No shying away from this ‘Truth’

During a final run-through for the new play “A Comfortable Truth,” playwright and director Mark Kemble cautions actress Shareen Mitchell to ease up and save herself for opening night. But by the final scene, Mitchell -- who plays the mother of a boy sexually abused by her family’s priest -- has screamed, cried and collapsed on stage.

“There’s no good half-way [to act] with this play,” she says afterward, wiping tears from her eyes.

“A Comfortable Truth,” subtitled “The Story of a Boy and His Priest,” opens tonight at the Lee Strasberg Creative Center in West Hollywood. It is one of the first plays addressing sexual abuse in the Catholic church since the national scandal erupted two years ago in Boston and spread across the United States.

In the two-hour production, 22-year-old Thomas Gordon (Zack Graham) accuses his childhood priest, Father Grant (Paul Lieber) of molesting him 11 years before. The church calls in a psychotherapist (Alan Blumenfeld) to steer the victim, his parents and the priest to get to “a comfortable truth.”

Part of the play is set in 1963. The abuse occurs on the day President John F. Kennedy is shot and Americans are said to have lost their innocence. Other scenes take place in 1974. The priest is confronted on the day President Richard Nixon resigns and, as Kemble says, “the chickens come home to roost.”

For Kemble, “A Comfortable Truth” is about the danger of blind faith in the leaders of any religious organization.

“I think there’s sleepwalking that goes on with belief systems,” says Kemble, who calls himself “spiritual” but not a part of an official religion. “I’m not against the Catholic church. I’m against Catholic priests [abusing] children.”

Kemble, who wrote and directed the acclaimed “Names,” started work on “A Comfortable Truth” in 1993, nearly a decade before the current crisis. He said recent revelations in the media that showed the depth of the scandal and extent of the cover-up confirmed for him the truths he had written, including the victim’s intense pain and the denial by the victim’s parents and the church.

“It was nice to have research dropped at your doorstep each morning” in the form of the daily newspaper, Kemble says. “It’s a terrible and sordid story. I don’t think it’s an aberration. I believe the institutional church attracts and produces this kind of behavior.”

Since he was a boy, Kemble has been intrigued by the sexual secrets of the Catholic church. Rumors of priests molesting children frequently swirled around his parochial school in Providence, R.I., and he says he’s still grateful to the nuns who shielded him and his classmates from certain priests considered dangerous to students.

“I watched the games that would go on as precursors to further intimacy,” says Kemble, a 50-year-old resident of Los Angeles who retains traces of an East Coast accent. “Priests playfully put boys under their tunics. Then they’d rub your head, turn you around and laugh. I think the pathology [of sexual abuse] ran through it all.”

The play’s language is graphic. For Kemble, the words “fondled,” “molested” or “sexually abused” are too bland to depict acts of sodomy on a child and other forms of assault.

“Molest, molest, it’s too nice a word,” says the mother of the victim, under hypnosis induced by the church’s psychotherapist, “ ... it’s too nice a word for what he did to my boy.”

“It’s a nasty and barbaric act,” Kemble says.

The play’s set looks like a cross between a church and bombed out train station with a few religious icons, including a busted Madonna fallen to the floor, candles whose melted wax forms miniature waterfalls and a crucifix disguised as a piece of junk -- scraps of wood and metal topped by an upside-down milk pail with the spout serving as Christ’s nose.

“There’s so many religion references in the play that I don’t want the audience to feel like they’re walking into the church,” he says.

The heaviness of the play’s theme and explicit language describing sexual acts committed by clergy attracted producer David Lee Strasberg to the work.

“The play goes all out -- as a production, the actors, the style,” Strasberg says. “It doesn’t hold back because some people think it’s a sensitive subject. It goes full throttle.”

The theater has invited victims of sexual abuse by priests and their advocates to attend the show on opening night.

“Even though you hear about the molestation of children by priests, you still don’t understand the implications of the molestation, the violation of trust and loss of faith that accompanies it,” says Raymond P. Boucher, a Beverly Hills attorney who represents more than 300 alleged victims of childhood sexual abuse. “ ‘A Comfortable Truth’ gives the public a glimpse into the scars that survivors live with every day.”

Mary Grant, who was molested by a priest in the 1980s, says she will attend tonight’s performance.

“I feel encouraged,” says Grant, now regional director for the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. “When clergy abuse is written about in the arts and movies, it raises the awareness and exposes the evil that needs to be purged from the church.”

Still, Kemble says he’s wary about turning “A Comfortable Truth” into a propaganda vehicle for molestation victims. This week, he ordered a display of more than 50 scandal-related news stories removed from the lobby.

He said the stage is one of the best places to reveal secrets, and he wants theatergoers to come to their own conclusions after seeing the play.

“Theater is truly the last church,” Kemble says. “That’s where the truth is spoken, or at least attempted.”

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Times staff writer Jean Guccione contributed to this report.

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‘A Comfortable Truth’

Where: Lee Strasberg Creative Center, 7936 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood

When: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 22

Price: $25

Contact: (323) 650-7777