suspenseful thriller about a therapist from a television call-in show threatened while vacationing in a remote, inaccessible location. Another thriller, Sleight of Hand (pr. 1987), is about a murdering magician. The Boys of Winter (pr. 1985, pb. 1988) is probably his best-known play after Agnes of God. The play is based on the My Lai incident during the Vietnam War, when unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. soldiers.

Agnes of God is an important play that becomes even more fascinating to consider in the light of modern-day issues, including the Roman Catholic Church’s stand on abstinence for clergy, the ways that functional and dysfunctional sexual energy gets directed, and the ways that young women’s unhealthy body images can result in a variety of eating disorders and pathological behavior.

Sources for Further Study

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project. New York: Random House, 1997.

Hutchings, William. “The Equus of Convent: Agnes of God.” In From the Bard to Broadway, edited by Karelisa V. Hartigan. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987.

Pope, Rob. Textual Intervention. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Rasmussen, Karen, and Sharon D. Downey. “Dialectical Disorientation in Agnes of God.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 53 (Winter, 1989): 66-84.

Rosefeldt, Paul. “Dissecting the Divinity: Mothers, Fathers, and Victims in Equus and Agnes of God.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 16 (March, 1995): 61-74.