A day after the election of the first American pope, the first female pope led us in a hymn in Latin – shortly before a hooded Inquisitor ordered her burned to death.
What’s most arresting about “The Popess: Instructions For Freedom” is that it’s based on historical fact. Elena Mazzon’s one-woman show, an enlightening if often irreverent chronicle of reverence that debuted at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is one of the nine plays in the 2025 In Scena Italian Theater festival, running for free through May 19th.
In the 13th century, Guglielma, a noblewoman, migrated to Milan and started preaching and practicing a woman-centered form of Christianity. She became the object of worship to followers known as Guglielmites who believed her to be the female incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Before she died, she appointed Maifreda Pirovano, a noblewoman-turned-nun, to be her Popess.
All of this is explained in the hour-long play (supplemented by facts in the one-page program.) Mazzon portrays the Popess, and the Inquisitor, but mostly an unnamed woman from the era who explains her journey to becoming a Guglielmite.
“I wasn’t always a heretic,” she tells us. “I was a very pious and staunch believer of what my friend Sybille used to call ‘the proper Church.’” But her mother had died in childbirth, and in questioning the spiritual meaning of this death – for which her older sisters blamed her — she found no answers, nor even solace, from the priests and nuns she consulted. Their response made her more receptive to her friend Sybille’s suggestion that she join her in a religious quest. “There are so many alternative movements nowadays,” Sybille says. “They call them heresies, but you know, it’s all about choice, not the right or wrong belief. You can choose what is right for you.”
After she tries several alternatives, she finds appeal in the Guglielmites’ theology.
“Our Freedom is in our Faith,” the Popess preaches. “There is no one truth. Being true to your heart is what leads to God.”
And women can have power. “No longer just wives or nuns,” the unnamed acolyte exclaims in wonder.
If this sounds uncomfortably like a religion class, Mazzon lightens it with moments of what could pass for a stand-up routine, with help from the audience.
She asks a member of the audience to help her dress into the long brown hooded cloak of the inquisitor.
“There is nothing like a room full of heretics,” the inquisitor begins, as if warming up the audience. “For first timers, if you need the toilet the bucket is at the back on your left. Gender neutral. Don’t say the Church discriminates.”
At one point, Mazzon goes around the room asking audience members what they would die for. She asks me directly.
“I don’t know,” I mumble.
“It’s ok,” she says, “you have time.”
Another audience member gives a better answer to her query:”I would die for a good espresso in New York.”
Yes, some Gugliemites will be killed but as the unnamed woman points out, there are worse fates. “You could die from dysentery, malaria, diphtheria, flu, typhoid, smallpox and leprosy, bitten by a rat or kicked in the head by a horse on its way to its fifth crusade. But you decided to die with honor.”
“The Popess: Instructions for Freedom,” written and performed by Elena Mazzon and directed by Colin Watkeys, will be performed one more time Sat May 10 (today) at 7pm @ Culture Lab LIC, as part of the 12th annual In Scena Italian Theater Festival.
