"The Runner Stumbles" is an unevenly written Catholic whodunit with an undercurrent of deep and heartfelt humanism. That undercurrent regularly gives life to the play …, but the work is too frequently undermined by awkward writing and construction…. Milan Stitt's drama is sincere in its anger with the official Catholic Church, as it seems devoted to the idea of Catholicism, but that ambivalence is reflected in the work itself….

The play is a courtroom trial and a flashback narrative. A priest has been accused of murdering a nun. She had come to his out-of-the-way parish to teach and, under contrived circumstances, moved into the rectory. The closeness of these living circumstances inevitably leads to romantic attraction.

An inevitable romance is merely a badly described one, but that is as much as one can draw from the story. Stitt has not delineated the nun at all—she is merely an...