A former seminarian plays a priest onstage

Boston's SpeakEasy Stage Company tonight opened the local premiere of a comedy called "The Savannah Disputation,'' about a pair of sixtysomething Catholic sisters who are unsettled by visits from a perky young Protestant missionary, and decide to try to trap her into a debate with their local parish priest.

This production is noteworthy because Timothy Crowe, the actor playing the priest, was himself a seminarian many years ago.

I have a preview of the play, focusing on Crowe's role, in the Arts section of today's Globe. The lede:

The weary priest, seated on a deep couch with a drink at hand, pauses for several minutes before responding to the question about how it felt to embrace a life of celibacy. When he answers, he begins with an anecdote, about the period of time just before he took his vows.

“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.’’

(Photo, by Eric Levenson/SpeakEasy Stage Company, shows Timothy Crowe, with Carolyn Charpie, in a scene from "The Savannah Disputation,'' running through Oct. 17 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts.)