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My new favorite play “Doubt”, which I went to see last week, just got another award. This time it’s the from the Drama Desk, an organization of critics and journalists. Previously it got the Pulitzer Prize and before that the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play of the year. In other words, the Triple Crown. The actors, the leading man, the leading lady, the ingenue and the character lady all got nominated for Tony awards for their acting as well as the director for his directing.
The four acting nominees were the whole cast of the show, which is one of the reasons all the “little theatres” in the country and out of it will be renting performance rights for it for the next twenty or thirty years. Small casts and one-set plays fit their needs perfectly, especially when they constitute a novelty in place of the usual repertory of plays available to amateurs.
Besides all this, the toughest critic in the country, John Simon, in New York magazine gave it a review unlike any I’ve ever seen by him before. I mean, Simon first became famous years ago for describing a musical star’s “pop eyes”, “liver lips”, “receding chin”, “nose threatening to become a trunk” and other defects in a memorable review that would never lead anyone to anticipate what he had to say about “Doubt”. What was that? Oh, only that it was “a nearly flawless work”, “wonderful”, “an experience to last you a lifetime”, and “may very well be great”. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true, if Simon says so. He’s not an easy marker.
I’ve noted before in these essays that “Doubt” is a special show for me, since it was written by a man, John Patrick Shanley, who used to live across the street from me in the Bronx, and its action takes place in a school I used to attend, among the kind of people I used to know. This isn’t to say I recognized everything in it, because Mr. Shanley has taken a scene from the past that was quite familiar to me and injected into it plot elements from the present day which weren’t part of that scene when I knew it.
This is all okay because we’re not being offered a documentary, but a drama. All the same, when I heard on the stage a priest and a Sister of Charity trying to shout each other down for minutes at a time, I could only shake my head and say “Gee, I never knew all this was going on”.
Well it wasn’t, of course. Not in those days. Today it could be and even should be, if it’s a case of a predatory priest against a nun trying to protect a student. There were no such priests in my time, or if there were, I never heard of them and certainly never encountered one of them. They were of a new breed, who saw the church as a perfect setup to enable homosexuals to indulge their taste for intimacy with young boys bred up by their parents to trust and believe in men wearing a priest’s cassock and collar. They infiltrated until they had the seminaries in their grip. All the bishops knew was that they were getting recruits at a time when priests were getting harder and harder to find. They weren’t inclined or equipped to inquire into their credentials to determine their bona fides. They were willing to take any help they could get. In time they learned that the gift they had received was fool’s gold. When they found out what their new priests were really up to, it was too late to do anything about it. Even the slightest admission that they knew what was going on was enough to open up the church to unlimited liability. All they could do was to use coverup tactics. Transfer these characters somewhere where no one knows about them. Demand proof against them. It won’t be easy to find. Pray a lot. Hope for the best. This too shall pass, maybe.
This scenario is reflected in the play, but it wouldn’t be right to give away the plot here. I didn’t need the plot much anyway, as good as it is. I was busy enjoying “the aesthetic pleasure known as recognition” while taking in the habits of the nuns with the black bonnets tied with a bow and shawls for cold weather, the priest in his cassock (but no biretta), the hard chairs in the school principal’s office, the card files, the graduation pictures on the wall. A woman in my group got a theater employee to check up on these after the show, but it turned out they didn’t come from our St. Anthony’s, but from St. Athanasius on Southern Boulevard. Close enough.
As I’ve said before, the nuns’ habits didn’t give me any trouble when I was growing up, and not since either. They were becoming and quite practical. It’s the nuns who disagree about this. Since the days when I knew them, they’ve almost abandoned the habit, which is almost like a soldier throwing away his uniform. They’ve now become little ladies in pantsuits, which is bad enough, but on top of that they’re carrying picket signs and demonstrating for something or other, usually some cause against which I’m willing to die (figuratively) in the last ditch.
How’d we ever come to this? What has happened to these women, the Brides of Christ, to whom Shanley dedicated his play with respect for the work they did in educating unlikely prospects like himself and me? I’m afraid it’s the old story. Something happened to them which is more characteristic of Protestants than it has ever been of Catholics, up to now anyway. They got bored with religion. They’re creatures of the media like the rest of us, and the media has no time for religion. Everything else is more interesting, sports, entertainment, business, politics, you name it. It’s a lot more fun to demonstrate in a civil rights march, or disrupt a shareholder’s meeting or even to bring a ray of sunshine to Death Row to encourage the martyrs suffering there, than it is, against their will to infuse a crew of runny-nosed ragamuffins with a keen desire to learn their ABC’s. That’s so bourgeois after all.
I may have been too drastic with my description of modern nuns here, but there’s no doubt that some of them are like that. I hope “Doubt”may serve to remind them of how far they’ve strayed from the right path, and for those who have never strayed I hope it confirms them in staying the course they’re on. The play tells them it’s a right one.
Although, as I said earlier, Mr. Shanley and I lived opposite each other at one time, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that we’ve ever met, except once through e-mail. He’s quite a bit younger than me, so we’ve missed each other. We have mutual acquaintances, though, who speak well of him. His only problem, as I see it, is what do you do once you’ve won the Triple Crown? How do you equal it? I think he’ll find a way.
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