Decades after leaving the seminary, he’s playing a priest onstage

“One day, the fact of celibacy just - hit me in the face,’’ says Father Patrick Murphy, one of the central characters in a new play, “The Savannah Disputation,’’ which opens today at the Boston Center for the Arts.

“For the first time, I seemed to really - understand,’’ the priest says, “and I felt extremely free, like I had sidestepped a trap.’’

The character offers the comment as a straightforward confession of a long-buried emotion. But for the actor, Timothy Crowe, the line is rich with irony.

Crowe, 64, faced that same moment of understanding decades ago as a young seminarian in Missouri. But for Crowe, unlike for Father Murphy, sidestepping the trap meant not entering the priesthood.

“It was a very difficult decision,’’ Crowe said in an interview last week. “But I felt incomplete.’’

The character of Father Murphy is one of four deeply religious and chronically single people who populate “The Savannah Disputation,’’ a 100-minute comedy about two Roman Catholic sisters in their 60s who respond to a cheerfully anti-Catholic evangelical missionary who keeps knocking on their door by luring her into a debate over theology with their beloved parish priest.

Crowe’s character is a reluctant disputant, a position the actor relates to. “It makes me think of how unimportant all this bickering is,’’ he said.

In the play, that bickering, about the afterlife, the papacy, and the priesthood, is often quite raw. Much of the humor comes in the form of tart insults from Mary, the younger sister. At one point, she says of evangelical missionaries, “If you’re nice to them, they just keep coming back. They’re like cats.’’ The missionary’s pitch for Protestantism is so over-the-top that it, too, plays for laughs: “I didn’t know it, but every morning I was inviting this pagan, Satanic stuff into my house by doing yoga,’’ she says.

The Catholic environment of “The Savannah Disputation’’ is quite familiar to Crowe, who was an altar boy at St. Gabriel’s Parish in St. Louis, and who attended parochial school and Catholic high school before entering a St. Louis seminary as a high school sophomore. It was another era in the church, when Mass was in Latin and Cardinal Glennon College had 400 young men studying for the priesthood.

“This was the old days, when we studied Aquinas in Latin, had a monastic schedule and a very strict academic program,’’ Crowe said. “There were no newspapers, no radio, and no TV. There was silence during meals - we would be read to - and every night there was the ‘magnum silencium’ [the great silence] until after breakfast.’’

Crowe lasted six years before deciding the seminary wasn’t for him. “It came down to two words: authority and women,’’ Crowe said. “I had difficulty accepting rules that I thought were inane, and I felt very uncomfortable and incomplete being surrounded by all men all the time.’’

But it was in seminary that Crowe discovered a love for the theater; he starred in an all-male staging of “My Fair Lady.’’ He transferred to Saint Louis University, where he studied philosophy and theater, and upon graduation he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. When he returned to the United States in 1970, he was offered a position with Trinity Repertory Company in Providence. With the exception of occasional stints away for other acting gigs, he has been at Trinity ever since, acting in about 90 productions.

Crowe also has married; his first marriage ended in divorce, and he remarried 17 years ago.

Paul Daigneault, the director of the SpeakEasy Stage Company’s production of “The Savannah Disputation,’’ offered Crowe the role of the priest based on his performance as the headmaster in the company’s 2008 production of “The History Boys.’’

“I had no idea of his seminary background. I couldn’t believe it, and in rehearsals, he was our Google,’’ Daigneault said. “He really gets this guy. The character could come off as being very two-dimensional, almost like a plot device, but when Tim bares his soul and tells Melissa [the missionary] about when he realized he was going to be celibate, he brings such a depth to it, where another actor could be glib.’’

The play, by Evan Smith, was performed at Playwrights Horizons in New York earlier this year to mixed reviews. Charles Isherwood, in The New York Times, praised its “lively comedy,’’ but said, “it sometimes feels like a Very Special Theological Episode of ‘The Golden Girls.’ ’’ But the play is attracting interest among theater companies that look for new American works; in addition to the Boston production, it is currently being staged at the Old Globe in San Diego, and it is scheduled to be staged later this year by the South Carolina Repertory Company and at the Olney Theatre Center in Maryland.

Much of the Boston cast was raised Catholic, including Nancy E. Carroll, who plays the sharp-tongued and sometimes mean Mary, and Paula Plum, who plays the sweet and sometimes mousy older sister, Margaret. Daigneault, founder of SpeakEasy Stage, was also raised Catholic, although he has since married an Episcopal priest and attends an Episcopal church. Carolyn Charpie, who graduated from Boston College last year, was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church and portrays Melissa, the young missionary.

Crowe remains a practicing Catholic, active in St. Peter Parish in his hometown of Warwick, R.I., casually citing the German Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and the American Catholic writer Andrew Greeley in conversation, and meditating daily while holding a rosary left to him by his grandmother. He says he has long since made his peace with the church, despite occasional disagreements, and clearly values the role of Catholicism in his life. But he also confesses that this makes him a rarity in the theater world.

“There’s a lot of eye-rolling; I would have to say the theater is fairly anti-Catholic and anti-institutional religion,’’ he said. “I think the church and the theater play in the same ballpark - meaning, destiny, relationships - so there is great mistrust between the two endeavors.’’

But Crowe says the sharp challenges to Catholicism voiced in the play - often to humorous effect - don’t bother him at all.

“Not only would this character have heard it all before, but I’ve heard it all before, and I’m basically inured to it,’’ he said. “If anything, it shows the desolation of this kind of tit for tat.’’

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.