In the curtain raiser to [Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You], The Actor's Nightmare—a standard Durang parody pastiche which, against my better judgment, I often found funny—the baffled protagonist talks about having been an altar boy and about all the people he knows who went to Catholic school; he adds, almost as an afterthought, "I don't know any Catholic adults." Sister Mary Ignatius explains why. I can imagine a devastating comedy about the worst aspects of Catholic education, c. 1950, but Durang is more cartoonist than comedian. His Sister Mary Ignatius … is pure caricature, and often very funny in the early sections of the play when she answers, edits, or ignores questions that have presumably been handed in by the audience. The scenes with the little boy are less successful whether she is surreptitiously fondling him or rewarding him with cookies for knowing his catechism; if it were not for Franz's air of unending surprise, the latter joke would have become tedious much earlier than it does. The play goes to pieces with the arrival of the accusatory former students, particularly the one who hates Sister Mary Ignatius because she believed the teacher; as presented here the nun has the credibility of Miss Piggy in love. Durang retreats from direct didacticism into black farce as the pistol-toting Sister Ignatius starts knocking off her pedagogical failures. It is possible that Durang believes that there is a mass murderer hidden in every knuckle-rapper or—to make a metaphor of his demonic finale—that Catholic education of this variety is destructive. I suspect something less serious. Judging by these two plays and the earlier A History of the American Film, Durang is a satirist whose vision is imparied by too many years of pop culture and an impulse to go for the gag instead of the jugular. (pp. 50-1)