Doubt: A Parable now onstage

It’s easy to argue a point when you actually have one.  It’s more tedious when all you have to go on is your intuition, your gut feeling that something isn’t right.

John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play, ”Doubt: A Parable,” confronts this entanglement of confidence, intuition, faith and doubt.  The one-act play is now onstage at Alleyway Theatre, produced by Buffalo United Artists.  A long-awaited film starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams will be out this winter.

The play is a dark tale of a nun and her strong belief that a priest, a teacher at the Catholic day school of which she is principal, has had improper relations with a young male student.  (Sexual relations, just to get that out of the way.) The priest categorically denies it, insisting that the so-called evidence she has is nothing more that circumstantial observations of the boy leaving the priest’s rectory and a few other details.  It becomes clear that the nun, even with her staunch insistence and cold demeanor, has only her thoughts to go on, and not the tangible or confessional evidence she would need to have the priest let go and the boy counseled.  Two supporting characters infuse the situation with their own baggage, only enabling the doubt that the nun—and the audience member—has.  It’s a mess, and not one that’s solved at the conclusion of the play’s hour.  You’ll be wondering and guessing all the way home.

The strength of this play is in the language, these terse and wholly uncomfortable conversations between nun and priest, nun and teacher, nun and mother, and ultimately, everyone and God.  The backdrop of the play’s action within the Catholic church is poetry and scandal all wrapped up into one.  Though the events are set in 1964 and not the 1990s, when so much of the church’s sexual abuse came to light, the tale is just as eerie and devastating, if not more so.  What we have here is one person’s word against another’s, their faith in God as both a barrier to the truth and an an open door to more suspicion.

Local actors Lou Colaiacovo and Lisa Ludwig are at their best as the priest and nun, each giving performances that are transformations of their preceding stage reputations.  Colaiacovo is the charming priest that students and parents would each call a friend, and Ludwig is the cold, weathered, indestructible sister who believes wholeheartedly that children need to be taught by adults, not befriended by them.  Each are really wonderful here, giving performances that I would say—in my limited but comprehensive survey of each actor’s careers—are the best they’ve given in a long time.  Katie White and Arianna Boykins are both so strong as a new teaching sister and less than concerned mother, respectively.

See this play, you won’t be disappointed.  There’s a lot of material in this play, a discussion that will give you lots to talk about, think about and surely doubt about.

”Doubt: A Parable” runs through October 25 at Alleyway Theatre, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. (and Sunday, October 12 at 7 p.m.).  For more information and tickets, go here.

Posted by on 10/07 at 10:41 AM