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	Daring to 'Doubt' When a Parochial School Nun Casts Suspicion on a Popular Priest, the Result Is a Timely Pulitzer Prize-Winning Drama By Anne Marie Welsh Union-Tribune [New York] April 17, 2005 NEW YORK – As John Patrick Shanley's drama "Doubt: a Parable" rounds to a close, starchy old Sister Aloysius tells the eager young Sister James, "In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God." Then balefully, the broken nun adds: "Of course, there is a price." For her, the cost is huge. This nun's conviction that a priest has molested an altar boy at her school, yet been rewarded with a promotion to a new parish, shakes her faith in the morality of the church and her belief in God, the foundations of her life. Sister Aloysius may or may not be right about the priest's crime in "Doubt," but her relentless drive, like the truth-seeking of Oedipus, has unintended consequences. She now sees through the culture of clericalism that has isolated her and made her powerless; in the process, she has lost her bearings. The piercing production of "Doubt" that moved last month from the Manhattan Theatre Club to Broadway offers a rare moment of art-life synchronicity. The national acclaim for this thrilling and provoking drama dovetails with tomorrow's opening of the College of Cardinals conclave to elect a successor to John Paul II. "Doubt" is set very specifically in 1964, a similar historic moment of transition. Then, achurch window that had been flung open by progressives at the Second Vatican Council was slowly beginning to close again after the death of John XXIII; now, said Thomas Cahill, the Catholic historian of religions, the church stands at a crossroads. The experience of Sister Aloysius in Shanley's beautifully constructed and expertly acted play, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, reflects at least one conclusion reached by Cahill, who contends that unless that august conclave in Rome elects a wise man capable of steering the church on a new course, then the late John Paul II – whom playwright Shanley has called the "retro Pope" – may be credited, for all his political skill, with alienating a huge segment of his flock. Cahill stirred a swarm of controversy after John Paul II's death with his op-ed piece in The New York Times on the perils of infallibility; he went even further in a recent conversation from his New York home, saying that John Paul II had a litmus test on sexual dogma and attitudes toward women that led him, with the consent of Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law and his German dean of cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger, to fill the American hierarchy with "sycophants and intellectual incompetents." An acclaimed author of books on the early Christian church and on Pope John XXIII, as well as of the best-seller "How the Irish Saved Civilization," Cahill said that when the sexual abuse scandal broke, every American bishop should have "resigned and donned penitential robes and asked for forgiveness and started all over again with an elected episcopate." Yet he also sees Shanley's play as a delicate, probing, even-handed work of art: "It's right there in the middle, because certainly innocent men have been charged, too, and the bishops still don't know how to handle these cases properly, because they want to go by rules instead of using their brains with discretion and judgment." Playwright Shanley sets his explosive reverberations in motion in four richly drawn characters; he both indicts the old culture of clericalism and leaves the guilt or innocence of his fictional priest, Father Flynn, in doubt. This anchoring of argument in character is, in issue-driven playwrights from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Shaw, the supreme challenge. Shanley has met the challenge with exceptional skill, building suspense, lifting the tension with humor, and refusing to judge or condemn any of his characters. Cahill and several high-profile critics, such as David Rooney at Variety, interpret Sister Aloysius' rigid crusade as an allegory of how unproven beliefs in weapons of mass destruction led to the pre-emptive U.S. invasion of Iraq. Other commentators take the opposite view: They see a woman of courage and integrity in the stalwart nun, played with such multilayered virtuosity by Cherry Jones. Dramatic structure "Doubt" opens with a sermon by the popular young parish priest, Flynn. Wearing green brocade vestments, speaking eloquently yet simply, actor Brian F. O'Byrne moves downstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, turning the audience into his working-class Bronx parishioners as he crafts a parable on uncertainty and the solace even a doubter can find in others, in community. But the doubts to which the charming Father Flynn refer morph from the public sorrow his congregation shared after the recent assassination of John F. Kennedy to a private grief he leaves unnamed. As he will again in a later sermon on gossip and intolerance, Flynn tells a tale to illustrate his point, a parable of a man shipwrecked at sea. As delivered by this superb Irish actor, a Tony winner for last year's chilling "Frozen," the sermon concludes dramatically and sentimentally on an upbeat note in the spirit of benign comedy. Shanley cuts to the St. Nicholas School's office, where Sister Aloysius, in her black robes and bonnet, and Sister James, a radiant naif enacted by Heather Goldenhersh, offer a classic "Going My Way" contrast between a conservative, old-school principal and a fresh, progressive teacher there to discuss a student. Like Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby in the 1944 movie, they lock horns across the generations, though, of course, in this veiled power struggle, the unyielding principal pulls rank and wins over the novice teacher with her admonition to be ever vigilant and skeptical of her own young charges. Father Flynn appears again in his sweats and Roman collar to coach the (invisible) schoolboys in how to shoot foul shots, behave around girls and keep their nails clean. His gruff concern for his students, like Sister