In 2004, John Patrick Shanley wrote Doubt, A Parable, a powerful, provocative drama. The play depicts a battle of wills between a young priest and an opinionated nun who believes he might have had an improper relationship with a student at the Bronx school where she serves as principal.
It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as that year’s Tony Award for Best Play. The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park staged the show in 2008, the same year Shanley’s script was released as a movie with Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn, with additional performances from Amy Adams and Viola Davis; it was nominated for four Academy Awards.
Now it has reached Cincinnati’s heavily Catholic West Side.
The gripping story of Doubt, about a boy who might or might not have been molested by a priest, explores nuanced questions of moral certainty. It’s a work that, at first glance, seems an unlikely candidate for production by Cincinnati Landmark Productions (CLP), a purveyor of usually family-friendly shows at its theaters in West Side neighborhoods.
But that’s precisely where it will be later this month, opening on Jan. 19 at the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts and continuing there through Feb. 12.
While the Covedale’s bread and butter has been musicals and comedies, CLP’s artistic director Tim Perrino points to several serious dramas presented there, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both by Tennessee Williams.
“Despite the subtlety of complex issues in those ‘large’ dramas, our audience took them to heart and enjoyed them,” he says. “We have an element in our audience base that wants a little more gravity.”
Perrino knows his patrons well, in part because he’s a born-and-bred West Sider.
“As a Catholic young man who grew up in Catholic schools on the West Side, I saw a lot in this play,” he says. “If Doubt wasn’t done well, I wouldn’t present it. If it was just a screed against the practices or the teachings of the Catholic church or even the problems thereof, just tearing down and criticizing it, I wouldn’t want to do it.”
Perrino says Shanley’s play is definitely not a condemnation of Catholicism. “It’s such a great piece of writing and the issues are so deftly handled,” he says. “Shanley himself said you should come out of the play with doubt. It’s not about a verdict; it’s not about a judge and jury. It’s about that place where the world really is, where having doubt leads to change and growth. Doubt leads to more light and more understanding and fewer closed, scary places where we don’t know what’s going on.”
The show’s subtitle, “A Parable,” suggests that it’s about a lesson to be learned, perhaps an admonition about jumping to conclusions.
“The play is so specifically unspecific,” Perrino says. “In the battle of wills between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, you are constantly witnessing Christ’s message of seeing the speck in your brother’s eye and not the great beam in your own. They can each see the flaw in the other, but not their own fatal flaws.”
The story is set in 1964, just before the Roman Catholic Church became more open to examining and updating its structure and many traditions. Perrino feels that’s significant, but he also believes the show is extremely pertinent to today’s world. He says Shanley’s purpose is to evoke conversation and thought.
“It’s amazing how timely it is,” Perrino says. “(Shanley’s) central premise is that we’re shouting at each other all the time anymore, but not communicating. People talk ad nauseam. There’s a kind of game of proving a point, of trying to shed light and force a better way to move ahead. We’re all going to live in doubt all our lives. That space between faith and doubt is where we all live. If we can just learn to shine a little light on things then we’ll be better off.”
The “District Series” at CLP’s second stage, the Warsaw Federal Incline Theater in East Price Hill, usually presents harder-hitting plays between September and May than does Covedale’s mainstream “Marquee Season.” Asked if he considered putting Doubt onstage at that new East Price Hill theater, Perrino says, “That series is more explicit. Doubt is so subtle. There’s no explicit depiction or discussion. It’s all about a suspicion that catches fire and then exposes in many ways the struggles of the Church just before Vatican II.”
Perrino has engaged Lindsey Augusta Mercer to stage the show. She’s worked with a broad array of Cincinnati theater companies — Cincinnati Shakespeare, The Carnegie, Falcon Theater and New Edgecliff Theatre. She recently staged Girlfriend and Darkest Night at the Gnarly Stump for Know Theatre. Her cast of actors are Martha Slater as Sister Aloysius, Rory Sheridan as Father Flynn, Maggie Lou Rader as the impressionable young nun Sister James and Joy Rolland-Oba as Mrs. Muller, the mother of the boy who might or might not have been molested. It’s a solid set of veteran performers from Cincinnati’s acting community who are recognizing that CLP is producing shows that afford serious acting opportunities. Perrino calls Doubt “big, high-level stuff” that attracts actors and, he hopes, people “who might not be viewing us as their outlet for theatrical entertainment. Now they might, because of shows like this.”
Perrino likes the way Shanley’s engrossing script challenges those who see it performed.
“When I walk out of this play, I have to make some conclusions in my mind — but I doubt them,” he says. “Shanley says when he started the play he had just one word on a piece of paper: ‘Doubt.’ He wanted people to learn that when you are in that unstudied moment of doubt between faith and hypocrisy, that’s when you have to learn who you really are and what you believe.”
Perrino believes Doubt is certainly a play for big people. “But we have plenty of big people who come here,” he says. “I think they’ll find it fascinating and a worthwhile night at the theater.”
The Covedale Center for Performing Arts stages DOUBT Jan. 19-Feb. 12. More info: cincinnatilandmarkproductions.com.
This article appears in Jan 4-11, 2017.
