By Donna Doherty
Journal Register News Service

NEW HAVEN — Nonie Newton-Breen's made a habit of playing Sister, the nun you hate to love and love to hate, back for the holidays in a seasonal mystery, "Sister's Christmas Catechism: The Mystery of the Magi's Gold," that she says "turns into a little CSI crime-solving thing at the end."

It opens Tuesday at Long Wharf Theatre's Stage II, where Newton-Breen spent most of the summer entertaining audiences in "Late Nite Catechism," written by the same team of Maripat Donovan and Jane Morris.

"Nunsense" has nothing on the Sister franchise. Ask Newton-Breen, a crack improv actor and veteran of Chicago's famed Second City, who's made a career out of playing the irascible no-nunsense Sister for the past six years.

"I'm excited," she says by phone from her home in northern California, at the moment "pretty stinky" with the ash-filled air of the recent Montecito fires. "I had the best time in New Haven. They (Entertainment Events, the producers) offered me Tampa, Fla., and I passed on it to come back to New Haven, because I met the most marvelous people when I was staying there and had the best time."

The Chicago native and Emmy winner (for writing and performing PBS' "Oh, Art!") admits that Pepe's pizza had something to do with it. "No one can compete with it. I probably gained 10 pounds," she says.

New Haven had a good time, too, and this time around, audiences will be even more involved in Sister's little play, which seeks the mystery of whatever happened to the Magi's gold.

Every night, there will not only be a preselected choir of four from the community participating, but also 10 lucky (?) audience members will be called upon to don costumes and come up on stage to be part of the classroom play about the mystery.

"It's really fun. You never know what you're going to get," says the show-biz veteran of 37 years. "We have the Wise Men, Mary, Joseph, sheep, an ox and an ass."

All will be asked to don makeshift costumes, the kind you'd find around a school, but let's let that remain to be seen.

"It's a pretty similar (classroom) set to 'Late Nite Catechism,' but we're having our Christmas party. We cover a lot of stuff about Mary and Jesus and Christmas in Act 1, and then in Act 2, we stage our own original Nativity scene," says Newton-Breen.

"Really, the genius of the shows is the audiences are really the stars of the show ... says Newton-Breen. "Sometimes the ones that seem the least likely to want to be part of it end up having the most fun.

"I had some soldiers back from Iraq who said they were more scared than when they were out in the field, and another time, I had an absolutely ancient old woman be the shepherd."

Sometimes the show can take on what Newton-Breen calls "an element of 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show,' like when they get their Catholic school uniforms out of the attic ... horrifying," she laughs.

While the actress-comedian's Second City background provided invaluable training for these one-woman gigs, Newton-Breen says, "I don't feel like I'm alone up there. I have to move the information forward, but I feel like the audience becomes part of the show. At Second City, we had a cast of six doing eight shows a week," and dealing with drunks, she notes.

"But it was great fun, and you really did learn how to write on your feet. This is still improv. It's still being in the moment, really listening to what people say. That's the gift. If you hear what they're saying, that's where the fun goes," she says, adding that about half the show is scripted, half improv.

"You have to be flexible, drop stuff that's not working. Generally speaking, you try to stay with the script, but opportunities are constantly presenting themselves to update the material.

"Even with the Christmas show, I still read all the papers," says Newton-Breen, who also logs on to catholiconline.org (for real).

"There are always new articles, new proclamations. I have to be on top of that stuff." says the second oldest of nine children of an Irish-Catholic brood.

Every tour stop selects a local beneficiary for its lobby collections. This run will benefit Bridgeport's School Sisters of Notre Dame.

"One run that Maripat and I split, we raised $80,000 and bought a new van for the nuns. We couldn't do it without the generosity of the people, and New Haven people were most generous and really get it," says Newton-Breen. "I'm very much looking forward to it."

Donna Doherty may be reached at (203) 789-5672 or ddoherty@nhregister.com