In March I was at the QUONTA Regional community theatre festival in North-Eastern Ontario. Theatre Ontario Festival brings together the winning plays from QUONTA and 3 other regional festivals in a province-wide competition. Here is the first of four blog posts about the four competing plays.
DOUBT: A Parable
by John Patrick Shanley
Presented by Theatre Kent
(WODL entry)
Doubt is a very powerful play. It's a masterly script, using humour to disarm you and then cranking up the dramatic intensity as soon as you let your guard down. The situation builds up, scene by scene, until the air crackles with the electricity generated by the events and characters. It's a single act, a little less than 90 minutes long, and you leave the theatre turning over all the events and characters in your mind and trying to resolve your own doubts about what you have just seen and experienced -- because the playwright doesn't do it for you.
The scenario is timely, certainly, although the story takes place in the year 1964. Sister Aloysius, the principal of a school, comes to believe that Father Flynn, the assisting priest in the parish, is preying on one of the boys in the school. With great certainty, she sets to work to force him out, aware that she must fight the whole patriarchal world of the Roman Catholic Church. In the end, she does achieve her objective, but has to tell a blatant lie to do it. Sister James, the younger teaching nun who triggers these events, is left with certainty that Father Flynn was innocent, while the boy's mother, Mrs. Muller, plainly comes to consider Sister Aloysius as her son's # 1 enemy. The priest is promoted to priest in charge of another parish and another school, and Sister Aloysius is left with her own doubts, which she never puts into words.
The play has seven main scenes, plus two sermons by Father Flynn, and must make use of three locations: the church, the office of Sister Aloysius, and a garden between the school and the rectory. One of the great challenges of this play is to find a convention which will allow the action to flow freely from scene to scene, so that there is no interruption in the buildup of that crackling tension that must exist by the final two scenes. Sadly, each scene ended with a lengthy full blackout and a resumption of the recorded music sung by a children's choir. Each time, the tension sagged. Yet, when Mrs. Muller arrived, it seemed entirely appropriate to have her appear first in the garden, then cross behind the window and finally knock at the door. Similar moves could, perhaps, have been used throughout, allowing the lights to stay up at all times.
The set was beautiful in a realistic but understated way, with wooden furniture all period-appropriate, and the tone beautifully set by a properly-dated black rotary dial telephone on the desk of Sister Aloysius. The set was centred and focused by a sizable but simple tracery frame for a stained glass window. With the rest of the frame left empty (a good choice), why did the very topmost small circular opening have backlit stained glass in it? The garden scene at stage left was effectively focused on a statue of the Madonna and Child, enfolded by a large tree (which actually blew in the wind, a lovely touch), and nicely balanced by a smaller similar tree in an otherwise unused area at stage right.
I felt it was a stroke of genius to place the pulpit of the church directly behind and above the desk, reinforcing subconsciously the relative positions of priest and nun in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The large filing cabinet was placed far enough out onto the stage to obstruct the view of the door from my seat (somewhat left of centre), and this meant that I was unable to see the key moment at the end of the penultimate scene, when Father Flynn was left alone in the office. Such are the penalties of touring a show to a festival!
Audrey Hummelen as Sister Aloysius has the most difficult of the four roles. She could easily become a very unlikable person, strict and dry to a fault. However, as played by Hummelen, Sister Aloysius was tough, but not without humour. Furthermore, she left room to grow into the final confrontation of the penultimate scene. It's an easy trap to take this character too far, too quickly, but Hummelen developed six extra degrees of glacial coldness and tempered steel in her face and bearing that hadn't been seen or felt before. This made her collapse in the final scene the more moving, no less than the fact that her steel backbone couldn't melt even when her face dissolved into tears.
Tracy Schillemore-Morton as Sister James struck me as being a little (only a little) too enthusiastic and energetic for her role. Sister James has to come across as a young, innocent, wide-eyed girl without experience of the world. To that, though, Schillemore-Morton added what I felt was a little too much restless energy in the opening scenes. As a result, when she had to express her relief at Father Flynn's explanation she had to go right over the top, becoming downright comical at a moment that should have been imbued with more tension. On the other hand, her final moments were among the finest work on the stage last night, as she moved slowly behind Sister Aloysius after the final line of the text and gently rested her hands on her superior's quivering shoulders -- a heart-rending picture of compassion writ large.
Neil Wood provided a fine contrast as Father Flynn. He had an easy, natural pulpit manner during his two sermons and came across as just that little bit more unbuttoned in other scenes, nicely suited to the way the character is written. His scene in the garden with Sister James was played in a very appealing way, with no hint of guilt or desperation in his voice and bearing. This is an important spot to reinforce the audience's doubts about the ultimate outcome of the story. One technical oddity: why was the first sermon (which opens the play) miked and amplified with a slight echo when the second was not? Was it intentional or was it another "festival gremlin" at work? (Everyone who has ever competed in a theatre festival will have a sizable fund of hair-raising stories about festival gremlins!) Wood also developed another steel backbone during his final scene of confrontation with Sister Aloysius, and the air certainly crackled with the requisite tension here!
Zoe Burbank as Mrs. Muller did an excellent job in her one scene. It's a tough challenge. She has to say and show so much about herself and her son in such a short time, and it would be easy to deteriorate into cheap melodramatics. Burbank did not fall into the trap. Her emotions were there, obviously rubbed raw under the surface, but what we saw and heard was a woman ruled by her own pride, who refuses to let her emotions get away from her. Even when she describes how her son could have been killed in the public school, or might yet be killed by his father, for being gay, she refuses to give way entirely. Masterly timing, too, in the controlled release of "he's... that way" and in her final line as she exits the office.
Take it by and large, this was a good performance of a tough show. I've seen it done twice before, and both times for festivals. Each company has had its challenges in trying to make this play work, and that was no less true for Theatre Kent. This is not to say that Doubt is unworkable -- it most certainly is not that -- but definitely Shanley's play presents a much bigger set of challenges than might initially appear on the surface. In the end, the audience has to be left wondering and questioning the motivations of all four characters, and also wondering just what the lesson(s) of this modern parable might be. In that crucial respect, Theatre Kent's production was highly successful.
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