Workings of church an open question in ‘Doubt’

Playwright’s quick-hitting work won’t disappoint his flock

By Eric Bartels

The Portland Tribune, May 25, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Courtesy of PCS

Sister Aloysius (Jayne Taini) has her suspicions of the charming new priest Father Flynn (John Behlmann) and his relationship with the school’s first African-American student in “Doubt,” John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer and Tony award-winning play about the incendiary grey areas that threaten to crack open a black and white world. Doubt plays through June 15 on the Portland Center Stage Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory.

It seems John Patrick Shanley had questions on his mind when he wrote "Doubt," the drama that opened at Portland Center Stage on Friday.

The Bronx-born Shanley came of age amid the turbulence of the 1960s, when Americans were reevaluating many of their institutions and assumptions: American foreign policy, social justice, personal freedom and the role of the church.

The last appears to have been particularly meaningful to Shanley, an Irish Catholic who was less than a model student, by his own admission, at a series of parochial schools.

In 1962, a council of Catholic leaders meeting at what would become known as Vatican II, decided on significant changes in the attitudes and practices of the church worldwide shifts that were hotly debated.

It was a time, yes, of much doubt.

In his play, which won a Pulitzer and a Tony for best play in 2005, Shanley debates the country’s changing landscape within the walls of the St. Nicholas Catholic School, an elementary school in the Bronx, in 1964.

An inexperienced teacher, Sister James, is taken to task by the imperious Sister Aloysius, the school’s principal, for going too easy on her students. A blunt-force martinet, Sister Aloysius has long governed by fear and orders the new teacher to do likewise.

“I want the children to feel they can talk to me,” says Sister James.

“They’re children,” replies her boss. “They can talk to each other.”

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