September, 2007 

Doubt, the provocative play by John Patrick Shanley that opens the 2007-2008 season for the Hippodrome, is a troubled piece for troubled times, weaving race, politics, religion, and sex, into a strangling knot.

This is the first day of rehearsal and the ensemble is engaged in a discussion of the proper pronunciation of the word “amen,” which in Chicago is pronounced, as is just about everything else, with a broad “a”. I find myself, after 12 years of Catholic education, to be something of an authority, but it turns out that Sara Morsey and Mary Hausch have done their time with the nuns as well.

How to perform the sign of the cross, how a priest gives a blessing, and what is up with that curious forehead and lip thumbing business?The play takes place in a parochial school in the Bronx 1964. President Kennedy had been shot. Suddenly anything was possible. What had been thought impossible is now a reality in the world.

The plot swirls around a young priest, Father Flynn, whose deeds and powerful influence threaten to sever the foundations of faith not just for this Bronx parish but for all who believe. At the precipice is a nun, Sister Aloysius, who will confront him with the truth.“

Only God knows their pain, the secret of their alienating silence,” Father Flynn tells his congregation of those who doubt. And who does not doubt?

“Doubt can be a bond,” Father Flynn tells his congregation. It’s a tortured logic that goes to the heart of the Catholic faith.

Faith and reason are on a collision course even in grammar school, and both are overmatched by sex. Consider the eighth grade boy.

“Puberty got hold of him,” says Sister Aloysius, who has a way with rooting out cause and effect. “Always the easy way out these days.”

A ballpoint pen is to be mistrusted because, unlike a flowing fountain pen, it will make you press down and “write like a monkey.”

Sara Morsey’s portrayal of Sister Aloysius won’t give an inch, but neither will she take an inch, and so we see the world of the play flowing around her like a river around a rock.“Satisfaction,” according to Sister Aloysius, “is a vice.”

The blueprint outlined on the floor of the rehearsal room projects the symbolic architecture of the church, and the actors know that when they descend to downstage that they are at once in both the gardens of Eden and Gethsemane.

“Sermons come from somewhere,” Sister Aloysius surmises, beginning the Freudian analysis that will ferret out the abuses that the Church will confess, grudgingly, only now, half a century later.

What guides faith, if it is reason, is bound to collide either with the Almighty or the abyss, and we cannot survive an encounter with either.

“Let’s stop,” Director Mary Hausch says, striding onto the stage, “my brain is teeming with questions.”

“Where does she get her handkerchief from?” asks Kate Kertez who plays Sister James. Although she too has matriculated with nuns and graduated from Notre Dame, it happened in modern times, and she is not familiar with the habits of old school nuns.

“From up her sleeve,” Morsey informs her. “Everything and anything could be up their sleeve, they could stash a stray dog up their sleeve.”

“Do we include the audience in the congregation?” Hausch craftily asks Michael Stewart Allen, who plays Father Flynn.

“My first instinct would be yes,” says Allen.

This is clearly the answer Hausch wants to hear.

Shanley calls the play a parable. This is a time to recall D.H. Lawrence’s advice to trust the tale and not the teller. A parable is what you call a play when it is not a parable, so that people will know it’s real.

“Sister Aloysius watches everybody,” Sara Morsey says of the character she plays.

We will want that beacon to search out the truth. It is Sister Aloysius who is casting doubt over Sister James, like casting a spell or a net.

They are working on a pivotal early scene in which the young nun, Sister James, is forced to re-evaluate all her first principles, once she is called into the principal’s office, and faces interrogation by the inquisitor, Sister Aloysius.

“Sister Aloysius is just stating the facts as she sees them,” Morsey explains. “Young people are focused on themselves, and if you do that, you won’t be a good teacher. You have to focus on your students.”

“Those were very different times,” Morsey continues. “You could tell someone something, especially a subordinate, something they were doing wrong and needed to be improved, and you didn’t have to tell them 12 nice things for every bad thing, like now. You could just come right out and say it.”

“I love that she cites Socrates, who fooled around with young men all the time,” says Allen.Sister Aloysius controls everything within the school, but the priests are above and beyond her.Priests trump nuns.

Hausch and Morsey were both taught by nuns and are re-entering the world of their childhood with this play.

In Doubt, at the same time that questions of faith and reason are pulling both clergy and congregation into a maelstrom there is also the question of stage movement.

“I want to use the chair as protection from Sister Aloysius,” Kertez says.

“Good,” replies Hausch. “That’s better for sight lines too.”

But once Sister James is in that chair and Morsey rises and Sister Aloysius approaches Sister James, you can see the young nun involuntarily cringe. Then Morsey stops dead cold and stares.

“My mother could do that,” Morsey explains. “It seemed like she could just stare at you forever.”

At the mention of spinal meningitis in the script, Morsey recalls, “I still have the holy card of classmate of mine who died in first grade of that.”

“Holy cards,” Hausch sighs, remembering.“

Oh yes. I had quite a collection. Holy cards were wonderful. Something to read while Mass went on, in Latin.”

Doubt opens September 7 runs through September 30.