Lingering 'Doubt', Boston Globe, February 8, 2007

Lingering 'Doubt'

Boston Globe
February 8, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2007/02/08/lingering_doubt/

America, by and large, doesn't do fatalism. In courts and public discourse, it is presumed that problems can be foreseen, or at least fixed; that situations work themselves out for the better; that all lingering questions are answered in the end. This is not the world that John Patrick Shanley describes in "Doubt, " a fine play that opened Tuesday for a two-week run at the Colonial Theatre.

In a way, it's surprising that "Doubt" took as long to arrive here as it did. The plot is set in the Bronx in 1964 and centers on Sister Aloysius , a nun who fears that a priest is molesting her school's first black student. Given its subject, Shanley's play has attracted intense interest in Greater Boston, which was riven five years ago by revelations of sexual abuse by clergy. Sister Aloysius's fierce protection of her schoolchildren will resonate locally, as will her frustration over her lack of recourse within the church hierarchy.

For the most part, though, the play isn't a commentary on the abuse scandal. Instead, it's a study in how a person's inability to know the unknowable — or prove the unprovable — reverberates in the wider world.

At the outset, Sister Aloysius has little evidence against Father Flynn, other than that he took the boy into the rectory for a "talk." And there is, after all, a more innocent way of viewing such actions — as an attempt to reach out to a troubled, isolated student who has few other protectors. As Flynn tells it, kindness is his highest priority, and the possibility that some people will get suspicious is a lousy reason to deny help to a child who needs it.

It falls to the boy's beleaguered mother to suggest that both accounts could be true — that Father Flynn might be helping her son as well as preying upon him. In her view, any attempt to address the situation will only make matters worse. "You accept what you gotta accept and you work with it," she says.

STAGE REVIEW: Power, abuse, truth in 'Doubt'

Sister Aloysius's refusal to trust Flynn grows out of a belief that anyone with a sufficiently silver tongue can calmly explain away anything. She's not alone; there has been an explosion of public interest in recent years in seeking truth through gut instinct. Bestselling books such as Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" and Gavin de Becker's "The Gift of Fear " tell readers that their instant judgments about people and events have great analytical power. Sister Aloysius tells Flynn he roused her suspicion when he touched another boy on the wrist, and the boy recoiled. Yet in Shanley's world, parsing such moments — "thin-slicing" them, to use Gladwell's term — is just another way of casting about for definite answers amid great uncertainty.

Then again, what else does a person have to go on? Shanley's play is short in duration but long on hard truths: the contortions people go through to avoid acknowledging unpleasant realities, the compulsion to act — somehow — on the limited information one has, the impossibility of ever knowing what lies in another's heart.