About the Play:

Nominated for Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Play

The Divine Sister is a full-length dark satire by Charles Busch, the genius campmeister who has been called "a first-class satirist and farceur" (The New Yorker). A crumbling convent school is on the verge of insolvency, when a young postulant begins to display strange heavenly powers. And when a dashing film executive arrives to buy the rights to her story, the Reverend Mother refuses to put profits over prayer.

The Divine Sister is an outrageous comic homage to nearly every Hollywood film involving pop-culture nuns – from the singing to the socially-conscious. Evoking such films as The Song of Bernadette, The Bells of St. Mary's, The Singing Nun, and Agnes of God, The Divine Sister tells the story of St. Veronica's indomitable Mother Superior who is determined to build a new school for her Pittsburgh convent. Along the way, she has to deal with a young postulant who is experiencing "visions," sexual hysteria among her nuns, a sensitive schoolboy in need of mentoring, a mysterious nun visiting from the Mother House in Berlin, and a former suitor intent on luring her away from her vows. Charles Busch's high-voltage spoof of religious melodramas evokes the wildly comic but affectionately observed theatrical style of the creator of Die, Mommie, Die! and Psycho Beach Party.

The Divine Sister premiered in 2010 at Theater for the New City in New York City before opening Off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse in New York City. Since then the play has been produced widely at professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 5 women, 1 man

What people say:

"Cue the Hallelujah chorus! Charles Busch has put on a nun's habit and is talking to God, from whom he has evidently received blessed counsel. The Divine Sister, his new comedy at the SoHo Playhouse, finds Mr. Busch at peak form. This gleefully twisted tale of the secret lives of nuns — in which the playwright doubles as leading lady — is Mr. Busch's freshest, funniest work in years, perhaps decades." — The New York Times

About the Playwright:

Charles Busch is an American actor, screenwriter, playwright and female impersonator, known for his appearances on stage in his own camp style plays and in film and television. He is the author of the award-winning Broadway play The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, and Our Leading Lady. He starred in such plays as The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which ran for five years Off-Broadway. In 2003, Busch received a special Drama Desk award for career achievement as both a performer and a playwright.