NEW YORK (NY)
Vogue [New York NY]
March 1, 2024
By CHRISTOPHER BARNARD
In the roughly six months after Doubt: A Parable premiered off-Broadway in 2004, the play swept the Tony Awards and won its author, John Patrick Shanley, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Arriving amid a wave of sexual abuse cases involving the Catholic church, the story of a priest accused of just that at a Bronx middle school in the 1960s teemed with relevance. (A 2008 film starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis—all nominated for Academy Awards—would later bring the story of Sister Aloysius’s crusade against Father Flynn to an even wider audience.) Now, as a new revival starring Liev Schreiber, Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine prepares to open on March 7, the ambitious questions at Doubt’s center still feel as relevant as ever.
Sister Aloysius (Ryan) is a hardened nun with a hunch: She suspects that Father Flynn (Schreiber) molested Donald Muller, the first and only Black student at their school. “She is a dog with a bone,” says Ryan. Yet while Sister Aloysius’s mission to reveal Father Flynn’s misdeeds turns into a gripping meditation on faith, vengeance, and, of course, doubt, the audience is purposefully left to wonder what and who to believe. (The alleged incident takes place offstage.)
“It feels strangely fresh to me,” says Schreiber of the piece, citing a few of its key themes: “How quick we are to go whole hog into an idea that is unresearched; misinformation, disinformation. Heated emotional opinions, and no one is willing to say ‘I don’t know.’” Though Doubt takes place 60 years ago, he compares its core concerns to the tribalism of social media and contemporary politics.
Schreiber has plumbed this territory in his work before. For seven seasons he played a Hollywood “fixer” who had been abused by a priest as a child on Showtime’s Ray Donovan; and in the 2015 film Spotlight he played Marty Baron, the Boston Globe editor who led a team of journalists investigating abuse in Boston parishes in the early 2000s. Initially, Schreiber was reluctant to take aim at the priesthood a third time. “I don’t want to kick the Catholic church any more,” he remembers thinking. (Coincidently, he got the call to do Doubt just after attending mass in Montauk with his in-laws.) However, after some reflection on the importance of institutions, like the church, that feel under attack, he signed on. “Increasingly we are taking organizations down; shared concepts and ideologies are being abandoned by a progressive ‘me’ thinking. Social media is helping it, using algorithms to divide us,” he says. “What if [Father Flynn] didn’t do it? And what does it say about this destructive cancel culture?”
Perish the thought of the poor soul tasked with explaining the very 21st-century concept of cancel culture to Sister Aloysius, who is the principal at St. Nicholas. Her forbidding black bonnet and cape, the traditional habit of the Sisters of Charity, cut an intimidating figure before she even says a word. “It’s wool and so intense. At the first fitting I thought, I can’t do this,” says Ryan of the costume. “It’s a stark image. She means business.” Yet to the actress, the habit also offers a view into the predicament of her character: a woman determined to be heard in a patriarchal system. “She is a very powerful yet powerless woman. She can’t go to the police if she thinks something is wrong. She is answerable to these men. Yet she has this power,” Ryan says. “Two things are true in this costume: It is a form of prison yet it is powerful.”
Ryan also feels there is a superhero quality to the get-up, which seems apt given her efforts behind the scenes recently. In an unexpected show-must-go-on twist, Tyne Daly, the actress originally cast to play Sister Aloysius in this production, had to drop out for health reasons during the first week of previews. Ryan ended up taking her place after only seven days of rehearsals. (Isabel Keating, Daly’s understudy, filled in the gap.) “Completely fearless,” is how Schreiber describes his new co-star jumping into the role. “Amy Ryan did the thing that nobody does anymore: she said yes to the horror show.”
Since joining Doubt, Ryan has been starting her day at about 5:30 a.m. cramming lines; on non-matinee days, she goes to the theater in the afternoon for extra rehearsals with the cast or understudies. “The lines are difficult to learn. He’s written it so economically, so perfectly, that if you paraphrase it muddles it. There is great intent in every line,” she says of John Patrick Shanley’s script. (The playwright also wrote and directed the 2008 film adaptation.) Bits of stage direction and dialogue are hidden around the set of Sister Aloysius’s office, where much of the play’s action takes place.
For Ryan—whom audiences may know as Holly from The Office, or for her Oscar-nominated turn in the 2007 thriller Gone Baby Gone—the quandary of a woman, holy or not, challenging authority in a man’s world is as pertinent now as it was 60 years ago. “It feels good to live in the shoes of someone that takes that on. And she is willing to be damned to hell,” she says. “To go up against the patriarchy in 1964? That’s superhuman.”
While Schreiber points out that Shanley wrote Father Flynn with a real priest in mind who had never harmed a child, he doesn’t reveal whether he, as an actor, thinks his character is guilty. “I don’t believe actors should ever talk about backstory,” Schreiber demures. “That is what is so great about the play. It can be what you want it to be.”