Amen, Father. That's just one of the directly expressed bits of dialogue that allows "Doubt's" young priest to voice what his creator - not God but the literary shaman and playwright John Patrick Shanley - is up to in this parable of a play. The show offers an absorbing evening of theater, even if its thoughtfulness register doesn't reverberate as much beyond the "Is Father Flynn a pedophile or does he just express the guilty behavior of one?" question as the play's Tony and Pultizer award-winning pedigree might suggest.
That's not the fault of this finely realized production, thanks to sure-handed direction (Martin Platt) and confident costuming, lighting and sound designs, including music by Johann Pachebel (Carol Wells-Day, Michael Gilliam and Joe Payne).
Then there's the witty details of William Barclay's realistic principal's office - imposing desk, industrial metal filing cabinets and puke green walls. All this technical prowess highlights the performances of a uniformly strong cast who have created highly moral, conflicted and believable characters, gracefully mining the cultural clash that provides the story's ironic humor.
"Doubt" is set in 1964, at St. Nicholas, a New York City parochial school, in the middle of the Vatican II-era changes that were transforming the face of Catholic Church leadership. Father Flynn (Jeff Talbott) styles himself as a kinder, gentler priest, whether he's opening the play by sermonizing about the positive nature of spiritual doubt, or coaching his young charges on the basketball court.
It's after Flynn befriends the school's lone black student that St. Nicholas' principal, the self-righteous Sister Aloysius (Greta Lambert), stitches the observations of a naive, young eighth-grade teacher, Sister James (Shannon Koob), into an accusation of sexual abuse. When Mrs. Muller (Tamela Aldridge) asks the nun to set aside her suspicions in order to not derail her boy's future, the nun's fortitude in the face of scant evidence appears, not courageous, but like moral grandstanding.
Lambert's rules-bound principal seems nearly as threatened by Flynn's use of ball-point pens and distinctively long fingernails as his possible sexual abuse of a young altar boy. The actor overcomes the restrictions of a nun's dark habit and bonnet, letting the exclamation points of her scrunched-up forehead express her certitude about the priest's guilt.
It's either a bold or a trickster move to open a play with the address of a sermon, and on opening night, Talbott's first speech had its shaky moments as the actor's accent slipped registers.
Overall, no matter how absorbing, what this polished production ultimately reveals is the shell game of Shanley's contrivances. The playwright hasn't revealed enough facts to allow us to know what actually happened, and at the end, we're caught off guard by a last-minute revelation that isn't adequately foreshadowed in the lead character's expressions or dialogue.
Ultimately, at the end of this 90-minute dramatic journey, I craved, if not the neatness of sermon-truth, a more artful, more complicated kind of story-truth. I still want more, but perhaps there's faith enough in that.
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* ELLEN FAGG can be contacted at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
'Doubt'
* WHERE: Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre, 300 S. 1400 East, University of Utah campus, Salt Lake City.
* WHEN: Friday; continues Mondays through Saturdays through Nov. 17.
* RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes in one act, with no intermission.
* TICKETS: $21-$39 (half-price for children on Mondays and Tuesdays); call 801-581-6961 or visit www.pioneertheatre.org.
