Step aside, Hamlet. Take a breather, Willy Loman.

Make room, all you classic and contemporary stage characters: The curtain is rising on the likes of Lolek, St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Blessed Margaret of Castello.

Is a revolution in theater arts afoot? No — just a boomlet in the number of playwrights looking to explore the Catholic faith while dramatizing the human condition.

One of the most experienced of the dramatic artists, award-winning playwright Dominican Father Peter John Cameron, says his mission as a dramatist is to engage audiences' imaginations, moving them with the wonder of what it's like to be fully human.

When a human being's reason is fully engaged, especially if he's thinking about the ultimate questions in life, he realizes he didn't create himself and he can't satisfy his expectations for happiness, says Father Cameron, who serves as artistic director of the Blackfriars Repertory Theatre Company in New York City (and as editor of Magnificat, the popular monthly prayer journal).

When questioning the true meaning of life, a reasoning person perceives a mystery and is filled with a desire to encounter a presence, he says.

“So the answer to the mystery is personal,” adds Father Cameron. “God gives us the answer definitively in sending his son, Jesus. All my plays are an attempt to engage reason in that way, to get people to consider the ultimate question of what it means to be human.”

Consider The Drama of Light, a series of short plays Father Cameron recently wrote about the luminous mysteries of the rosary. In the third mystery, the Proclamation of the Kingdom, 12 actors wearing masks, standing at sharp angles and with their backs to each other, appear on stage. The Blessed Mother quotes from Scripture, saying how God has relied on the word in human communications and language throughout history.

With each Scripture reference, the actors bring the scene to life. Jesus appears, proclaiming the Beatitudes. In response, the masked actors cite a Scripture verse as a response to, and fulfillment of, each of the Beatitudes. Realizing that the Word has transformed their lives, each actor takes off his mask and approaches Jesus so that, by the end of the play, when Jesus says that heaven and earth will pass away but his word will last forever, all the actors are standing in a semi-circle around him, their arms draped around each other's shoulders. “It's a very powerful visual image of the communion created by the Word of God,” says Father Cameron, whose play, a revised version of The Sacrament of Memory, about the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, will be performed off-Broadway in the fall.

Another playwright, Cathal Gallagher, believes more plays should be written that involve heroes of the Catholic faith.

“I think playwrights have a great opportunity to bring to life saints and heroes and martyrs and let young people see them,” says Gallagher, an Irish immigrant who formed Quo Vadis, a theater company in California's Silicon Valley, about six years ago. “Who knows? A seed may be sown that may yield vocations in the years ahead.”

Already he's dramatized the lives of Blessed Margaret of Castello, a midget born blind, lame and deformed who became a lay Dominican, and St. Margaret Clitherow, who was raised in the Church of England but converted to the Catholic faith. She was eventually martyred for harboring priests and permitting Masses on her property.

Gallagher's latest play, A Question of Ethics, about a Catholic student battling political correctness at a university, will be performed at a San Jose high school over several weekends in late October.

Gallagher, 64, hopes his plays will influence audience members to leave the theater “a better person than the person who went in. Hopefully, they'll find something encouraging and inspiring that could change their lives.”

Part of the inspiration for actor-playwright Jeremy Stanbary to form a Catholic theater company in Lincoln, Neb., earlier this year comes from the life of Karol Wojtyla, who understood the link between religion and theater. Wojtyla, who of course went on to become Pope John Paul II, acted in a clandestine theater company in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

The inspiration for the name of Stanbary's theater company, Epiphany Studio, comes from the Holy Father's 1999 Letter to Artists, in which the Pope talked about how “beauty is the visible form of the good,” says Stanbary, 25. “And it's the good that really draws the human heart in a powerful way. Beauty, in a sense, is the vocation of the artist. He (the Pope) calls for new epiphanies of beauty in our time to renew and restore man's soul and the soul of nations and the soul of cultures.”

An epiphany for Stanbary occurred when he found out at the end of his freshman year of college that he was going to be a father — even though he wasn't married. His son's birth sparked his “Augustine-like” conversion, which he said was the way that God chose to move his heart to a fuller awareness of God's mercy and love in his life.

“I was a product of our culture, which says, ‘If it feels good, do it,’” says Stanbary. “And I realized in a lot of painful ways that that wasn't the best way to live and that wasn't something that was good for me or for society, and the Catholic faith had the answers for me in that.”

Stanbary wrote a one-man Catholic drama while in college and, after graduation, spent a year of formation in the seminary. He discerned that God wasn't calling him to the priesthood and, after a two-year stint as a youth minister in Lincoln, he formed his nonprofit theater company.

His latest production is a one-man drama titled Lolek, the Holy Father's childhood nickname, which traces the life of Karol Wojtyla through young adulthood and will be performed in Lincoln on Nov. 7-8. He plans to share his faith with audiences around the country because he's hoping theaters, high schools and parishes book Lolek — or any of the other Catholic one-man dramas he's written.

“I want to reach out to the culture at large with the beauty of the truth,” says Stanbary, “which naturally finds a home in men's hearts when it's received in a proper way.”

Carlos Briceno writes from Seminole, Florida.