The photo of James Lopata’s parents meeting Pope John Paul II hangs near his front door but somehow doesn’t command attention.
Lopata’s paternal grandmother grew up with John Paul in Wadowice, Poland, so he had a family connection. When he mentions the pin his mother wore to greet the pontiff, the scene becomes downright revolutionary.
“You can’t see it very well there, but it’s the logo for the Women’s Ordination Conference,” Lopata said, referring to the organization that advocates for women to become priests, deacons and bishops.
“The Pope has no idea. He’s staring right at it,” he said with a booming laugh. “But that’s my parents. We were revolutionaries, I guess.”
If that was the extent of his Catholic pedigree, Lopata’s creative work would make perfect sense. But “Mass Drag,” his new musical that will have its world premiere at the ESL Rochester Fringe Festival from September 15-18, is about much more than dogma and edicts from the Vatican.
Lopata, a Webster native, wanted to explore “what happens when the institution you love doesn’t know what to do with you.” To do that, he penned a show about drag nuns holding their own mass in a gay bar.
It took decades from when he first came out — to a priest, naturally — for the show to develop. He had a lot of life to live before then. Lopata contemplated priesthood but ultimately decided against it, feeling the tension between his call and an institution that seemingly turned against him.
“I’ve struggled with that my whole life,” Lopata said. “The musical, in some ways, is the musical that I’ve been meant to write, which is to somehow figure out how to live this life with what I’ve been given.”
Instead of taking Holy Orders, Lopata worked in New York City and Boston as an executive coach, a journalist and a digital consultant. He also studied playwriting and pursued directing theater. But he continued to feel the call, so he pivoted once again, attending Harvard Divinity School.
Writing a Catholic drag show became the logical end point of all Lopata’s searching.
“I think it’s important to say, and what I’ve discovered is, that you don’t have to be a priest to do ministry,” he said. “My whole life has been ministry in various ways, and this is a ministry I’ve come back to.”
“Mass Drag” follows four drag nuns as they consider welcoming a fifth sister into their order. They’re inspired by the real-life Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of queer and trans nuns founded in 1979 in San Francisco. In the ‘80s, many sisters ministered to AIDS patients when the church itself wouldn’t.
Lopata remembers the crisis. He sat with a man at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan who died the next day, alone and seemingly abandoned by his family. The man’s mother returned to claim the possessions that might’ve gone to his partner, if only he’d had the legal protections of marriage. Lopata turned that particular experience into one of the most moving sequences in “Mass Drag,” set up as a generational conflict between the new recruit, Sister Tommy Dubious, and her elders.
“In theology, there’s this gap often between the reality on the ground and the doctrine that the church puts out,” Lopata said, “and as that gap gets wider, it opens spaces for drag masses in bars that never would have had to be there.”
That said, this is a drag show, honey. The high emotions and discussions of the church’s active harm of gay people are punctuated by chic habits, general fabulousness and exuberant hymns.
In particular, opening number “We Are The Church They Couldn’t Kill” sets a tone of defiant perseverance and community. “The Brother-Making Song,” meanwhile, highlights a marriage-like ritual the church performed for 1,000 years, bonding two men together. The life and death of Saint John Henry Newman, a historical figure whose partnership with a man the church sought to edit, is woven into the drama.
“Newman, who asked to be buried in his lover’s grave, who lay in that grave for over 100 years,” Sister Maggie Marginalia says during the show. “Then the church went to move him, to separate, to sanitize, to make safe for sainthood.”
If you’re confused, the sisters will help you stay on the path, as they do for the young, skeptical Sister Tommy. Understanding complex church dogma and history is not a prerequisite to enjoying the show. Lopata is betting on it.
Though Fringe marks the world premiere of “Mass Drag,” Lopata has fine-tuned the show via workshops and table reads, including earlier this year at Easton Mountain’s Summer Gay Spirit Camp. “Mass Drag” also has a November date at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva; Lopata has his eye on an eventual Off-Broadway run, though he knows that could take years.
He’s after an expedited timeline, and with an annotated reader version of the script full of academic essays and flexible plans for campus versions available, he just might get it.
The Fringe show features an entirely local cast of performers, including Dino Kolios, Sean Scott, Tim Stuff, Dylan Burley and Terry Quataert, with Paul Scheib as swing and Katherine Snelling as music director.
It’s a great community for Lopata, who used to dress up as Pope John Paul II for Halloween as a kid.
“I wanted to be the first American pope, so I’m very upset at Pope Leo right now,” he said with a smile.
He’ll just have to settle for being, like his family before him, a revolutionary. massdrag.org
