Under suspicion

Lots of uncertainty in the
Centaur’s production of Doubt

FATHERLY INTENTIONS: Lina Roessler and Alain Goulem

By NEIL BOYCE

John Patrick Shanley lays out the theme of his 2004 play, Doubt, A Parable early and often: “Doubt,” says his central character, a priest, “can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.”

Now playing at the Centaur in a production directed by Micheline Chevrier, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work is set in 1964. We’re at St. Nicholas, a Catholic boys’ school situated in a working class neighbourhood in the Bronx. From the outset, a power struggle has been brewing between the school’s priest, the kind and “fatherly” Father Flynn, and its principal, the rigid Sister Aloysius.

A naive junior teacher, Sister James, thinks she detected alcohol on the breath of a student in her class who had returned from church—and the company of Father Flynn. Sister Aloysius is all too quick to figure the kindly priest for a paedophile. Throwing more tension and pressure into the mix, the boy in question is the first black student ever admitted to the school.

A back and forth of accusations and threats pours out in the fast-paced one-act, all hovering around: who is wrong and where do our sympathies lie? Is the repellent Sister Aloysius a zealot or does she genuinely wish to protect her students? Is easygoing, charismatic Father Flynn a molester?

You’ll have noticed the title of the work isn’t “Certainty.” We don’t and never will know the definitive truth—Shanley’s play dwells in that ambiguity. Shanley himself feels that doubt requires more conviction, criticizing our current culture as one “of confrontation, of judgment and of verdict.”

I’m also filled with uncertainty. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have first seen Shanley’s film of his own play, one that featured two of the greatest actors working today, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It caused doubts and questions of my own to roil in my brain at the theatre that night.

Why did Chevrier play three-quarters of it as a comedy for two sparring leads? And the accent—why? We don’t need the “Hey, youse guys!” dialect to orient us. We can make the leap to that time and place without it. Why saddle the actors with another element, which they often struggled with?

The pacing—what was the hurry? Line deliveries and scene changes (actors looking like forklifts as they moved their tables and chairs) were so brisk, it seemed the plan was to get us through the piece and out drinking in the lobby as quickly as possible. Even the last confrontation, which should distill all the fireworks that came before, simply fizzled, as did Sister Aloysius’s guilty denouement. A weird reading all around.

Still, some parts connected. Brenda Robins thrilled as the spiteful Sister Aloysius (a woman who speaks in absolutes—someone for whom “satisfaction is a vice”), but had little to work off in her scenes with Sister James (Lina Roessler).

Alain Goulem played Father Flynn like Father Knows Best: great as the concerned, friendly, basketball coaching priest, although one couldn’t really imagine his dark side.

Lucinda Davis, as the mother of the child in question, was a natural. She only got a few minutes on stage opposite Robins, but burned with a quiet fire, sharpening up the production like a razor. Her character, Mrs. Muller, sees the hypocrisy of the two combatants. She only wants her child to get through but knows how difficult it is to win against the Man.

DOUBT, TO MARCH 29 AT CENTAUR
THEATRE (453 ST-FRANÇOIS-XAVIER).
TICKETS: (514) 288-3161