Don't 'Doubt' the Arts Club - A Powerful New Drama

After capping off a strong year at the Stanley earlier this summer with a triumphant run of The Producers, Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre kick off their 45th season with another Broadway smash: Jon Patrick Shanley's dark, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Doubt. I caught the play last Wednesday and have to say this relevant tale of moral uncertainty is a powerful and exciting choice for the Stanley Industrial, and and another must-see production from the company...

Set in a New York Catholic boys' school in 1964, the play opens with the handsome, youthful, and increasingly popular new parish priest Father Flynn delivering a charismatic sermon to the Stanley on the fundamentals of personal morality -- asking the crowd to question their own conception of private guilt. Engaging from the start, the play's almost unforgiving grip on the audience doesn't let up for the next 90 minutes, and the lack of an intermission only adds to that intensity.

After that initial sermon, we're quickly introduced to Sister Aloysius, a veteran nun who takes a more traditional approach to the Church and adolescent education. Her pseudo-tyrannical squashing of younger Sister James' desire to inject creativity and democracy into the classroom is quite the attack on an archaic school system (then or now), and ruins any possibility of finding a moral base in the nun. Though she often seems like the voice of experienced reason through much of play's remainder, these opening scenes of Aloysius as villainess are pivotal in keeping any real truth or justice well curtained by human doubt.

Sister James, played by the charming Sasa Brown, soon exposes her inkling that Father Flynn may be acting inappropriately with the new altar boy Donald Muller, the school's first African American student. Her 'innocence' obviously begins to affect her judgment, however, and it's the disciplinarian widow Sister Aloysius (who's personal history remains unclear but potently visible) who takes resolute ownership of the suspicions. There's no need for me to ruin any more of the plot, but the chain of confrontations between the three that only an inkling of doubt sets off is powerful and entirely convincing. The only scene which left me unimpressed was the exchange between Aloysius and Mrs. Muller, as the mother's reactions feel more than a tad disingenuous; the only break in an otherwise utterly believable drama.

Gabrielle Rose and Jonathon Young are both superb as Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, their scenes together fiercely intense and playing at the peak of tension in a consistently unsettling hour and a half (but, ya' know... that artistically uplifting and morally cathartic kind of 'unsettling'). They're both just as strong during monologues -- Young's early scene jesting with the basketball team really showed off the man's charisma while making that undercurrent of suspicion all the more disturbing. Both actors draw on a wealth of experience, and their performances were amongst the most confident I've seen in a recent local production.

It's only natural for audiences to have some initial reservations about the subject matter. The priest-as-pedophile plot has been replayed a dozen times over in the last 10 years, and was done particularly well with the 2006 documentary Deliver Us From Evil (which this play preceded by two years). The cynic might argue the storyline has now been overplayed, while religious communities may worry about the effect further media sensationalism may have on an already stereotyped priesthood. But the play is far from recycled news cliche; with a unique perspective, it tackles the murky questions surrounding suspicion and guilt without pointing any fingers or attacking easy targets. It's really a universal tale, forcing the audience to question (and ultimatley... doubt) their own conceptions of truth or moral justice, confronting the reality of bias in all it's forms.

While there wasn't much to complain about in Director Rachel Ditor's tight adaptation (she was previously in control of last season's Stanley drama Rabbit Hole), the real star of the show for me was John Patrick Shanley's beautifully written play. It's a story which was born from his own real experience at Bronx Catholic school in the 60s, and his realization that the church's nuns would have likely known and gossiped about priestly misdiscretion, while remaining powerless and silent under the male-dominated church hierarchy.

Doubt went on to win Shanley the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and I'm forced to agree that it's one of the most expertly crafted dramas I've seen. The play progresses at a rapid pace; each brief but powerful scene seems to heighten both the audience's doubt and conviction. And while the action is condensed, Shanley and Ditor still give the audience room to contemplate. The heavy speeches and emotional dialogues are punctuated by periods of almost uncomfortable silence, during which one can only assume a number of audience members were forced to perform their own private guilt-analyses. I recommend opening those M&Ms before the play starts.

There's a film coming out in January, adapted by Shanley himself and starring Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Now you know that's as good a recipe for Oscar bait as you'll find in the next year... so I'd buy your ticket now and ensure you're able to scoff at your coworkers by telling them you've 'already seen the play' when they're all talkin' 'bout Doubt five months from now.

And since it wouldn't feel appropriate to leave you with a joke, I'll offer this quote from the play:

"The truth makes for a bad sermon... it's too confusing and and there's no clear resolution."

The Arts Club Theatre presents Doubt at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage from September 11 - October 12.