I Doubt It, by Amy Lighthill

     In l990, Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor published a book called The Faith to Doubt. He pointed out that in the Zen tradition, three factors have to be cultivated on a spiritual path: great faith, great doubt, and great courage. Doubt, in his context, means “to keep alive the perplexity at the heart of our life, to acknowledge that fundamentally we do not know what is going on, to question whatever arises within us…Faith is not equivalent to mere belief. Faith is the condition of ultimate confidence that we have the capacity to follow the path of doubt to its end.”
 
     None of the four characters in John Patrick Shanley’s play, Doubt, has this kind of deep understanding of faith or doubt. The year is l964, and in a small parochial school, the nuns and priest are tussling with black-or-white concepts of faith and obedience. Though the younger ones are ready to crack open the rusty door of church dogma, the tradition-bound school principal, Sister Aloysius, remains starchily ensconced in her crack-the-whip-for-your-own-good nundom. For reasons never explained, she quickly determines to bring down the handsome and breezy young priest, the one perhaps too beloved by schoolboys, but who, nonetheless, feels the hierarchy’s support behind him.

     Viewers are apparently adoring the opportunity to proffer an opinion about the slightly mysterious resolution of this battle of wills. But the iron-fisted, tight-jawed head sister here stayed one-dimensional, to my eyes. Like the play itself, her performance lacked nuance. Though set in the bosom of Catholic education, the play has surprisingly little to offer about theology or the real inner spiritual lives of its inhabitants. The central “dilemma” sat in the principal’s office in more ways than one. Characters search for “the answer” and don’t feel comfortable when they lose their moorings. Even in the relative innocence of l964, there must have been more shading in a life devoted to faith than this. 

     Mr. Shanley gave us a wryer, more affectionate, look at this same neighborhood in his delightful film comedy, Moonstruck. There, the characters spoke straight from their hearts with poetic simplicity and depth about their very Catholic world.  The one character in “Doubt” who suggested a richer awareness of life’s shades of gray was, perhaps ironically, the one black character, Mrs. Muller (the arch and deliciously powerful Donna Biscoe). Her one scene, in which she casually deconstructed Sister’s naïve and self-righteous assumptions about her son, stole the show and won her a well-deserved ovation at the play’s abrupt conclusion.

     Beautifully staged by Pat Flora, the show provides an opportunity to consider, again, the shortcomings of the institution that so many love to hate (or, love and hate). If you love being right, you'll have a lot of fun trying to argue other theater-goers out of their doubts about "Doubt".