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Doubt Returns in a Traditionalist Production
John Patrick Shanley’s dialogue still packs heat, but the fire’s been turned down this time.
We’ve gotten something old, something new, and now, with Roundabout’s revival of Doubt,we’re getting perhaps the zenith of Shanley’s rise as a playwright, the 2004 show that won him a Pulitzer and a Tony and became a film he directed with (deep breath) Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Viola Davis, and Amy Adams, every one of them nominated for Oscars. It’s always been a period piece: Its story takes place in the just-post-Kennedy Bronx of Shanley’s childhood, where the rigid Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan), the principal at St. Nicholas School, vehemently objects to ballpoint pens as one of many insidious gateways to a malign and indolent future. She’s earned it: Into Sister Aloysius’s world of certainty, salvation, and sin has stepped a mother who loves her child not theoretically but actually, practically — whose daily life is wider and harder, more dangerous and complex than the crusading nun can fully comprehend.
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