THE BEGINNING OF CALAMITIES

A caustic, improbably entertaining debut: an 11-year-old stages Christ’s Passion for his Catholic school on 1970s Long Island, allowing him to enact the drama of his incipient homosexuality.

Spazzy and prone to stuttering at the forbidden game of Keep Away, fifth-grader Danny Burke decides to write an Easter play in order to stay in at recess and avoid being subjected to his peers’ merciless bullying. His working-class mother, Carol, pushing 40 and with two troublesome older boys already moved out and a husband who’s never around, can’t be bothered; she insists only that Danny play a minor role in the production so as not to embarrass himself (and her). Danny’s mod teacher at Our Lady, Liz Kaigh, fresh out of college, seizes enthusiastically on the idea of the play and garners permission from principal Sister Regina to stage it. But when few of the popular children volunteer for roles, Liz—calling herself “Queen of the Lepers”—is left directing a ragtag group of outcasts and misfits. Danny, who longs to play Christ despite his teacher’s grave misgivings, finds his increasingly ecstatic identification with the vilified Son of Man a sensuous expression of his homosexual yearnings, especially regarding whipping and nudity. He creates a special biblical kindred spirit, Arram, who lounges naked in his room and encourages Danny to be true to his nature by, for example, streaking across the backyard. As the moment of the performance nears, mishaps mount, and Danny sabotages the other Jesus-es so the role, at the last minute, falls to him, while Liz and Carol create mythical personas of each other thanks to Danny’s fearful embarrassment that they might ever meet. They do, and the play is staged in a resounding finale as snickeringly silly as it is gratifying. House brings an ironic verisimilitude to the scrappy fifth-graders and two leading women—yet an underlying sarcasm leaves an aftertaste of wistful cynicism.

A tenacious exploration of identity and bad-hair memory in the ’70s suburbs.