"Sanctifying Grace"
as reviewed by Variety

SANCTIFYING GRACE

NEW YORK A Donald Kelly, Diane Krausz and Jeremy Steinberg presentation, in
association with HBO Prods. Inc., of a monologue in two acts by Lou DiMaggio
and Colin Quinn. Directed by Robert Moresco. Set, David Raphael; lighting,
Mauricio Saavedra Pefaur; costumes, Susanne Coghlin; executive producer,
Cambell Martin Associates Inc.
Opened June 18, 1994, at the Irish Arts Center. Reviewed July 21;
73 seats; $25 top. Running time: 1 HOUR, 15 MIN.
With: Colin Quinn.

Reviewed by Jeremy Gerard
Colin Quinn, familiar to MTV viewers as the sidekick on the gameshow spoof
"Remote Control," makes an impressive stage debut with "Sanctifying Grace," a
funny, resonant monologue co-written with Lou DiMaggio, in which the actor
portrays a handful of people from the Brooklyn Irish neighborhood he grew up
in. The central figure is "Fats," who admits to an unseen priest as he steps into
the crisscrossed light of a confessional that it's been 17 years since his last
visit, a jumping-off point for a tour of old haunts and memorable characters
set mostly in the 1970s.

To the extent that Quinn skillfully evokes a wide range of types to tell what's
basically a coming-of-age tale, the obvious parallels are with John Leguizamo
and Eric Bogosian, and like them Quinn has HBO on his side, though plans for this
show are uncertain. Looking like a young Danny Aiello, the beefy actor engages
in none of the histrionics that the genre has spawned; he's neither wildly
flamboyant, like Leguizamo, nor in-your-face, like Bogosian. In a performance
of spare gestures and raspingly dry delivery, Quinn adds slowly and subtly to
his canvas until his portrait is complete, and the considerable humor seems
merely a veil over considerable loss and pain.

For Jimmy, garden-variety boor who has the hourly wages of civil servants
committed to memory, childhood is recalled as a continual punishment, usually
meted out to a younger brother who suffered frostbite, deafness and other
tortures at the hands of their father.

Marriage – "you saw a girl sitting on a stoop, you went around the block, and if
she was still there you married her" – is a dead-end cycle of "silence, violence
and bad sex," while grown-up friendship is marked as often by betrayal as by
love. Most wounding is the dreamless emotional landscape they all inhabit: As
Margaret, the sole woman Quinn conjures, says. "We didn't go after what we
wanted, we went after what was left." The result is narrow, mean lives
constrained by boredom and typically wrecked by drugs and alcohol.

The script sometimes reaches – a couple of malapropisms, undoubtedly lifted
verbatim, nonetheless ring false, and, similarly, some of the storytelling is
too contrived. Nevertheless, Quinn warms to Robert Moresco's admirable simple
staging (with able assists from Mauricio Saavedra Pefaur's lighting and
Susanne Coghlin's costumes), and the performance grows on you. And not
withstanding the darkness at its core, "Sanctifying Grace" is very funny. It's a
natural candidate for a cable special, and one hopes to see Quinn on other
stages soon.

(Reprinted w/o Permission)