ALTHOUGH IT HAS been denounced by almost every religious group in Boston and by several politicians including Mayor Flynn Christopher Durang's black comedy Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You is hardly worth the hype. In fact, the picketers outside the Charles Playhouse who charge the play with being a "vile diatribe against all things Catholic" may be their own worst enemy. Without their help this poorly directed version of Durang's limited comedy would probably just wither away into theatrical oblivion.

While the protesters claim that the play's message is "Catholicism--and by implication religion in general--is a destructive inhuman force that ruins peoples' lives," the performance in fact delivers no such clear statement and seems instead like a Saturday Night Live show gone bad.

The play begins with Sister Mary Ignatius, played aptly by Elizabeth Franz, calmly explaining Catholic beliefs as if they were so many geometry theorems. Franz is the best part of the evening, bringing an understated madness to her part which save it from becoming, mere caricaturization. Explaining the difference between venial and mortal sins, Sister Mary lists sex outside of marriage, masturbation and hijacking as some of the more serious offenses. A parody of the Catholic belief that suffering is good, her eyes twinkle in delight as she explains in gory detail Christ's sufferings on the cross. Further, she insists that her best pupil who had her first period in gym class was really experiencing a stigmata.

DESPITE FRANZ'S efforts, however, the play lacks substance, as it stumbles from one anti-Catholic innuendo to the next.

The play's denouement comes with the arrival of Sister Mary's former students who returned for a reunion of sorts. The group reads like a Laundry list of Catholic casualties-an unwed mother, an agnostic who's had two abortions, a homosexual and an alcoholic wife beater who constantly wets his pants. The students, who all blame their problem on Sister Mary's repressive dogma have come to embarrass her. In the course of their confrontation, the nun shoots two of her students and chases another away, while the fourth is held at gunpoint despite his pleas that he be excused to go to the bathroom.

Perhaps it is the fault of director Jeffrey Zaks or perhaps it is the weakness of the script itself, but the play's shift from slapstick None of the characters are developed enough to make their suffering believable and the play's broad beginning leaves the audience unprepared for any profound message hold coda might hold. Despite all the hoopla, Sister Mary's bark is a lot worse than her bite.

BECAUSE Sister Mary" is only about an hour long, the theater offers another Durang comedy, The Actor's Nightmare to flesh out the evening. A mildly humorous play, The Actor's Nightmare is based on one very clever idea that nonetheless runs out of steam very fast. The story opens in medias res when George Spelvin, played by Jeff Brooks, finds himself backstage of a theater where an abrupt stage manager informs him that the play's leading man has been injured and George must take his place. Unfortunately George doesn't even know his own name much less his lines. "Am I an actor? I thought I was an accountant," he wonders.

While his fellow actors blithely with him luck and broken legs. George is still trying to figure out what play he's in. Things are further complicated when the play changes from Private Lives to Hamlet to a kind of Waiting for Godot. Just as George has figured out that Sybil is his wife and Amanda his lover, Horatio marches on stage announcing he has seen the King.

The rest of the play is spent exhausting every funny situation that could possibly arise from such circumstances. The crux of the comedy comes when George is left on stage for what is supposed to be a soliloquy of Shakespeare from Macbeth to a Midsummer Night's Dream. he resorts to reciting the pledge allegiance and the act of contrition. Like the rest of the play, the speech is funny for a while, but rapidly becomes tiresome. By the end of the evening, George's nightmare has become the audience's own bad dream.