I'm Sure You're Right

Doubt is the clergy sex abuse play that isn’t about clergy sex abuse. Not primarily, anyway.

At a Catholic school in 1964, the mother superior suspects that a newly arrived priest is sexually abusing the school’s only black student; a young nun and the boy’s mother are caught in the crossfire.

That’s the premise of John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 drama, and it seems to reflect the sex abuse cases that have roiled the Catholic Church, especially since the mid-1990s: Did Father Flynn abuse young Donald Muller, or not? The play, which offers clues both ways, seems focused on the topic of sexual impropriety. But Shanley gave Doubt a subtitle — “A Parable” — for a reason. In an interview last December with Cathleen Falsani of the Huffington Post (coinciding with the release of the Meryl Streep-Philip Seymour Hoffman-Amy Adams movie), Shanley revealed that “I wasn’t interested particularly in writing about the church scandals, and I wasn’t really interested in writing a whodunit. I’m more interested in people becoming more accepting and comfortable with living with doubt, because I think that’s one of the big problems we’ve had in this country in the last decade. There’s been this evaporation of doubt as a hallmark of wisdom. ... Everyone is very entrenched. And true discourse is nowhere to be found. And we’re desperate for it.”

Director Roger Welch’s production at Interplayers (through Nov. 7) will emphasize the connections among gossip, vulnerability and certainty. During rehearsals, Welch says, the cast “didn’t talk about abuse because the play is really more about being accused of something, and the fallout from that.”

Ann Russell Whiteman, who plays Sister Aloysius — the stern disciplinarian who hounds Father Flynn (Aaron Murphy) with her insinuations and accusations — adds that “gossip is what happens to other people. When it happens to you, it’s an insidious disease.”

Sister Aloysius, says Whiteman, feels so sure that she has correctly observed the social interactions at St. Nicholas — and understood the “shared anecdotes among the sisterhood” — that she has latched onto “a certainty that is undeniable. She is convinced that she is working from the objectivity of fact.”

So why do the extremists of the left and right — the Sister Aloysius figures of this world — resort to the comfort of sureness? Nearly two centuries ago, the poet John Keats implied that very few people can live their lives with “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” And many of us are clearly scared of uncertainty. Welch believes, moreover, that Doubt “deals primarily with a person’s need to be right especially when feeling vulnerable” — adding that the play is set just after the JFK assassination and was written not long after 9/11. When we’re scared, we don’t have time for nuances; we just want the labels.

The running joke about Doubt is that the first act is the 90-minute, intermissionless play itself, while the second act is the argument you have in your car on the way home. Does the nun make her case against the priest? Or does she leap into a certainty that’s based on nothing and born of vulnerability?

As Whiteman says, Doubt calls for much more “audience involvement” than most plays. “It’s about what you think,” she says, “not about where you are led.”

Doubt: A Parable pits nun vs. priest at Interplayers Professional Theater, 174 S. Howard St., through Nov. 7 on Wednesdays-Thursdays at 7:30 pm, Fridays at 8 pm, Saturdays at 2 pm and 8 pm, and Sundays at 2 pm. Post-performance talk-backs with the cast and Catholic priests on Wednesdays, Oct. 28 and Nov. 4. Tickets: $14-$21; $12-$19, seniors; $10, students. Visit interplayers.com or call 455-PLAY.