Table of Contents
#1 Show of the Year. John Patrick Shanleys drama is simple in outline, complex in resonance. The play thwarts all our comfortable assumptions.
Richard Zoglin, Time Magazine
A beautifully balanced drama. Shanley is a writer working at the top of his craft, making the most of a muted but evocative palette in the pursuit of truths shadows. Here, for the first time in a long time, is a play that is about something.
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A breathtaking work of immense proportion. Positively brilliant.
Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly
#1 show of the year. An eloquent and provocative investigation of truth and consequences. A gripping mystery, tightly written.
Adam Feldman, TimeOut New York
#1 show of the year. Gripping. Impressive! Doubt takes the stuff of headlines and turns it into deeply moving drama.
Howard Kissel, Daily News
#1 show of the year. How splendid it feels to be trusted with such passionate, exquisite ambiguity unlike anything we have seen from this prolific playwright so far. Blunt yet subtle, manipulative but full of empathy for all sides, the play is set in 1964 but could not be more timely. In just ninety fast-moving minutes, Shanley creates four blazingly individual people. Doubt is a lean, potent drama... passionate, exquisite, important and engrossing.
Linda Winer, Newsday
Remarkable. Doubt is a reminder that theres life left yet in the well made play.
Peter Marks, Washington Post
The best play of the year, bar none. Doubt is a greatlets repeat, greatnew drama. Driven by strong conflict and crafted with subtlety, Shanleys writing is incisive, insightful and masterfully controlled. Taut, yet thoughtful, the writing is direct and swift as an arrow. This is enthralling theatre and should not be missed.
Michael Sommers, Newark Star-Ledger
Doubt may well be Shanleys best play to date.
John Simon, New York Magazine
#1 show of the year. A terrific, marvelous new play with astonishing theatricality. Doubt wakes up the slumbering theatre season, jolting the audience with a tough, timely story, rich in character, language and ideas. Doubt is Shanleys best play in years.
Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press
All the elements come invigoratingly together like clockwork in John Patrick Shanleys provocative new play, Doubt, a gripping story of suspicion cast on a priests behavior that is less about scandal than about fascinatingly nuanced questions of moral certainty. Something rare for this season: a laudable new American play.
David Rooney, Variety
Compelling. The prolific Shanley folds doubts back upon each other in what may be his strongest script yet.
Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
One of the years ten best. Moral certainty never seemed so suspect as in John Patrick Shanleys evocative and beautifully crafted thriller.
David Cote, TimeOut New York
A supremely intelligent new play. The must-see play of the season!
Jacques Le Sourd, Journal News, Westchester
Riveting, exceptional theatre!
Liz Smith
This play is dedicated to the many orders of
Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives
to serving others in hospitals, schools
and retirement homes.
Though they have been much maligned and ridiculed,
who among us has been so generous?
Preface
Whats under a play? What holds it up? You might as well ask whats under me? On what am I built? Theres something silent under every person and under every play. There is something unsaid under any given society as well.
Theres a symptom apparent in America right now. Its evident in political talk shows, in entertainment coverage, in artistic criticism of every kind, in religious discussion. We are living in a courtroom culture. We were living in a celebrity culture, but thats dead. Now were only interested in celebrities if theyre in court. We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment, and of verdict. Discussion has given way to debate. Communication has become a contest of wills. Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere. Why? Maybe its because deep down under the chatter we have come to a place where we know that we dont know... anything. But nobodys willing to say that.
Let me ask you. Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction? I have. Thats an interesting moment. For a playwright, its the beginning of an idea. I saw a piece of real estate on which I might build a play, a play that sat on something silent in my life and in my time. I started with a title: Doubt.
What is Doubt? Each of us is like a planet. Theres the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Whos your best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.
It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, hes on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like youve gone the wrong way and youre lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.
The play. Ive set my story in 1964, when not just me, but the whole world seemed to be going through some kind of vast puberty. The old ways were still dominant in behavior, dress, morality, world view, but what had been organic expression had become a dead mask. I was in a Catholic church school in the Bronx, run by the Sisters of Charity. These women dressed in black, believed in Hell, obeyed their male counterparts, and educated us. The faith, which held us together, went beyond the precincts of religion. It was a shared dream we agreed to call Reality. We didnt know it, but we had a deal, a social contract. We would all believe the same thing. We would all believe.
Looking back, it seems to me, in those schools at that time, we were an ageless unity. We were all adults and we were all children. We had, like many animals, flocked together for warmth and safety. As a result, we were terribly vulnerable to anyone who chose to hunt us. When trust is the order of the day, predators are free to plunder. And plunder they did. As the ever widening Church scandals reveal, the hunters had a field day. And the shepherds, so invested in the surface, sacrificed actual good for perceived virtue.
