EpiCharis Theatre Agnes of God
EpiCharis Theatre presents Agnes of God Credit: courtesy

After decades of decline, traditional religion is currently resurgent in social discourse and American politics, so perhaps it deserves to be taken seriously on stage as well. An ideal place to begin might be the acclaimed theological drama Agnes of God, which is being presented April 23 & 24 by the brand-new EpiCharis Theatre. This week I spoke with producer-director Charis Watler, whose personal, spiritual and socioeconomic odyssey is every bit as compelling as the play she’s presenting.

Growing up in a strictly conservative evangelical Christian family, Watler was home-schooled until halfway through 10th grade and had her first exposure to performing arts through her church’s youth group performances. When her family moved into a homeless shelter, she began attending a charter high school where she encountered her first acting class.

“It really changed who I was and how I saw community,” she recalls. “I had trouble relating to people my age [but] theater was a shared purpose and a shared mission that we all had together.”

Going to school alongside wealthier students while living in a shelter was “embarrassing” and isolating, but Watler says she’s “always had this internal drive to work harder than everyone else,” which led her to winning a Disney Dreamer and Doer award, and going on to get an associate’s degree from Valencia College. “I think I’ve always wanted to be better than what I came from,”  Watler says. “There was some people that didn’t make it out of that homeless shelter — I hear every once in a while about someone who OD’d that was living there — but I was already pushing forward.” 

It was while taking a directing class from John DiDonna at Valencia that Watler met playwright Bethany Dickens Assaf, after being randomly assigned one of her five-minute scripts.

“She loved what I directed, and she’s been offering me opportunities ever since,” Watler says about the Whiskey Theatre Factory co-founder, who invited Watler to join WTF as artistic director. 

Orlando Fringe Festival-goers will remember Watler from her roles in WTF’s  Saints of Orange County and the Critics’ Choice Best Drama Vast of Darkness, for which I praised her “slow-burn performance as an unqualified astronaut.” That role was written by Dickens Assaf specifically for Watler, which she calls a “huge honor and a huge achievement.” But she’s also been active offstage in the director’s chair, helming productions for CFCArts’  Youth Theater.
More recently, Watler resigned from WTF to form her own theater company — named EpiCharis Theatre, after a martyred saint — with the mission of presenting challenging stories about the intersection of mental health and spirituality. 

“There’s only so much of my personal art I could do in youth theater, and there was also only so much of my personal self I could put into Whiskey Theatre Factory,” Watler says, praising WTF’s focus on pro-female new plays while explaining, “I’m not a writer, so I felt like that wasn’t really my place. I really want to start doing art that speaks to me personally.” 

EpiCharis Theatre’s debut production, John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God, is a excellent example of the religious and psychological themes Watler wants her new company to explore. Best known from the 1985 film version with Anne Bancroft, Jane Fonda and Meg Tilly, the play stars Hayley Sanz in the title role as a novice nun accused of infanticide, who insists her newborn was immaculately conceived. Clashing over Agnes’ claims are the hard-nosed Mother Superior (Sandi Linn) and Dr. Livingston (Sarah Mathews), a skeptical psychiatrist who uncovers Agnes’ past history of abuse. 

Although written long before her birth, Watler says she connected with Pielmeier’s play upon encountering it in high school because it’s a play that “celebrates questions and questions answers. I grew up in an environment that very much discouraged asking questions and discouraged questioning authority. … Agnes of God offers critique and questions in a way that doesn’t tell you what to believe at the end, and I think that’s powerful.” She also says that Agnes’ mental health issues hit close to home, so she wants to show disorders like schizophrenia “in an authentic light” to destigmatize them.

Watler sings the praises of her cast, calling Sanz’s depiction “exactly what I was wanting … for people to see Agnes as her own person who is capable of making her own thoughts and decisions”; and saying that Linn “has such a lovable and compelling way of portraying [Mother Superior] that we really grow to care about her in ways that I didn’t first pick up.” Watler’s especially grateful to Mathews, who joined the cast late after another actress dropped out. “I had never met her before, and she completely blew me away in auditions. She makes such strong choices that I often am breathless; I cry every rehearsal because of her.”

Finally, the fourth character in this immersive production is the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Maitland, which will host the play in its historic chapel, along with an accompanying God and Science visual art exhibit. “As little hope sometimes that I have in churches locally or across America, the churches have really been coming through for this project,” says Watler, who held rehearsals at Audubon Park Community Church. “That’s kind of given me more hope in Christianity as a whole, like through this experience of doing this play.”

Watler readily admits that the political landscape is “fraught” when it comes to Christianity, and says that “Christianity can be both the beauty and hope that you find in life, and also the torment, even at the very same time.”

Her ultimate aim with EpiCharis, Watler says, is to create theater for “people who are spiritually homeless, or come from that background and are now unsure of what they believe in, [that] allows them to be able to talk about it with other people that have those same problems [and] same questions.”

Orlando’s daily dose of what matters. Subscribe to The Daily Weekly.

Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.

Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Bluesky | Or sign up for our RSS Feed

This article appears in April 22-28, 2026.