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Still, if you’re like me, you might lean more toward one side than the other. In this sense, Scott Ellis’s production for Roundabout Theater Company has not yet achieved the ideal balance; Ryan, who replaces an ill Tyne Daly, has had just a few weeks to prepare. His portrayal of Aloysius is smart and uncompromising, but a little undersized in crucial moments, leaving the splendid Schreiber (a burly 6-foot-3, with a tough-guy brush cut and a loud Bronx honk) to outdo it. . (Brian F. O’Byrne, who played Flynn in 2005, was more lanky, and Cherry Jones, as Aloysius, more imposing.) Schreiber is also about the same age as Ryan, not a couple of decades younger as written.
The climactic scene between the nun and the priest, when their certainties finally collide, is slightly muffled in this production, which doesn’t take enough time to let the importance of what’s happening sink in. In truth, that is also a flaw in the play’s Carpentry: something has fundamentally changed, but Shanley refuses to say what it is. (A crucial coda is yet to come.) I think this flaw is why some critics have found “Doubt” a bit gimmicky: like the procedurals, it withholds information to maintain suspense, but unlike them, it does permanently. He is manipulative.
Is that really a criticism? I want the works to manipulate me and it is often the case that we cannot know the truth. For a man like Flynn, who has “things he cannot say” in 1964, it may well be that he is innocent of Aloysius’ charge but guilty of something else.
Such ambiguity, necessary and humiliating, is an enduring concern for Shanley, who this winter is the subject of an accidental retrospective in New York. The same uncertain judgment is at the heart of her more directly autobiographical “Prodigal Son,” in which another troubled child—she played, in its premiere in 2016 at the Manhattan Theater Club, by Timothée Chalamet, falls under the influence of another Catholic mentor. Again, underage drinking and inappropriate sexual behavior are involved.
Still, Shanley doesn’t entirely condemn the maestro of “Prodigal Son,” inspired by a central figure of his own youth, except by using his real name; Moral investigation, the work demonstrates, is not the same as moral certainty.
Nor is it the same as moral inconsistency; Some people pay for their sins. The way I see it, the conclusion may vary: “Doubt,” in this production, throws Aloysius under the bus for his pride. That seems realistic. The Flynn fathers of this world often recover from much more serious accusations, not because they are necessarily innocent but because, collar or no collar, they are men.
Doubt
Through April 21 at the Todd Haimes Theatre, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes.