In a Church’s Sanctuary, Theater With a Dose of Reality

David Gonzalez/The New York Times

Over the last few weeks, moments sacred and profane have played out each night in the boxy, cinderblock sanctuary of Nativity Church on Second Avenue. The altar, candles and tabernacle have been put away, replaced by a bare-bones set where the youthful cast of “Stand-Up Tragedy” confront and comfort one another under the gaze of an unblinking Christ.

The church is a stand-in for the play’s Trinity Mission School, where an idealistic white teacher tries to save a bright but troubled Latino teenager. Its Lower East Side location lent the production a certain authenticity of place that appealed to Category 7, which is staging this revival of Bill Cain’s 1989 play.

They had no idea at first just how perfect. The church is where the playwright - a Jesuit priest - celebrated Mass during the 1980s, when he taught at the nearby Nativity Mission Center, the middle school that inspired him to write the play in the first place.

“I just wanted a downtown church, and I didn’t realize until later that I got the genuine article,” said David G. Schultz, the troupe’s artistic director. “That’s where Bill Cain said Mass in the ’80s. That’s the resurrected Christ on the wall, the figure he used to lay his hands on for solace when he went out to teach. There is an incredible energy in that place.”

The vibe is palpable both in the work and the setting.  These same pews - where Dorothy Day once worshiped during her later years at the Catholic Worker around the corner - was where a generation of Nativity schoolboys also prayed. It was where their parents pleaded silently for deliverance from the evils lurking outside.

Father Cain â€" who had been director of the Boston Shakespeare Festival before coming to New York - said teaching at the school was his “day job” as he became a playwright. He realized at school that the lives of his young charges were too complicated to be fixed by simple solutions or pep talks. It taught him how to be a teacher, and in turn, a playwright who drew on his experiences there, which he chronicled in diaries.

“The trope is always the white guy going in to save black and brown kids,” Father Cain said.  “One day I went to get a kid who had missed school. When I got to his house, I realized it was more complex than just getting him to school. The family was in housing that was untenable. The context that kid was in was overwhelming, not just for him, but even for grown-ups with all the advantages. What one has to do to get out of poverty is not a romantic little journey, but a serious struggle.”

The result was a play that combines sardonic humor, blood-boiling anger and heartbreaking tragedy to draw attention to a world that may have vanished from the gentrified Lower East Side but persists in other parts of the city and country. Several students from La Salle Academy next door have roles in the play, giving it a jolt of real-life teenage energy. But the play is not a documentary, it’s a forceful treatise on good intentions gone terribly wrong.

The play, which ends its limited run on Saturday, has drawn modest crowds who have stayed afterward some nights to discuss the issues raised on stage: what can outsiders - even those with good intentions â€" expect in a poor neighborhood; how did the real Nativity school change lives; and what are the overlooked gifts of those who struggle each days against the odds and indifference.

Father Cain - as well as the members of Category 7 - hoped the production would also attract new audiences, from those who have not been to a play to theatergoers who have not encountered its themes in a real-life setting, even if their immigrant grandparents probably did.

“One of my theories of writing is to show people their hidden greatness,” said Father Cain, who also has the television series “Nothing Sacred” among his credits. “I also wanted to say to the theatergoing world, which is a white world,  ‘Wake up and notice these beautiful and extraordinary people.’  There is a privilege to joining this world, to get out of your own narrow little world.”

Manhattan’s Nativity school itself existed to expand the world of its students. It closed last year, the profits from the building’s sale pumped into two remaining Nativity-style schools, the Bronx’s St. Ignatius School in Hunts Point and Brooklyn’s Jesuit Prep in Crown Heights. Both of those are in danger of closing at the end of this semester due to a combined deficit that  surpasses $1.3 million.

What they did was not altruistic. It was a mission. During an after-show discussion last week, Father Cain put it in the kind of plot terms understood by any dramatist.

“It’s a lifeboat,” he said. “And the job is to keep everybody in. The loss of one is the loss of the world.”

A reminder of that confronted them when they filed out of the quiet church into the festive din of Second Avenue. Right across the street was a funeral parlor.