As my fellow critic Jackson McHenry pointed out just last week, John Patrick Shanley is having a moment. We’ve gotten something old, something new, and now, with Roundabout’s revival of Doubt, we’re getting perhaps the zenith of Shanley’s rise as a playwright, the 2004 show that won him a Pulitzer and a Tony and became a film he directed with (deep breath) Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Viola Davis, and Amy Adams, every one of them nominated for Oscars. There was a reason for all that. As a piece of writing, Doubt is practically a Death Star tractor beam for the American performing-arts awards complex. It’s got a ripped-from-the-headlines subject (the possibility of child abuse by a Catholic priest), enough wit to keep that subject’s gravity from getting saggy and morose, and a variety of robust solos and duets for its performers — the kind of material that’s begging to be put into a reel. Can’t you just see Meryl politely accepting applause after the clip ends with her blazing, “I will do what needs to be done, Father, if it means I’m damned to hell!�
Speeches like that one were built to shake audiences up, but nearly two decades on, and in this production, Doubt feels conspicuously steady. As an earnest and much-decorated emissary from the early aughts, the play seems almost nostalgic, a familiar object rather than a galvanizing event. It’s always been a period piece: Its story takes place in the just-post-Kennedy Bronx of Shanley’s childhood, where the rigid Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan), the principal at St. Nicholas School, vehemently objects to ballpoint pens as one of many insidious gateways to a malign and indolent future. (Shanley recently told Vulture that he was influenced to write the play in part by the discovery that a teacher from his own Catholic school had been a serial abuser.) But it’s not so much the play’s 1964 setting as its 2004 vibes that make it feel a bit frozen in amber. Director Scott Ellis is happy not to push past the expected. David Rockwell’s set dutifully revolves between stony, ivy-twined cloister courtyard and massy mahogany office. Ryan wears the same severe bonnet and glasses that Streep and Cherry Jones wore before her. Mikaal Sulaiman’s straightforward sound design gives us crows cawing, children at play, and kyries between scenes. And, while one needn’t belabor the point, seven of the eight-person central production team are men. The famous faces onstage are new, but much of what’s been packaged here feels intensely, and intentionally, the same as it ever was.
It’s the packaging part that hits hollowly. In and of itself, Doubt is still a sharp and sturdy piece of writing. It’s also tonally broader than Ellis gives it credit for. Shanley isn’t really a naturalist — there’s a height and a swagger to his dialogue, an old-fashioned timing to his jokes, and a raconteurish confidence in his prose that can become ecstatic or hellfiery depending on which way the passions flow. His characters have Willy Loman and John Proctor in their family tree. There’s a Daniel Day-Lewis bigness to them that wants shameless expression — even, in their own way, with the ones like Sister Aloysius, who wear their buttons all the way up to their chin and are well acquainted with shame. St. Nicholas’s iron lady drops as many laugh lines as she does righteous denunciations, and ingesting too much of her particular brand of wit should be like taking the cinnamon challenge — dry, bitter, and hazardous to one’s health. It may well be that Ryan is still working her way into the part: She joined the production in early February to replace Tyne Daly, who withdrew for health-related reasons, and she’s currently painting with a smaller brush than Shanley’s text makes room for. She’s hard edged and precise, but she also feels restrained — neither as pungent as she might be with the part’s zingers nor as devastating in its moments of indignation and fury.
Restraint is believable in a woman who thinks “innocence is a form of laziness†and that “‘Frosty the Snowman’ espouses a pagan belief in magic.†Yet there’s a dramatic edge to Sister Aloysius that Ellis and Ryan are, consciously or not, leaving underplayed. For one thing, the headmistress knows how scary she is and intentionally cultivates her own terrifying mystique. But in another and more complex way, she, like all of us, doesn’t know herself as well as she thinks she does. When she criticizes a young teacher for “performing†for her students “as if on a Broadway stage†(a line that can’t help clanking a bit here), there’s a part of Sister Aloysius, however buried, that comes from a place not of strict morality but of personal insecurity. What if this new kind of performance — enthusiastic, friendly, curious, nurturing — renders her own obsolete?
