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November 30, 2004
TT: Parochial-school duel
Seeing as how I didn't bring my iBook to Smalltown, U.S.A. (and good for me!), I wasn't able to post the usual Friday-morning teaser for my Wall Street Journal column. This one was a doozy: I wrote about four different shows, two good and two bad.Topping the list was Doubt:
The best new play of the season is about a Roman Catholic priest suspected of molesting a young boy. Don't roll your eyes: I couldn't believe it, either. Not only does the priestly sex scandal offer endless opportunities for tendentious pontification of one sort or another, but John Patrick Shanley, best known for his screenplay for "Moonstruck," is a gifted but uneven playwright whose previous work has never rung my bell. Nevertheless, "Doubt," which opened Tuesday at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage I, is that rarity of rarities, an issue-driven play that is unpreachy, thought-provoking, and so full of high drama that the audience with which I saw it gasped out loud a half-dozen times at its startling twists and turns. It's this year's "Frozen," minus the plagiarism.
Actually, it's not quite right to say that "Doubt" is unpreachy, since it starts with a sermon in which Father Flynn (Brían F. O'Byrne), a working-class priest with the thickest of dese-dem-dose accents, assures his flock that "doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty." It's a peculiar sentiment to hear from a Catholic pulpit circa 1964, and it triggers the suspicions of Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones), the principal of the school across the courtyard from Father Flynn's church. A hard-nosed pre-Vatican II nun, Sister Aloysius is realistic to the point of cynicism, and when the painfully naive Sister James (Heather Goldenhersh) reports that one of her students had a private audience with Father Flynn and returned to class with alcohol on his breath, all of her alarm bells start clanging at top volume.
I don't want to give away any of what happens next, save to say that Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius quickly find themselves drawn into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game. What I can say is that one reason why "Doubt" is so suspenseful is that Mr. Shanley has skillfully obeyed the time-honored commandments of the well-made play. Terence Rattigan, an old pro who once advised playwrights in search of inspiration to "take a hackneyed situation and reverse it," would have applauded the shrewdness with which "Doubt" follows his advice. The bluff, regular-guy Father Flynn looks like anything but a child molester--yet the circumstantial evidence against him keeps piling up. Sister Aloysius, by contrast, is a battle-ax with a dark streak of paranoia--yet it appears increasingly clear that her twitchy nose for scandal is leading her in the right direction....
I also loved Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance:
I strongly suggest that anyone going to "Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance" who holds a ticket in the first six rows of the Music Box Theatre makes a point of arriving on time, since Dame Edna (known in real life as Australian drag comedian Barry Humphries) likes nothing better than to single out latecomers for public humiliation. When not working over those hapless folk who dallied over dessert, the Dame passes among her fans with the verbal equivalent of a baseball bat, clobbering innocent bystanders who make the fatal mistake of catching her heavily shadowed eye. Fortunately, the outrageous insults are all in good fun, and Dame Edna's falsetto shrieks and wackily glammed-up outfits never fail to ease the sting....
Not so Woody Allen's A Second Hand Memory:
Speaking of embarrassments, Woody Allen has returned to the Atlantic Theater with a real stinker, a kitchen-sink drama called "A Second Hand Memory" that runs through Jan. 23. Despite Mr. Allen's best directorial efforts and a stageful of such familiar faces as Dominic Chianese ("The Sopranos") and Michael McKean ("A Mighty Wind"), this wan little piece of pilfered goods reminded me of nothing so much as the kind of script a college sophomore obsessed with Clifford Odets might have written in 1950. (Worst line: "Get out of my dreams.") In fact, I wouldn't be altogether surprised if Mr. Allen had dragged it out of his trunk of unperformed plays....
Sam Shepard's The God of Hell has already closed, so I won't keep on beating a dead dog, unless it twitches.
If you really, truly want to know what I thought of The God of Hell, or read the rest of what I said about the three other shows I reviewed on Friday, your only recourse (short of going to a library) is to do what you should have done months ago: subscribe to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of the best bargains in mainstream media.
If you're interested, go here.
Posted November 30, 2004 12:05 PM
