"DOUBT" FREE

The name of the play is Doubt for a reason. It isn’t about certainty, though the subject would seem unequivocal: Child sexual abuse in a religious school.

All wrong. Right?

And yet, because of the inequitable power dynamics —  adult abusers vs. child  accusers — God and God’s big-time institutions vs. everyone smaller — nothing about child sexual abuse, particularly in a religious school, is ever certain. Hence the title.

Doubt: A Parable, by John Patrick Shanley, has been a painfully favorite play of mine ever since I first laid eyes on it back in 2004, Off Broadway, at Manhattan Theatre Club, and then followed it to Broadway, where it won the Best Play Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. In Doubt, Shanley nails the equivocations that underlie the crimes.

Set in 1964 at a Bronx Catholic school, Doubt conjures a seemingly prehistoric time but let me assure you, in abuse terms, it is timeless.

How do I know?

Trust me. I know.

Doubt’s school principal, Sister Aloysius, is a martinet of a nun — all business, all dogmatic religious faith, but lacking any actual faith in humanity. Doubt’s putative child molester, Father Brendan Flynn, is the parish priest, a buddy-boy of a cleric who ministers as an all-around-good guy to his sub-teen male school minions, silkenly erasing boundaries with facile Vatican II ecumenicism.

The student that Father Flynn “may” have abused is the school’s first and only Black student, who is never seen. His mother, however, is; she gets her moment late in the play. We will return to her.

The battle between good and evil in Doubt is devilishly conflicted. The avenging Sister Aloysius, who goes after Father Flynn on instinct only, is abrasive and unsympathetic, if not downright vindictive. Her prey, the priest, is, of course, a charmer. Their duel seems preordained but there are gaps of doubt, for them, and for us, doubts planted by the playwright.

It isn’t that we all can’t see what has happened here. It’s just that adults, with their disquisitions, their presumed innocence, their institutional protocols and religious veils, tend to cloud the picture when the sexual violation of a child is concerned. And who really wants to grapple with that anyway?

Well, John Patrick Shanley, for one, through his mouthpiece, the good Sister. The problem I encountered with Doubt as currently revived on Broadway by Roundabout Theatre with a stellar cast and a speed gun, it would seem, is that all doubt has been stripped from it. The excellent actors each hammer their characters into place with alacrity and absolute certainty. Amy Ryan’s relentless Sister Aloysius has no doubt as to what Father Flynn has done and what she needs to do. Liev Schreiber’s assured Father Flynn evinces zero doubt as to his own actions. As for the naive Sister James — a young history teacher at the school who bounces back and forth at the triangulated junction between the poles of her two superiors, now believing one, then the other — her self-doubt, as portrayed sweetly by Zoe Kazan, is also absolute. No gradation.

This is not how Shanley wrote Doubt. Shades of uncertainty lurk everywhere between the lines of his script, just waiting to be played. In this production, they are not.

A moment toward the end crystalized this for me, the moment with the aforementioned mother of the 12-year-old Black student, a role that won Viola Davis an Academy Award nomination in the 2008 film of Doubt, alongside Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. The role comprises a single scene with Sister Aloysius, who has summoned Mrs. Muller to reveal to her the seeming violation of her son, Donald, at the hands of Father Flynn. Mrs. Muller, a proud and practical woman, does not appreciate her summons at all, and tells the Sister so. Her son’s presumed molestation is beside the point, his continued presence in the school is his passport to a better life. Nothing else matters.

“You're the one forcing people to say these things out loud,” Mrs. Muller tells Sister Aloysius. “Things are in the air and you leave them alone if you can. That's what I know. My boy came to this school cause they were gonna kill him at the public school. So we were lucky enough to get him in here for his last year. Good. His father don't like him. He comes here, the kids don't like him. One man is good to him. This priest. Puts out a hand to the boy. Does the man have his reasons? Yes. Everybody has their reasons. YOU have your reasons. But do I ask the man why he's good to my son? No. I don't care why. My son needs some man to care about him and see him through to where he wants to go. And thank God, this educated man with some kindness in him wants to do just that.”

Shanley has shaped this speech so it can be delivered any number of ways: Sadly. Resolutely. Bitterly. Doubtfully. The excellent actress, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, delivers it as an anthem. Like a trumpet. And without a doubt. The audience, the night I saw Doubt, gave the speech a show-stopping ovation.

I found this distressing. A parent has essentially just pimped her child to a child molester, however maternal her justification. The playwright leaves space here for the actor to shed doubt upon this justification, even as it is avowed. Ms. Tyler Bernstine ignored this opportunity completely (as directed, I assume), delivering the speech straight-up and doubt-free. The audience applauded, cheering what amounted to an exploitation advocation.

I was more than a little embarrassed for all of us.

Still, I never quite lost faith with this production. There was plenty to appreciate — the acting was sterling, if single dimensional, and the scenes hurtled forward. At its best, though, Doubt has an arc and it belongs to Sister Aloysius. Her absence of all doubt is inexorably chipped away, largely through subtext (in productions that allow their actors to play it), leading ultimately to Doubt’s devastating curtain line — which I will reveal here, so you might want to stop reading. Father Flynn, at Doubt’s end, is finally gone from Sister Aloysius’s school — not apprehended, and certainly not punished, but quietly shifted by his Bishop to another institution; the shameful dénouement of so many child sex abuse cases in religious schools, still.

Sister Aloysius has won. Then, suddenly, alone with young Sister James, she turns, “bent with emotion,” according to the script, and confesses: “I have doubts!  I have such doubts!”

Her words are devastating — in productions that have built up to them. In this production, they burst like a non sequitur, arriving out of nowhere.

Their mystery, nonetheless, remains: Did Sister Aloysius have doubts about Father Flynn’s guilt, or her own religious faith, or simply herself? 

That is the beauty of Doubt. We never quite know.