By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald
February 8, 2007
http://news.bostonherald.com/columnists/view.bg?articleid=181730&srvc=home
Cardinal Law would love this play. It helps you better understand, if not condone, the expedient denials that let him and so many others sweep the whole nauseating sexual abuse mess under the rug.
But "Doubt," which opened Tuesday at the Colonial Theater and has won a zillion awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, is so much more than some dreary examination of the church scandal and who, in this case, is right: the battle-ax authoritarian nun who runs a grammar school, or the charismatic and caring young priest she accuses of molesting a troubled boy.
"It is about uncertainty," said its star, the Tony-award winning Cherry Jones, in an interview yesterday. It's about "rushing to judgment" and how we decide what and who to believe and how we are thoroughly convinced of one person's version of the facts, up until we are thoroughly convinced of the other person's tale.
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| Cherry Jones Photo by Lisa Hornak |
It's a play for those who've felt that sickening drop in their stomach when first suspecting betrayal by someone trusted - a spouse, a boss, a politician, a president. It's about the awful compromises then made to get by, to keep going on. "I still long for shared certainty, an assumption of safety, the reassurance that others know what's for the best," says playwright John Patrick Shanley.
"You may want to be sure (but) you may come out of my play uncertain."
The power of "Doubt" is that you're still uncertain hours and days later about the nun and priest and maybe even about people in your own life. And it's a very unsettling place to be.
This sparse, four-character, 95-minute drama takes place in 1964 at a Catholic grammar school in the Bronx. Cherry Jones' Sister Aloysius is the aging, hunched, no-nonsense principal in heavy black habit and bonnet with a massive crucifix around her neck.
She frets over eighth-grade girls wearing lipstick in the Christmas pageant ("I was waiting in the wings for that little Jane."). About students using ballpoint instead of fountain pens (a ballpoint "makes them write like monkeys!").
Almost from the beginning she also frets about Father Flynn, who says children need warmth and love, not judgment; who takes them into the rectory and out for ice cream and would like to take them on camping trips, too - exactly the sort of thing we heard about Fathers Porter and Geoghan and the worst of Boston's priestly abusers.
Aloysius, understanding her almost powerless position as a nun vs. a priest in the rigidly hierarchical church, plots to get Flynn to confess.
First she seeks help from a younger nun, who teaches the boy she fears Flynn has abused. But this nun believes Flynn's denials, both because of his kindnesses and because it's so much easier than believing the worst.
Then Aloysius meets with the mother of the child, the lone black boy in the school. But the mother, amazingly, tells Aloysius to "let (Flynn) have" her boy if that means he gets through til June."They were going to kill him in the public school," the mother says. And his own father has nearly killed him with beatings because he is "that way," she says, as in gay - a word not in the lexicon of 1964, when JFK had just died, when Pope Paul VI reigned, when most Catholics still believed in their church and most Americans in their government, too.
By the time the curtain falls on "Doubt," you're not sure who to believe, or what, and "truth" as Father Flynn puts it, "has no clear conclusion."
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