These two seem to be regulars at the bar the final member of the trio, April White, who once wanted to be a nun and whom the others initially fail to recognize, must practically live there, knocking back all the booze that a gruff but protective proprietor will allow her to pour into herself. Her opposite number is Linda Rotunda, who’s far from virginal (three illegitimate births and counting) and is more of a single-issue malcontent, the issue being that her boyfriend has recently ditched her, declaring that he wants to be with someone ugly, which Linda certainly isn’t. One of them is Denise Savage, who is a virgin and aggressively bitter about it, and about most everything else. In Shanley’s play, three of the bar-flies are 32-year-old Jersey girls who once went to convent school together. It also fits into the great American saloon tradition, in which the playwright corrals his characters in a symbolic watering-hole and watches them ferment. Like Doubt, whose characters were mainly priests and nuns, Savage in Limbo belongs to the new school of American Catholic drama, not so much lapsed as haunted, and most stimulatingly exemplified by Stephen Adly Guirgis ( The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Jesus Hopped the A Train ).
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