Habits Put Collars Down in Doubt

If you go see only one play about possibly pedophiliac priests this year, we can heartily recommend you make it John Patrick Shanley's Doubt. Shanley's play, set the year after Zapruder's Zoomatic became famous, pulls you back into the context of a much different time, when nuns wore habits, the Catholic Mass was a mumbled Latin, and the priesthood enjoyed a less tarnished status.

While Shanley's Pulitzer and Tony-winning play complicates its story's facts, the plot is pretty simple: a traditionalist nun, a school principal, suspects that the new priest who has arrived spouting Vatican II reforms may be a child molester. The trouble is, she has no hard proof, and, in the hierarchy of the Church, priests rate higher than nuns. For the 90 minutes of the play, it's a cat-and-mouse game -- although who's the cat and who's the mouse changes abruptly. Doubt runs through October 21 at the Rep. Tickets are $10-$48. Check out Seattle Performs for more info.

Corey Brill does wonderful work as Father Flynn, the handsome, gifted, reform-minded newcomer with big plans for the parish. He cares about doing the right thing -- and he's clearly battling staid school principal Sister Aloysius's grim, sin-infected worldview due to his own more optimistic beliefs. Yet there's something there, an entitlement, a preening, that Brill lets you know is weakness that Flynn is blind to -- which means he could be blind to other behaviors, as well.

Shanley does slip an ounce or two too much cultural commentary into the piece; the boy that Father Flynn "takes an interest in" happens to be the first black kid in the largely Irish and Italian student body. But overall, the social backdrop plays as defining a role as Michael Ganio's set design for the shabby Bronx Catholic school St. Nicholas; naturally the principal's office is graced by a Pope portrait, literally the picture of infallibility.

The play has two searing scenes -- in one, Sister Aloysius (Kandis Chappell) asks the boy's mother, Mrs. Muller (Cynthia Jones) in on a fact-finding mission, and for a moment the outside world's concerns take the stage. Cynthia Jones' performance is worth the price of admission, to see her morph from abashed parent and harassed wife, to embattled mother and cold strategist as she takes Sister Aloysius's measure.

In the other scene, Kandis Chappell's Sister Aloysius and Corey Brill's Father Flynn face off, over a great gulf in perspective. The back-and-forth is electrifying. By this time, you've come to understand what's at stake for both, and that one has to win and one has to lose. But which one? Warner Shook's direction may, unfortunately, present an easier answer than we deserve.

Early on, Sister Aloysius is presented as so tough-as-nails -- when counseling novice nun and teacher Sister James (Melissa D. Brown), she tells Sister James to stop performing for affection as a teacher: "Satisfaction is a sin!" she barks -- that she becomes a figure of fun, rather than the strict authoritarian who would have been happy to run Father Flynn out of the parish for being too "touchy-feely," let alone gay, let alone a child molester.

Because this is the crux of Shanley's play -- reviving all the other distracting conflicts that helped cloak widespread abuse -- it seems a shame to go strictly for the laugh, as if institutionalized cruelty wasn't a legacy of the times, too. (Also, if Sister Aloysius's warped perspective wasn't to be chuckled away, there would be more for Brown's Sister James to do than act conflicted and weepy.)

That said, thanks to the appraising stance of the play -- it lets the characters do the advocating -- there's a great deal of humor in it. More than you might expect a play about priests and sexual abuse to have. And in the uncertain end, there's wisdom in the view that though children are always trumpeted in conflicts over values, they frequently end up the victims of that conflict. Here they are absent from the play itself: much discussed, but never seen.

Photo copyright Chris Bennion 2006.

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By MvB in Arts & Events on October 2, 2006 9:00 AM

Comments [rss]

MvB

Jeremy: I had seen Martin Moran's The Tricky Part last season, which does focus on the after-life of abuse, so here I was prepared to take Shanley's no-kids-allowed perspective as an intentionally limiting one. I think it works -- but it's not going to be "the" play on the issue because of what it leaves out.

d

Loved the play and disagree with Jeremy. I think we could all come up with ways the play could have been more inclusive, but what I was really struck by watching this play is how tightly written it is. It's intense and the minutes fly by. While adding children may have been more inclusive, I think intensity would have suffered. One of the reasons is a logistical one. Child actors stop a play dead in its tracks. In all my years of watching theatre, I have yet to see one where this didn't happen.

Reading Shanley's program notes was interesting for me. I never questioned (doubted) that Sister Aloyius's suspicion was founded. It's not a trial; all things being equal the simplest explanation is the one to accept.

Jeremy M. Barker

Doubt is a good play, and the production and performances are strong, but it's also a bit didactic. Shanley is clearly going for the "how-do-you-know-who's-telling-the-truth" aspect of the priest-absuse scandal, and he labors to leave the audience seriously questioning who's right and who's wrong. That's, I think, the main reason we never actually see children in the play, and it's right to ask questions about that omission. Potentially abused children are not Godot, whose power and presence exist in absentia: they're the meat of the issue, and I think with a kid actually onstage, it could potentially sway the play away from the gray area Shanley aims for and push the audience to Sister Aloysius's side.

I wasn't particularly put off by the fact that the potential victim was the first black student at the school, and (it's implied) a homosexual who's abused at home. Shanley gets the sort of child who makes an easy victim, and it's a very subtle commentary too on the fact that in real life, the court cases over priest abuse were complicated by the fact that such victims make for such easily dismissible accusers: Father Flynn points this out himself in the play when he suggests that Muller's home life is probably the cause of his strange behavior rather than unsubstantiated sexual abuse. So while it can seem like a stretch to include race and sexuality in the mix, I think it's actually fairly astute from a historical perspective.

What troubles me is that Shanley dodges the actual issue of the consequences of priest-abuse. This play addresses the issue the same ay Schindler's List addressed the Holocaust: perfectly triangulated for the non-stakeholders to address the horror of the situation. In Schindler's List, we get the perspective of a simply selfish, non-ideological war profiteer who's forced to make tough decisions on humanitarian grounds, but for a movie about a list of Jewish names, there's actually only one main character who's Jewish; Spielberg made the film with a mind to having American outsiders see the conflict from a perspective they can understand and appreciate. Similarly Shanley writes a play that tries to convey to the audience how tough the situation really is. But in both cases there's a valid criticism to be made that the refusal to tell the story of the victim just further marginalizes an already marginalized person. They remain an object, something that things happen to but who has no real voice. Personally, I can see the value in that sort of drama, but I think better writers can achieve both ends simultaneously.