Doubt: A Parable was written by John Patrick Shanley and marks a serious departure for the man who also penned screenplays for Moonstruck and Joe Versus the Volcano. While Doubt enjoyed two successful seasons on Broadway and snagged both a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize, Live Arts’ current production marks the play’s regional debut.
Although the play is a compact 90 minutes, it still manages to explore a few compelling moral issues. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, Doubt’s action centers on an impropriety that the progressive Father Flynn (played charismatically by newcomer Timothy Read), the priest and boy’s basketball coach at St. Nicholas, may or may not have perpetrated on a 12-year-old boy. Opposed at every step by the inflexible nun Sister Aloysius (Doris Safie), Father Flynn finds a sometimes-ally in the gushing and vulnerable Sister James (Amanda Pierson Finger) and in the mother of the boy he’s been accused of preying on, the pragmatic Mrs. Muller (Simona Holloway-Warren). The actresses are utterly believable in their adversarial roles, and remind the viewer that strong women also exerted themselves in the patriarchal Catholic Church of the ’60s.
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Nun’s the word: The clergy tries to keep a possible sin under wraps in Doubt: A Parable at Live Arts. |
With hints and arguments dropped from every angle, it is nearly impossible for the viewer to decide who is right and who is wrong, who is innocent and who is guilty. In fact, Read—moonlighting from his day job as a pastor to a Crozet Presbyterian church—conducted his own exit poll after the show: “Did he or didn’t he?” Loyal members of his congregation as well as new fans had to answer, “Hard to say.” Even director Fran Smith’s subtle authorial touches pull a viewer’s compass in opposite directions and serve to enhance the play’s ambivalent message: Does the music playing when Flynn takes off his clerical robes signify something sinister? Does the way he crouches low on a basketball when counseling young boys demonstrate his accessibility or his lecherousness?
Shanley’s drama relies on the audience to interpret its lessons. Father Flynn even delivers two short sermons in the work, which make spectators briefly feel like they’re sitting in pews, asked to peel back the many layers of a religious parable. But the play’s explorations of forgiveness versus cover-up, doubt versus suspicion, and innocence versus naivety never weigh too heavily on the audience, often lightened by epigrammatic one-liners delivered by Safie’s Sister Aloysius, who is implacably against sugar cubes and ballpoint pens in addition to pedophilia. The cast does an excellent job of grounding a complex moral tale in a place that is human, empathetic, and ultimately honest in its ambivalence.