As for Thompson’s Othello, he at first surrenders to his bride with a giddy delight that contrasts ebulliently with his soldier self, then turns on her with an enraged passion that seems as much directed at himself — but which is nonetheless painful to witness. Just before denouncing the trembling Desdemona as “that cunning whore of Venice/That married with Othello,” Thompson’s Moor grabs his wife and clutches her to him as if she were a rag doll. When he embraces her limp corpse in much the same way, the repetition is heartbreaking. This is a production brimming with big gestures — and it earns them.
Introducing his latest undertaking for Gloucester Stage, artistic director Eric C. Engel calls the play by its full name, Doubt: A Parable (through August 24). And his production demonstrates how well he understands playwright John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner. Doubt is no mystery juggernaut intended to point the finger at child sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy but instead, like the parables favored by Jesus, a story told to teach a moral lesson. Father Flynn, the amiable young priest of Shanley’s play, also feeds his flock on parables — because, he says, the truth “tends to be confusing and have no clear conclusion.”
Neither does Doubt present a clear conclusion. The play is set in 1964 at a Catholic-parish grammar school in the Bronx, where the tough old principal, Sister Aloysius, suspects young Flynn is abusing the kids (one 12-year-old in particular) and the cloth. Of course, in the midst of tradition-loosening Vatican II, the strict, no-nonsense nun distrusts Flynn for other reasons: he offers the students not just a ruler rap to the knuckles but friendliness, compassion, and sports tips. He does not consider the addition of “Frosty the Snowman” to the annual Christmas pageant “heretical.” And like all priests, given the male-chauvinistic structure of the Church, he’s a clip to the wings of the old bat’s power. She may rule the roost of St. Nicholas School, but Flynn, asked to her office for a meeting, casually assumes her catbird seat while she must pull up a chair and provide the tea.
Still, as Engel’s darkly lit, somberly stylized, carefully equivocal staging makes clear, it is the rigid certainty of the righteous woman who may be wrong, rather than the power-wielding priest’s guilt or innocence, that is at the heart of this particular examination of the clergy sex-abuse scandal. Shanley has said he was motivated to write the play, the germ of which was its title, by his mounting dismay over the rabid, polarizing certainties afflicting our country, in particular by the rigid if jury-rigged convictions that led to the invasion of Iraq. “Doubt,” he maintains in his preface to the play, “requires more courage than conviction does.” And his artfully wrought parable, in which the dawning of a soul-troubling uncertainty is also a loss of innocence, bears that out.
In the play’s Manhattan Theatre Club debut and on Broadway, the extraordinary Cherry Jones played Sister Aloysius as an awkward, Bronx-accented, osteoporosis-afflicted penguin giant bestriding her office like some quirky colossus. Her memorable characterization added to the play. At Gloucester Stage, the able Nancy E. Carroll does not embellish the part — though with her crack timing she wrings much deadpan comedy from Sister’s clipped ripostes. And her zealotry is frighteningly contained. Lewis D. Wheeler is equally fine. An open-faced yet vigorous young man, Wheeler’s Flynn can handle a basketball while wearing a dress. More important, his incredulity and frustration at Sister Aloysius’s ruthless persecution seems wholly genuine. By the same token, he relaxes rather smugly into his couch of male authority.