James' intuitive wish to be comforting and close to hers, seem part of the fresh air let into a church-centered neighborhood by Vatican II. Deft, funny, and ever-so precisely directed by Doug Hughes, these early scenes trade in the familiar absurdities of Shanley's earlier romantic comedies. Father Flynn, for instance, tells an old wives' tale of how one parochial friend who stuck his dirty fingers in his nose and mouth "got spinal meningitis and died a horrible death." He's as specifically (and wackily) located in this place and era as Sister Aloysius, who laments the passing of the fountain pen, for ballpoints have ruined her student's penmanship, forcing them to "bear down and write like monkeys." The play darkens just a shade when O'Byrne's likable, if always inscrutable priestoffhandedly invites the schoolboys into the rectory for cookies, Kool-Aid, and a bull session. At this point, Sister Aloysius begins her unrelenting, yet canny exploration of her suspicions about Father Flynn. Each well-considered word and gesture now accumulate weight and seriousness. The easily intimidated Sister James becomes her eyes and ears, despite feeling unsettled by looking at "things and people with suspicion. It feels as if I'm less close to God." One of the play's most fascinating themes emerges when the young nun reports that Donald Muller, the school's first black student, returned to class from a visit with the priest upset, and with liquor on his breath. Sister Aloysius tells her young colleague, "There are parameters which protect him and hinder me." Being saddled with a clueless, near-senile old pastor, Monsignor Benedict, Sister Aloysius decides to bring Father Flynn down: "There's no man I can go to, and men run everything. We are going to have to stop him ourselves." When O'Byrne's athletic Flynn steps into her realm, he immediately violates her unwritten rule: Unaware of his own sense of entitlement, he sits expansively at her desk – a gesture the bespectacled Jones greets with a fierce, withering glance. With writerly economy matched by Jones' moment-by-moment hunt of her prey, Shanley lets Sister Aloysius build her case, at first obliquely. Her ruse, that they are meeting to discuss the annual Christmas pageant, brings on more of the deliciously absurd dialogue that propelled even Shanley's Oscar-winning "Moonstruck" screenplay. The nun feels that a secular tune like "Frosty the Snowman" espouses "a pagan belief in magic" and is thus heretical, for instance, and she judges an eighth-grade girl wearing lipstick "a jade." In this confrontation and the next – a heartbreaking meeting between Sister Aloysius andMuller's dignified, baffled mother – Shanley creates a vibrant feeling for the Bronx parishioners,their bigotry against homosexuals and blacks, their narrow and isolating expectation that even strong women will be submissive to the church hierarchy and to their husbands. Shanley has Mrs. Muller, played with quiet, gentle authority by Adriane Lenox, acknowledge that her little Donald may be gay. He's "that way," she says,and "that" is why his father beats him. This mother's willingness to allow the boy to be compromised because a nice priest has singled him out for attention quickly telegraphs the domestic entrapment this woman simply cannot imagine escaping. Sister Aloysius' tough-minded response to the mother sets up the final confrontation between nun and priest, a classic agon that has audiences literally on the edge of their seats. In media interviews, O'Byrne has called that scene "a tennis match to the death." And although Shanley's script does leave the score of that match uncertain, O'Byrne gave Flynn's reactions to the nun's charges such a raging, threatening, overdetermined air, his upset seemed tantamount to an admission of guilt. Revelations Last fall, before the off-Broadway opening of the play, Shanley told American Theatre magazine that he imagined parochial school nuns must have been the first to suspect the priestly sex crimes, for they would have noticed behavioral changes in their parochial school students. "But the chain of command in the Catholic Church was such that they had to report it not to the police, but to their superior within the church, who then covered up for the guy. This had to create very powerful frustrations and moral dilemmas for these women," Shanley said. The playwright also revealed that a member of his family was one of the scores of boys allegedly molested by Father John Geoghan, the notorious priest sentenced to a Massachusetts prison, where he was beaten and stangled to death by another inmate in February 2003. By February of last year, a study commissioned by America's Catholic bishops and conducted by researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice concluded that the sexual crisis of the Catholic Church was not a figment of the media's imagination, as Vatican officials had first suggested, nor was it a case of a "few bad apples." Since the announcement of his play's Broadway transfer and the likelihood of its winning this year's Tony for best play as well as several acting awards, the publicity surrounding the show has focused upon milder personal stories than the abuse scandal. Shanley enjoys recounting what a rebellious parochial schoolboy he was – kicked out of kindergarten for daydreaming, and expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School for not turning in his Spanish homework and saying he did not believe in God. He has publicly reconnected with the real-life Sister James who was his first-grade teacher and upon whom he based his fictional Sister James, the least developed, most functional character in the play. Still, Shanley's intense, absorbing and completely entertaining drama comes after he took another risk with "Dirty Story," last year's "he said/she said" allegory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The widespread acclaim and popularity of "Doubt" (despite a less effective production now at the Pasadena Playhouse),are making Shanley a spokesman for the philosophical power of embracing uncertainty and living in a complex, ambiguous rather than black-white world of easy answers.