The young teacher is Sister James (Zoe Kazan), and it is she who winds up fanning the older nun’s suspicions around the well-liked priest Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber, savoring his Bronxy dialect like it’s a meatball sub). Something about the priest has already been gnawing at Sister Aloysius’s mind, but as soon as Sister James — all nervous, self-effacing flutterings — reports that the school’s only Black student, a 12-year-old boy named Donald Muller, returned to her class after a “private meeting†with Father Flynn acting “a little odd†and with “alcohol on his breath,†the headmistress lets slip the dogs of righteous persecution. Whether or not she can find hard proof of the priest’s misdeeds, she has, as she tells him in one of the play’s most fiery moments, “my certainty, and armed with that … I will not stop.â€
When Doubt made its Off Broadway premiere in 2004, the Catholic Church had only just admitted that, between 1950 and 2002, more than 10,000 children had been molested by more than 4,000 priests in the U.S. In such a charged moment, were audiences primed to side with the vehement Sister Aloysius or to hesitate, wondering perhaps if an innocent man was being swept away by a poisonous tide? That’s the delicate fulcrum on which the play balances, and it remains intact. Though Shanley himself now says that he isn’t sure how the play will land today (“I think the audience as a society was much more complacent than it is nowâ€), the machine he built is paradoxically solid in its ambiguity; like a Rubik’s cube, it’s easy to grasp and hard to solve. Regardless of performances, the text knows how and when to tug you one way or the other, but it’s also a text that craves big, juicy embodiment — actors locking eyes and spiritually battling it out with each other to the point of breathlessness.
While Ellis’s ensemble doesn’t lag behind the play, neither are they quite pushed to light a fire under it. Ryan and Kazan often feel like they’re in slightly different shows, Ryan’s more subtly minimalist and Kazan’s more caricatured — the specificities of a scene, and the fact that Sister James is not just a soft heart but apparently a smart and compelling teacher, can sometimes get lost underneath her tremble and treble. Schreiber, perhaps ironically, is the most comfortable of the three. The “fuhgeddaboudit†accent heightens him just enough, while his square-shouldered physical ease keeps him rooted — this guy is definitely also the school’s basketball coach, and the kids probably think he’s, ya know, whatever, pretty cool. While I wasn’t sure I quite bought his Father Flynn’s having to take notes because he gets “too flustered to remember the details of an upsetting conversation,†Schreiber’s zero-on-the-Kinsey-scale presentation of the role is an intriguing one. Shanley drops some quirks into the character that Sister Aloysius takes as signs of deviancy — he likes three lumps of sugar in his tea, he keeps his fingernails slightly long and very clean — and encountering these things in a guy who seems like he’d enjoy a beer at a Mets game makes us call into question our own possibly insidious assumptions about surfaces and essences.
About three-quarters of the way through Doubt’s concise 90 minutes, Sister Aloysius invites Donald’s mother to her office. What she wants from Mrs. Muller (the always rock-solid Quincy Tyler Bernstine) isn’t entirely clear even to her, but she’s getting desperate — she needs someone to say, “Yes! I bless you with my motherly horror and grief. Go forth and save my child!†What she gets is a sharp dose of realism, administered by a Black woman who doesn’t live inside an ivy-covered sanctuary and who can’t necessarily afford moral perfectionism. “You know the rules maybe, but that don’t cover it,†says Mrs. Muller, never impolite but every bit a match for Sister Aloysius’s spine. “You accept what you gotta accept and you work with it … It’s just till June.†That line gets some gasps and always will, but Bernstine also gets exit applause. She’s earned it: Into Sister Aloysius’s world of certainty, salvation, and sin has stepped a mother who loves her child not theoretically but actually, practically — whose daily life is wider and harder, more dangerous and complex than the crusading nun can fully comprehend. Although Ellis keeps Shanley’s play feeling fairly digestible, there are moments, as when Bernstine is on stage, when the discomfiting thrum of its title can still be felt. Why do we think we know what we think we know? And about whom do our assumptions ultimately speak?
Doubt is at the Todd Haimes Theatre (formerly the American Airlines) through April 21.