Doubt
Jan. 22-24, 30-31, 8 p.m.; Jan. 25, 3 p.m.
$20-$25
The Village Playhouse
730 Coleman Blvd., Mt. Pleasant
(843) 856-1579
www.thevillageplayhouse.com
Well-staged and well-acted, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable presented at the Village Playhouse is an evening you won’t regret giving over to the theater. The Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play is certainly not a feel-good work, but it is an honest one.
At the center of the drama is dark suspicion, a vile allegation of child molestation and ruthless evisceration of simple human kindness. All of it takes place in the confines of a ’60s-era Catholic elementary school.
With only four characters, Shanley manages to draw us into themes that — unsettling as they are — ring true. The playwright does not require that we shed our conscience or humanity at the door, but rather invites us to examine what choices we might make when faced with the basest behaviors imaginable.
Dripping acid on nearly everything, rule-bound and mirthless Sister Aloysius (Libby Campbell) seethes with a growing envy of the youthful and popular parish priest, Father Flynn (Paul Whitty). His warmth and easy informality act as a goad to the principal’s despair over the declining standards she sees all around her. Even the modern substitution of ballpoint pens for proper fountain pens is irksome and indicative of incipient moral laxity.
Nor is she content to stew alone in her venom. The young nun, Sister James (Katherine Chaney) is well within Sister Aloysius’ administrative grasp and influence. A competent, enthusiastic teacher, Sister James is judged too warm and forgiving toward her students by her superior — and quickly brought to heel. Worse still, Sister A’s corrosive disposition eats away at the young nun’s charity, replacing it with suspicion.
What follows is almost a foregone conclusion, but still comes across as an entirely satisfying narrative of corruption, small-scale tyranny, and a thunder storm of doubt unleashed in a small community.
In the homily that opens the play, Father Flynn reflects on the recent assassination of President Kennedy and draws out of it the central preoccupation of the work.
In the midst of that historic national tragedy, “Your bond to your fellow beings was despair. It was awful. But we were in it together,” he says. In the claustrophobic shelter that is their parish, Father Flynn and the two nuns will come to know the darkest edge of that horrific intimacy.
The child dragged into this disastrous situation happens to be new to the school and, among mostly Irish and Italian parishioners, the only black student. When Sister A confronts his mother (Yvonne Broaddus) with her tortured suspicions about Father Flynn, the poor woman is blindsided. Broaddus gives a gut wrenching performance as a mother desperate to give her son a future, heedless of the short-term cost.
Too long postponed by hierarchical constraints, Father Flynn and Sister A finally assail each other. Though it takes place in the principal’s office, this is a harrowing scene that shows both actors rising to the dramatic equivalent of gladiators, matching each other relentlessly.
By the end of the play, nothing will survive entirely unblemished, but significantly, Shanley is more generous to Sister A than she is to herself, allowing her in the closing moments to be seen for something more than her malice. He grants her —and the audience — a moment to reveal a lost, desperately flawed, and entirely human being.
Moments like this remind us why we go to the theater.
Kudos to Keely Enright and her cast.
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