‘Doubt’ challenges assumptions of audience, cast

Be certain only of your uncertainty.

Then ponder what the playwright wonders: “Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed?”

And when does zealous conviction curdle into blind bias?

Such questions are intriguingly explored — and wisely unanswered — in “Doubt,” which pits philosophical issues against moral outrage in its tale of pedophilia in the church. And as its author, John Patrick Shanley, suggests above in the book preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, nagging ambivalence afflicts us all.

“We should take Shanley at his word that it’s a parable,” says Michael Lugering, director of the production by Nevada Conservatory Theatre at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “He’s concerned about when we’re certain and we shouldn’t be certain. It’s Shanley’s best work.”

Given ongoing headlines — the latest being Pope Benedict XVI’s recent meeting with sex abuse victims — Shanley’s plot is still the dramatic equivalent of tossing a lit match into a propane tank. Set in a Catholic school in the Bronx back in 1964, it’s the story of Father Flynn, a charming priest suspected by the martinetlike nun, Sister Aloysius, of abusing their first black student. But to counter an audience’s impulse toward knee-jerk condemnation of the cleric, Shanley shades “Doubt” with layers of ambiguity until it shifts toward our tendency to quick, implacable judgment rather than his debatable guilt.

“This man may or may not be a child abuser, but he cares about this boy and about race relations in 1964,” Lugering says. “Shanley makes some interesting choices, and I hope there’s a point in this play in which everyone says, ‘I really like this guy, but I don’t know.’ I have speculations and I explore those, but I think it’s better to go into rehearsal one day and ask how this would go if he were innocent, and how it might go if he were guilty. He could have written that the priest was an abuser and the nun a hero, but he chose to do something far more complex, so I hope we don’t simplify it.”

Though sprinkled with humor, “Doubt” is an intense, intermissionless 90 minutes, and critics have said the audience’s arguing the outcome afterward is its de facto second act. As Shanley further explains in his preface, society has been polarized into extremist attitudes by modern discourse.

“There’s a symptom in America right now,” he writes. “It’s evident in political talk shows, in entertainment coverage, in artistic criticism of every kind, in religious discussion. … We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment, and of verdict. Discussion has given way to debate. Communication has become a contest of wills. Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere. Why? Maybe it’s because deep down under the chatter, we have come to a place where we know that we don’t know … anything. But nobody’s willing to say that.”

Spinning our expectations against us, Shanley introduces Sister Aloysius as almost comically rigid, as in this monologue:

Frosty the snowman espouses a pagan belief in magic. The snowman comes to life when an enchanted hat is put on his head. If the music was more somber, people would realize the images are frightening and the song heretical. It should be banned from the airwaves.

But as events develop, she increasingly assumes the cloak of crusader as audience alliances are tested. “She’s been described as ruthless and unrelenting,” says Anne Desalvo, who plays the nun. “An aspect of her I’m trying to keep alive is she talks about once being married, and her husband dying in the war against Adolf Hitler — not that he fought in World War II. I think she has a thing about evil, that evil must be stopped. She’s paid the price.”

Father Flynn, meanwhile is a charmer right from his sermon that opens the piece, but as rumors surface, so does uneasiness.

“He certainly has a history that he’s trying to cover for, and you have to remember there are things beyond your knowledge,” says Flynn’s portrayer, Eric Martin Brown. “Going into rehearsal, I made a decision to not let anyone know whether I thought he was guilty or not of touching this child. Sometimes, I’m like, ‘Yes, I committed this act, I’m going to approach it that way today.’ Then I’ll go in the next day and say, ‘Let’s try it this way instead.’ It’s a challenging, but very rewarding role.”

For audiences, the conclusion is inconclusive — and intellectually satisfying for those willing to declare certainty only of their uncertainty.

“I still yearn for … an assumption of safety, the reassurance of believing that others know better than me what’s for the best,” Shanley writes. “But I have been led by the bitter necessities of an interesting life to value that age-old practice of the wise: doubt.”

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.