Doubt: A Parable still speaks loud and clear in the posttruth era

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      By John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Bill Devine. A Seven Tyrants Theatre production. At Tyrant Studios on Saturday, November 24. Continues until December 14

      Preaching from the pulpit, Father Flynn (David Thomas Newham) says “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” Those two ideas—doubt and certainty—do battle in this tense midcentury drama.

      Flynn is the parish priest at St. Nicholas Church School in 1964. The school is run by Sister Aloysius (Tallulah Winkelman), a Victorian disciplinarian who tolerates no tomfoolery, not even the Christmas pageant.

      When young Sister James (Olivia Lang) brings Sister Aloysius suspicions that Flynn has “interfered with” an altar boy, she flies into action. The rest of the play is a kind of four-way boxing match of accusations and recriminations, with Liza D’Aguilar as the boy’s mother joining the fray.

      Sister Aloysius is the linchpin of Doubt, and the actor who plays her must carry the show. Winkelman plays her with steely resolve, and despite how unlikable the nun seems, we still feel empathy for her and her certainty about Flynn’s guilt. All the performances are persuasive, but hers stands out.

      This was my first visit to Tyrant Studios, a recently created venue above the Penthouse nightclub on Seymour Street. It’s composed of a charming, old-timey speakeasylike bar and a cozy little theatre. These upstairs rooms once hosted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald. The irony of seeing a Catholic school set above a strip club was not entirely lost on me.

      Set designer Lynda Chu makes the most of the pocket-size stage. She and director Bill Devine manage to convincingly carve three distinct spaces—an office, a garden bench, and a pulpit—on a stage the size of the average family room.

      Doubt is a modern American classic. Playwright John Patrick Shanley won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play when it ran on Broadway in 2005. It’s been adapted into an opera and a 2008 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

      A lot has happened since the play debuted in 2004 off-Broadway—not only for the Catholic Church, but overall in the culture around accusation, truth, and falsehood. I knew the play, and I feared that my perspective from a world of President Trump and #MeToo might make it feel a little dated.

      It did not. The beliefs that drive each character’s contradictory interpretation of the play’s events feel all too relevant in our posttruth society.

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