In my life I have been fortunate to
witness some truly great ninety minute plays, not the least of which
was God of Carnage in New
York City just shortly after it had garnered two Tony Awards. I was
not so fortunate to see Doubt,
a play by John Patrick Shanley in which Cherry Jones won a Tony Award
for her piercing portrayal of Sr. Aloysius, but I have seen the play
performed at the Alley Theatre in Houston and at the Bayou Bijou
theatre in UL's Student Union. The play richly deserved its Pulitzer
Prize and Tony Award for Best Play, but the Acadiana Repertory
Theatre's production, while it benefits from a fine cast, suffers
from poor direction. It's a great play aided by gifted actors, and it
could have been so much more.
The play focuses
on the tensions between Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the principal of a
Catholic school, and Fr. Brendan Flynn, the newly appointed priest
assigned to the St. Nicholas parish. It's 1964, where uncertainty
racked both the United States in the midst of its civil rights
struggle and the Catholic Church in the first fruits of Vatican II.
The veteran Sr. Aloysius is deeply suspicious of both the new
direction the church was taking and the new progressive priest who
endorses a warmer version of the faith than she has espoused. In the
play's course, she discovers through one of her new teachers Sr.
James that Fr. Flynn has taken an unusual interest in Donald Muller,
the school's first African-American student. Armed with her
certitude, she assaults Fr. Flynn, using every weapon in her arsenal
to remove the priest from her school and her parish. She is
successful, but the effort shakes her faith to its core, leaving her
wracked with doubt.
John
Patrick Shanley's lean play uses words in the same manner as James
Goldman did in The Lion in Winter:
they serve as story and as a rich testament to what finely-honed
words can do. The two protagonists battle with words, struggling with
the great moral issues of the 1960s, so it's all the more
disappointing that the actors were placed strangely on the stage. In
the principal's office, many actors became trapped in their chairs,
creating an awkwardness when more dynamic action was needed. It did
not help that the Bayou Bijou lacks the proper depth for a full set,
but nearly every actor upstaged each other in a manner that
undermined the intense material. On so many occasions, the audience
missed crucial facial reactions as the performers turned to face an
upstage actor. A simple relocation of chairs would have fixed nearly
all the problems and some more active blocking could have made this
production a stellar one. It also baffles me why the principal's
office was elevated on a platform; it was unnecessary and caused no
end of problems as the actors stumbled around it during scene
changes. On two occasions, I feared for the safety of the cast as
they teetered near the edge of the stage trying to walk around the
platform.
The director
Garland J. Theriot assembled a fine cast, and my congratulations go
to the actors who managed to create such vibrant characters. Shana
Ledet Qualls dominated the stage from the very beginning, and her Sr.
Aloysius was a steely mixture of tarnished experiences and, in the
end, fragile bravado. Though she only had one scene, Kristina
Marshall made Mrs. Muller the most complicated and rich person on the
stage. Her sympathetic portrayal of a harried mother was a
tour-de-force in a small time period. As the naïve Sr. James,
Etienna R. Wright gives a nice portrait, but she needed to wait for
laughter to die down as important lines were said. Steven R. Landry
gave a nuanced, even underplayed performance as Fr. Flynn, but in the
crucial moment when he must call to Sr. Aloysius with a single word,
“Wait,” it wasn't strong enough to signal the victory Sr.
Aloysius finally achieved. During Steven's monologue addressing
students at St. Nicholas, he stood behind the light, casting himself
in shadow, an unusual positioning that served little purpose. These
four actors deserve great credit for keeping the play fluid in the
face of stolid blocking.
When
I discovered that Doubt had
been made into a movie with the incredible Meryl Streep in the lead,
I was elated, only to notice that the movie completely erased the one
thing that made the play so powerful: the doubt. The play's great
strength is that nothing is ever proven, and the audience members are
left to decide on their own what really happened. Every person who
left that theatre was haunted by Sr. Aloysius's final words: “I
have doubts. I have such doubts.” I wished I had left haunted as
well.
---Vincent P. Barras
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