The Peterborough Players continue their 2008 season with Doubt: A Parable.
The drama was inspired by the recent sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
NHPR Theatre Critic Kevin Gardner has this review.
It may be that John Patrick Shanley’s oblique drama about a priestly child abuse scandal is indeed a parable, as its self-conscious title claims.
If so, it’s a doubtful parable at best.
There’s no denying Doubt’s success, however.
The play appeared just as the Catholic Church seemed permanently engulfed by horrifying and widespread revelations about the behavior of many of its priests.
Doubt ran on Broadway for two years – a long time for a non-musical - and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2005.
Still, other than its golden timing and the eagerness of American audiences to witness theatrical deconstructions of Catholicism, it’s hard to see why this play was such a hit.
And the Peterborough Players’ current production doesn’t make it any easier.
Doubt tells a simple, sad story.
It’s 1964, at a Catholic school in the Bronx.
The school’s Principal, a formidable older nun named Sister Aloysius, suspects a popular young priest, Father Flynn, of impropriety with a 12-year-old male student.
Without credible evidence of any kind, Sister Aloysius embarks on a campaign to remove Father Flynn
And in doing so, she ensnares both the boy’s mother and an idealistic young teacher, Sister James.
The campaign is an earthly success, but a spiritual disaster.
All this might seem dramatically promising, but at Peterborough it’s just unsatisfying.
Warren Hammack’s direction has little shape and seems hamstrung by the relentless ambivalence of Shanley’s script.
He doesn’t seem to know where he wants this story to take us.
As Sister Aloysius, well-known television actress Linda Kelsey gives a twitchy, distracted performance.
She undercuts her character’s resolve and foreshadows her final, devastating revelation so many times that when it finally arrives, it’s an anticlimax.
Kraig Swartz plays Father Flynn behind a Teflon shield of likeability that shuts out almost every opportunity Shanley gives him to show us who he really is.
As Sister James, Karron Graves chirps through her early scenes as though she’s playing Maria in The Sound of Music.
Then she lapses into inconclusive depression when her illusions fall to pieces.
The one truly compelling performance here is given by Libya Pugh as Mrs. Muller, mother of the allegedly abused young boy.
In her single, riveting scene with Sister Aloysius, she hints at what this play might possibly become.
But it’s not enough.
Year in and year out, Peterborough is unquestionably one of New Hampshire’s finest professional theatre companies.
They don’t miss the mark very often.
But their Doubt is mired in uninspired direction and unconvincing performances that fail to locate anything deeper than the surface of Shanley’s script.
Then again, for all its acclaim, it may be that Doubt: A Parable doesn’t run very deep in the first place.
After all, immortal dramatic masterpieces like In Abraham’s Bosom and Hell-bent Fer Heaven won Pulitzers, too.
Remember them?
The Peterborought Players production of Doubt: A Parable runs through September 14th.
For NHPR News, I’m Kevin Gardner.
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