"Doubt" Has A Hesitant Debut

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so excited to see the national tour of “Doubt.” If I had walked into the theater with no expectations, I might have really enjoyed myself. The show isn’t bad—in fact, it’s good—but considering its Tony- and Pulitzer-winning pedigree, “Doubt” should have been great.

Producer Carole Shorenstein Hays’s adaptation of the play, which runs through Feb. 18 at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, has retained much from the original 2005 production, including its highly acclaimed director Doug Hughes and star Cherry Jones (“Ocean’s 12,” “Erin Brockovich”). What it can’t hold onto is the energy necessary to keep a show like “Doubt” afloat.

The play itself is a highly dramatic take on the moral gray areas hidden behind the black and white habits of a Catholic middle school in the 1960s. Where formal propriety has overtaken ethical responsibility and the appearance of certainty is all that remains, the characters struggle to reconcile order and truth. Jones leads the cast as Sister Aloysius, a teacher who plows headfirst through level after level of rigid Catholic bureaucracy to protect her students from the sexual advances of Father Flynn (Chris McGarry), a popular priest.

In playwright John Patrick Shanley’s own words, “Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. ‘Doubt’ is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.” That’s a tall order for any play, particularly one that clocks in at about an hour and a half. So it feels odd to say that “Doubt” should be tighter, quicker, faster-paced–anything to wake up the play’s latent vitality.

Shanley is a master of the literary balancing act, suspending his drama in a web of tension between Sister Aloysius, Father Flynn, and the doe-eyed Sister James (Lisa Joyce), all jockeying for position on a relatively level playing field. The audience’s heart goes to Sister James, whose innocence will not let her believe the accusations; its heads are with Flynn, whose charismatic self-defense is too convincing for our comfort; but our guts are with Aloysius. His skillful writing has earned Shanley a pile of awards, including the 2005 Tony and Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “Doubt.”

Even though pacing is normally under the director’s purview, in this case it seems inappropriate to assign the blame to Hughes. His direction draws crisp lines through the drama that highlight Shanley’s straightforward storytelling, and each character’s journey appears both distinct from and part of the murky moral scenery—all admirable directorial achievements.

The actors also seem more than comfortable in their roles. Jones first played Sister Aloysius in the Off-Broadway run of “Doubt” late in 2004 and continued in the part to Tony-winning success. Her take on the nun is unsweetened, to paraphrase Sister Aloysius’s own words, yet sympathetic enough that the audience is able to see the tenderness into the gnarled exterior. McGarry has worked with Shanley on four previous occasions, and his experience is evident in Father Flynn’s wonderfully authentic urban Irishness. Joyce also ably conveys Sister James’s deepening unease as the Father Flynn scandal progresses.

The fourth and final strand of Shanley’s dramatic web, the violated student’s mother (Caroline Steffanie Clay), crosses the other characters only once, in a ten-minute scene that also earned original star Adriane Lennox a Tony Award. Unlike Lennox’s acting, Clay’s is weak, and despite the high emotion written into the role, her performance is neither shocking nor compelling. However, her scene is isolated enough from the rest of the play not to affect the story arc too detrimentally, and she is by no means incompetent.

What really makes this production sag seems impossible, given that Boston is the show’s first stop on a 12-city tour: This show is tired. “Doubt” should play like a segment on “Hardball”: dense, decisive, and with little time for contemplation. There is just a little too much dead air in this production, a few too many pauses for characters to ponder, and the result feels more like an episode of “The Today Show” made of pretend news and cut with plenty of fluff. Stop and thihjgnk about the situation too much and the ending seems inevitable (I won’t spoil it, but you can probably guess). What should have been a profound conclusion becomes perfunctory and awkward.

According to Samantha Jones of “Sex and the City,” “Good on paper means bad in bed.” “Doubt” is certainly good on paper, but it just can’t get all the way there. With luck and time, the actors will become more comfortable, and by the end of its run it may be an excellent show—but I have my doubts.

--Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.