Sex on the Beach

Father Patrick, a handsome and somewhat vain Catholic priest, is startled to recognize Evelyn — formerly Sister Francis — a young woman he knew years earlier when she was a novitiate. At a retreat, the two shared something much more than the merely spiritual. An encounter with Patrick that he would prefer they kept buried. Not so with Evelyn, who has come to regard it as the beginning of her real life. She wants to expose it, tease it, and perhaps repeat it. What follows is a sensual battle involving restraint and temptation, faith and memory, guilt and appetite. By the end, Patrick’s composure has been shaken, and the question of whether desire can be fully renounced is left with her offering the key to her hotel room.

Evelyn is a scene-commanding role for an actress in her 30s: a former almost-nun who credits one illicit night with with setting her free. The part gives wit, provocation, erotic mischief, and an understanding of Patrick’s buried desire — a role for an actor who can make temptation feel funny, worldly, and impossible to ignore.

Father Patrick is a tightly wound, conflicted role for an actor in his 40s: a handsome priest whose composure is rattled when he runs into the former novitiate with whom he once shared a forbidden night. The part gives piety, temptation, moral panic, and slow-burning desire — a role in which spiritual discipline and human weakness collide in real time.