Doubt

For those who want to believe, the trouble with Catholicism is that it doesn’t always allow you to be a good Catholic. Such is the source of anguish for Sister Aloysius, a dyed-in-the-wool nun staunchly of pre–Vatican II mind-set, and for the charismatic young priest (McGarry) she suspects to be a pedophile. The principal of a Bronx grammar school in 1964, Aloysius is at once in charge of men and subjugated by them; as Father Flynn’s boss she has the facility to monitor his behavior, yet as a devoted woman in the church, she has almost no capacity to report it. Without the authority to confirm her suspicions, she’s left only with instinct, that unguided vice that comes without a safety.

Shanley penned Doubt when he was 54, and it’s unlikely he could have written it a day sooner. This New York ruffian’s writing has always been that of a sinewy, bruised romantic. But while this play is a love letter to men and women of faith (depicted on opposite sides of an arbitrary table), it’s also an uncommonly mature, unsentimental assessment of the church. Portrayed neither as a ruler-slapping parochial juvie (à la Christopher Durang) nor as a panoramic backdrop for perversion (see any given ripped-from-the-headlines Law & Order), Shanley’s taut mystery shows us an institution that lures clergy members with its majesty and order, only to confound them with its wicked contradictions.

So much praise has been heaped on Cherry Jones’s expert Tony-winning performance that there’s little to add, other than reassurance that her clenched-jawed, padlock-minded Aloysius hasn’t been overbilled.—Christopher Piatt