The late Austrian playwright Werner Schwab (1958-94) is known for writing social dramas with blunt, even shocking language. Holy Mothers, as Meredith Oakes titles her 1997 translation of Die Praesidentinnen, is no exception. Not only is it blasphemous, obscene and scatological, but it becomes increasingly cloacal as it proceeds on its grotesquely funny way. A hideous kitchen is the arena for three aging Catholic women. Erna (Valerie Lilley) wears a ludicrous huge hat she retrieved from someone's trash and prattles on about her Polish butcher, Karl Wottila (an unsubtle reference to Pope Paul, whose portrait hangs on the wall). Grete (Paola Dionisotti), tawdrily dressed, with cheap bracelets and too-big earrings, drawls nasally about having sex with a tuba player.
The conversation can get nasty: when Erna calls Grete "a Nazi Hitler whore," the latter replies, "If I'm a whore, you're a nun with a sewn-up twat." The somewhat younger Mariedl (Linda Dobell), in pigtails, who has been crawling around the floor like a child, soon reveals that her job is to clear shit-clogged toilets in middle-class homes -- and proudly without wearing gloves, "because if the Lord God created the world, He also created human excrement."
As time passes, fact turns to fantasy for all three -- and Mariedl talks of achieving celebrity, with clientele burying food and perfume bottles among the stools in the toilets. There is a shocking climax straight out of Sweeney Todd. A surprising brief epilogue ensues, in which the stage becomes a small theater. The three women are part of the "audience," and after a song, three girls appear and start to perform a parody of Holy Mothers, causing the horrified trio to seek an exit.
This production is well mounted, but Schwab would have been wise to take a blue pencil to his script.
