Fool for Christ.

The stage is a lie," Voltaire said; "make it as truthful as possible." Often, a production's physical setting plays a role in luring us to accept a dramatic lie, the words and movements of actors, as truth, the behavior of real people in a real world. A luxurious theater's gilt and red velvet, for example, seems almost to bribe us into suspending disbelief.

But a makeshift theater can complement a play just as effectively as an ornate Broadway house. An unglamorous context worked to advantage recently when I watched the actress Sarah Melici perform Fool for Christ in the auditorium of the Catholic Worker: Melici performs this one-woman show about Dorothy Day at churches, retreat houses, and other locations, and, as one might expect, she performs with minimal equipment: a handbag, a book or two, a cardboard sign that reads DON'T BUY GRAPES. On this occasion, at least, her forum - a hall with peeling cream-colored plaster, and furniture covered with sheets - was equally spartan, a suitable environment for a play about a woman who chose what most people would feel to be a spartan existence.

The stacks of yellowing Catholic Workers on shelves around the hall seemed to help me to glimpse the woman who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement. The jail that Melici conjured so simply with a sofa and an easel, the Staten Island beach and the cardinal's office reproduced with the same - these visions detached themselves briefly from the world of the rainstorm outside and the half-empty bench I sat on, with the man asleep at the far end.

It was the memory of another makeshift theater that sent me to Melici's play: a theater where I engaged in the only whole-hearted cursing I have ever done in my life. The occasion was another play about Dorothy Day, mounted at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. I played a prostitute - an anomaly of an undergraduate acting career otherwise devoted to playing innocent young girls and innocent, cantankerous grandmothers.

During the scene in question, the police raided a flophouse where Day had taken shelter for the night and Mac the 'character I played - was indignant. I remember springing up from my pallet to holier a series of colorful epithets, with the audience a blur through the blind glare of the spotlights.

"I didn't know you could swear like that," a friend said admiringly afterward. And in a sense I couldn't: the attraction of acting lay in leaving the serf behind, and Mae was the one with the foul mouth. I didn't really believe I was Mae, of course, and yet in a way I did, or I would have stayed mute. Two different realities coexisted.

Speaking both to Melici and to Randy-Michael Testa, the playwright/director who orchestrated my cursing all those years ago, I was struck by their sense of this duality: the hard surface of circumstance, supporting or opposing their efforts to mount a play, and the world of Dorothy Day, with whom they began to feel a kind of communion.

Testa, who now teaches at Dartmouth, reminded me how hard we'd struggled to give his play Dorothy Day: In Thought, Word and Deed breathing room in the heady political atmosphere of the Kennedy School. The script consisted only of Day's own words, selected and arranged. "Dorothy was such a great writer, and such an honest journalist," Testa notes, "that her own moral self-scrutiny was to me the most interesting part of whatever dramatic action there was....I tried to include the scenes where we overheard Dorothy's confession - and those also happened to be the scenes that had really great action, if you want to call it that."

Our stage was the Public Affairs Forum, a central space hemmed in by tiers of offices and classrooms. As we rehearsed, students and professors went about their business, sometimes wandering fight through a scene, oblivious to actors trying to pray, or picket, or curse in character. Ultimately, the slight hostility of the environment made our play more powerful. Testa remembers how odd it was when the actor playing Trotsky, from a pulpit draped with a huge Soviet flag, bellowed a speech over the strains of the Internationale - after all, this was an academic institution where students dreamed of becoming president, and where members of the Reagan administration, and other dignitaries, gathered to salute their own prestige. "Putting a play up about an anarchist at the Kennedy School of Government is itself an act of political maneuvering...," Testa observes. "Doing it in that setting, where power and authority and government savvy are key...it really was a wonderful, paradoxical moment."

By contrast, circumstances have more often harmonized with Fool for Christ. A veteran of regional theater who has appeared in the television shows Law and Order and The Golden Years, as well as the New York Shakespeare Festival, Melici had reached that point in an actress's career when roles become scarcer, and so had begun to toy with the slightly terrifying idea of doing a one-woman show. Looking at a statue of Day that stands in front of her New Jersey church, she realized that she didn't know much about the monument's subject. As she read The Long Loneliness and other works by Day, she became increasingly attracted to this woman who, she observes, "lived the works of mercy, the spiritual and the physical." On a personal level, too, she found that she could identify with Day: "She was a mother, she was a grandmother...she was one of us."

Paul Novosel, director and composer of Stations - a musical based on the stations of the cross-offered to direct Fool for Christ, and playwright Donald Yonker wrote the script. Melici first performed the work at the Catholic Worker, on East 3rd Street, in January 1998, and since then has taken it to groups of clergy and laypeople in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Profiting from the flexibility of a solo act, she was even able to execute the entire monologue on the patio of a woman too ill to see the show when it played nearby.

To date audiences have been enthusiastic. The Catholic Worker called Fool for Christ "the most accurate portrayal we've seen...a perfect production." Her role has brought Melici another kind of satisfaction as well, she says: "It seems as if wherever I go to do it, I meet someone who will give me some more information, something that is moving, something that is personal, that brings [Day] closer to me....It's opened up a whole new world."

Testa, who has reworked Dorothy Day into a one-woman show that is mounted intermittently, has also felt his dramaturgy bringing him closer to Day's reality. Staging the piece has introduced him to people who knew Day. He has even felt himself relying on his play's subject for guidance when contemplating a revival: "I always feel that when Dorothy wants us to put the play back up, she'll let us know."

Testa believes that Day's story translates particularly well to the stage. "In her early days of Greenwich Village bohemianism," he observes, "working for the Call, the Socialist newspaper, Dorothy hung out with actors and artists. Eugene O'Neill was a good friend of hers. He recited The Hound of Heaven, and Dorothy talks about that being a very central moment in her own spiritual development."

A representation of anyone's life can only be a lie, in Voltaire's terminology, not least because of the need to simplify and condense. But, in Testa's opinion, connections between art and life can turn a play's fiction into a particularly wonderful kind of truth. "Dorothy's life in some sense was theatrical," he reflects, "or dramatic, let's say - and that drama, that theatricality, are wonderful on the stage for illuminating the workings of grace."