The characters In Evan Smith's The Savannah Disputation, now at Playwrights Horizons, eventually challenge each other's deeply held faiths, but the results aren't more than sitcom-deep.

In fact, the show plays at first exactly like a sitcom pilot about two Catholic spinster sisters (Dana Ivey and Marylouise Burke) who share a house in Savannah. They get into a tangle with Melissa, a young Evangelical missionary (Kellie Overbey) whose passion is to inspire Catholics to renounce the Church. In the play's opening scene the more wary sister, Mary (Ivey), has a snappy retort for the missionary when slamming the door in her face: "I know Jesus loves me," she says, "it's you he hates!" Soon aft[...]