By Jerome Weeks - Art&Seek.org
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-783657.mp3
Dallas, TX – The Broadway drama, Doubt, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. The play has an especially powerful and painful relevance to the Dallas area. KERA's Jerome Weeks reviews the North Texas premiere presented by Water Tower Theatre.
The case of Rudy Kos, the Dallas priest who was convicted of sexual assault in 1997, made Dallas one of the first Catholic dioceses to be rocked by a sex abuse scandal - one of the first of dozens of such scandals throughout the church.
Water Tower Theatre in Addison deserves praise, then, for finally premiering Doubt in North Texas. Doubt is John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a priest, who may be a pedophile, and the nun, the school principal, who sets out to bring him down. I say Water Tower is finally bringing the play here because we're getting to see Doubt two and a half years after it debuted in such places as Singapore and New Zealand.
Doubt is clearly inspired by the recent cases of pedophile priests. But Shanley sets his drama in the Bronx in 1964. This permits Doubt to be separate, to explore its own case without entangling itself in the hundred-million dollar court settlements we've seen the past decade.
Setting the drama in 1964 also means that Doubt presents the Church's struggles over authority and renewal, struggles prompted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Sister Aloysius is definitely old school;' she believes that the best tool for educating children is knocking some fear into them. She is unsettled by Father Flynn, the new parish priest who wants to knock the dust off the church, wants it to join the community.
The play becomes a test of wills between priest and nun. She suspects Father Flynn has already molested a young boy, but her efforts at finding proof are hampered by traditional church hierarchy.
Flynn: You have to stop this campaign against me!
Sister: You can stop it at any time.
Flynn: How?
Sister: Confess and resign.
Flynn: You are attempting to destroy my reputation. But the result of all this is going to be your removal, not mine.
Sister: What are you doing in this school?
Flynn: I am trying to do good!
Doubt could succeed with little more than three chairs and a desk onstage. But Water Tower Theatre is one of the great theatrical spaces in North Texas; you could stage almost anything there. As if to justify presenting such a small-scale drama, director Terry Martin has had designer John Hobbie build a minor basilica onstage. It's impressivve but not necessary.
As Father Flynn, Regan Adair has an easy charm, a telling, enigmatic distance - and a variable, light Irish accent. For her part, Nancy Sherrard plays Sister Aloysius like a comic dowager out of Oscar Wilde. She has a more richly theatrical delivery than the stern principal would tolerate. She's best when that's stripped away in the play's finest scene, a confrontation with the young boy's mother, strongly played by M. Denise Lee.
Doubt - as in beyond a reasonable doubt' - deals in suspicions and evidence. No trial actually happens in Doubt, but it's very much in the tradition of the courtroom drama. It's smart and taut and powerful, but I must respectfully lodge a dissent against the play's title -- and what many people believe it's about. Audiences are supposedly torn over who is right, Father Flynn or his accuser. Our doubts are embodied in a flighty young nun, Sister James (the bordering-on-hysterical Jessica Wiggers) who wants to believe the sympathetic priest though she fears Sister Aloysius is right.
But that's not how Doubt actually plays. I think audiences decide whether the charges are true fairly early on. We feel relatively little doubt here. The play is certainly suspenseful, but the suspense isn't over who is right. It's over who will win - over how they will win and what it will cost the Church. That's why Shanley's ending is so disturbing - and why audiences in North Texas can grimly appreciate it.
What happens to Father Flynn clearly points to what happened in places like Dallas in the 1990s.