The main question I came away with from the revival of Doubt: A Parable at the Todd Haimes Theatre wasn’t the one the plot is intended to raise, whether a popular parish priest molested a boy who is a student in the parish school. I questioned whether one cast member change could turn a play I found riveting in its original production into one that fell flat for me.
Veteran theatre and television actress Tyne Daly was to star as Sr. Aloysius Beauvier, the principal of St. Nicholas School in the Bronx who is convinced that Fr. Brendan Flynn is guilty. Daly had to bow out after being hospitalized on the day of the first preview performance. Amy Ryan, another veteran performer, was cast and had the unenviable task of having to get up to speed to take on the role of the lead character.
The question I will never know the answer to was would Daly have given the production the power it deserves as a fascinating exploration of the often elusiveness of truth. The 2004 play, by John Patrick Shanley, won a Pulitzer and Tony.
Under Scott Ellis’s direction Sr. Aloysius isn’t just the angry woman she was written to be. She is shrill and full of rage. Her rapid fire judgments and accusations deserve to be spoken but would be more effective with some nuance in tone and volume. She is loud and delivers like a machine gun. Anger can be just as well expressed, and more dramatically presented, when the sharp words are alternately spoken in lower, pointed tones, with pauses for them to sink in.
This affected how I reacted to her fiery exchanges with Fr. Flynn, played by Liev Schreiber. In the 2005 Broadway production, starring Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Byrne, and the movie with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, I felt I was attending a verbal tennis match. When the ball was in Sister’s court, I believed her. When it bounced back to Fr. Flynn, I believed him.
This isn’t entirely Ryan’s fault. Schreiber seems too nice, and genuinely committed to the Church’s reforms being implement at that time, 1964, to bring the Catholic tradition out of the rigidity St. Aloysius clings to. The previous actors, especially Hoffman, had an aura of sleaziness about them. Only for a moment, after Sister tells him she has investigated his tenure at a past parish, did Schreiber’s Fr. Flynn make me think he could be guilty. He had a worried expression but only for a flicker.
The richest performance is given by Zoe Kazan as Sr. James, the young nun filled with joy and a love of teaching, especially history. Her Sr. James at first seems girlish and intimidated by her principal but she proves to be strong-minded and concerned about not rushing to judgment. I wish Sr. Aloysius and Fr. Flynn had been portrayed with the depth she brought to her role.
Shanley’s play makes for great theatre for at least two reasons. We watch it with the knowledge of the horrendous number of children who had been sexually abused by priests for years while being transferred by their superiors from parish to parish.
The play is also strengthened by the time in which it is set, especially for those like Shanley and me who were in Catholic elementary schools in the 1960s or anyone else who was observing the changes of the Second Vatican Council. The Mass went from Latin to English so we could finally understand the words of the service we were obligated to attend each Sunday. Sisters either gave up their habits entirely or shortened their skirts and simplified their veils. As a child I could feel the excitement even if I didn’t understand the significance of the changes.
Not everyone was happy with the new ways. Sr. Aloysius rings true to me because she reminds me of my Uncle Mick who also was a stern, rigid individual. As the president of the seminary in Seattle he was the same type of authoritarian ruler and was opposed to the changes in the Church. He was the wrong person at that time, or any time for that matter, to be in charge of training future priests. The Sulpicians, the order to which he belonged, recognized this and retired him to Hawaii, which he hated and where he died of a heart attack at 57 in 1969.
I have a personal connection to this play in another way. The nuns are Sisters of Charity of New York. I have been an Associate member since 2001. Associates don’t take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but we share in the Sisters’s lives through being welcomed in their congregational gathering and in spreading their charism of charity.
At the Sisters’s invitation, the cast, Ellis, the understudies and any member of the creative team were invited to meet with a group of Sisters at their headquarters at the University of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale to discuss their way of life. (I don’t know if Ryan had the time to get up there.) Schreiber also met with Fr. Christopher Keenan who is an Associate.
I’m assuming costume designer Linda Cho visited, or at least she found a way to be true to the Sisters’s habit, a black bonnet cap and floor-length black dress/robe first worn by their founder, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. The former Associates director, the late Sr. Mary Gallagher, told me to get back the skirt’s pleats after a long day she’d fold the pleats back into place and put the garment under her mattress. When she got up in the morning the pleats were restored. I bet Cho didn’t hear that story.
These are the order of nuns who educated Shanley. Sr. Margaret McEntee taught him in the first grade at Sr. Anthony’s School in the Bronx. She was his muse for Sr. James and she maintains a friendship with him. He dedicated his play “to the many orders of Catholic nuns who devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes. Though they have [been] much maligned and ridiculed, who among us has been so generous?”
Sr. Aloysius doesn’t resemble any Sister of Charity I’ve ever met. We aren’t given any reason for why she has the disposition she has. We learn that she had been married but her husband died in World War II. She doesn’t seem to find joy in her vowed vocation or in education. She tells Sr. James she’s glad the children are terrified of her.
Her anger seems to come from her resentment of the male dominated Church. From the beginning she makes comments about not being permitted to enter the rectory or be in close quarters unattended with a priest, even the 79-year-old Monsignor. She knows well the male control of the Roman Church, as any Sister would. Men rule everything, she says to Sr. James. It festers in her and so she sets her anger toward the male authority figure closest to her. “I’ll bring him down. With or without your help.”
But Fr. Flynn holds the power. When Sr. Aloysius, against the rules, meets with him in her office alone, he puts her in her place. “You have no right to act on your own,” he tells her. “You are a member of a religious order. You have taken vows, obedience being one. You answer to us. You have no right to step outside the Church.”
She, by the power of her personality, and he, by the power of his authority, are not easily stopped. This tension should have been more convincing than it was. Perhaps Ryan needed more time to inhabit her role. Perhaps Schreiber had a stronger edge when he sparred with Daly. It must have been hard for the cast to spend so much time rehearsing and preparing and then have that chemistry disrupted right at the start of public performances. Those are two more things I won’t know.
Unfortunately all of this spoiled what is usually a climatic ending. This time it felt more like a conclusion than a revelation.
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