 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com Now a major motion picture! Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer Prize–winning play. “The best new play of the season. 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. Mr. Shanley deserves the highest possible praise: he doesn’t try to talk you into doing anything but thinking-hard-about the gnarly complexity of human behavior.”—Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal “A breathtaking work of immense proportion. Positively brilliant.”—Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly “#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. 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 John Patrick Shanley is the author of numerous plays, including Danny in the Deep Blue Sea, Dirty Story, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia, Sexualis, Sailor’s Song, Savage in Limbo, and Where’s My Money? He has written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Congo; Alive; Five Corners; Joe Versus the Volcano, which he also directed; and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for best original screenplay. |
Average Customer Rating:   Powerful What a powerful piece. There are only 4 spoken characters in the whole book - yet so much goes on in such a short story/play. It is riveting and superbly written - considering it's only 60+ pages long.
The play takes place in a 1960's Catholic Church School where a nun suspects the priest is molesting one of his students. It's a story about doubt. Did he do it? Was she wrong? Right? You just don't know. You are left with DOUBT. I found that the ending was well suited for this piece and I highly recommend it.
Life lessons If the movie was excellent, the script is outstanding. The author sees life as one should struggle to. The dedication of the play to nuns is very sincere, touching and true. Read it for a life-enhancing experience! Contemporary Classic Sister Aloysius thinks Father Flynn is abusing a student at the parochial school. Father Flynn thinks Sister Aloysius impedes the redeeming work of the church. Both of them try to recruit naïve young Sister James, manipulating her innocence to their own ends. When the fallout begins, no one knows who to believe; even the priest and the sisters lose sight of the truth.
Shanley's most famous play is stunning in its evasiveness. Any attempt to nail it down to a single meaning is destined to fail because the characters and their conflict are too slippery to admit of simple definitions. This beautiful ambiguity could have burned audiences, but Shanley handles it with such aplomb that the tension between possibilities makes the play sing with life.
Only a few years old, this brief, quick, powerful play is already recognized as a contemporary classic. And no wonder, since its characters say the words many of us wish we could speak. They voice our doubts, ask our questions, tremble with our fears. Not just for theatre fans, Shanley's "Doubt" is a play that audiences and readers treasure and consume time and again. "Where's Your Compassion?" In April of 2005 I saw the play "Doubt" by John Patrick Shanley on Broadway with a cast consisting of Brian F. O'Byrne, Cherry Jones, Heather Goldenhersh, and Adriane Lenox. It's a short play with no intermission. Reading it now after seeing the excellent movie version with a screenplay by the author and directed by him, the play seems claustrophobic and too condensed. The movie opened up the action, made it more dynamic with other characters and exterior scenes. The movie made the four lead characters more complex, richer in detail.
The author in his introduction says, "We've got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word."
Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones) is so certain of Father Flynn's guilt that she will not let doubt creep into her mind. She is bent on destroying the priest. She says, "I'll bring you down." Flynn says "It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of virtue. Don't believe it. There's nothing wrong with love." His second sermon, done with an Irish brogue at times, is on the subject of intolerance, and is aimed at the school principal.
In the struggle Sister James has lost her peace of mind and cannot sleep. Mrs. Muller (Adriane Lenox) fiercely defends her son and in a brilliant scene outmaneuvers the zealot-principal. A person's nature is of no interest to the principal; she's only concerned with actions. Her conviction, her certitude make her less of a Christian.
Of the black student, Donald Muller, Sister Aloysius says, "He's isolated. The little sheep lagging behind is the one the wolf goes for."
The priest asks, "Where's your compassion?" and the Mother Superior answers, "Nowhere you can get at it."
It's interesting that Shanley, describing the Catholic Church in 1964 said, "We had, like many animals, flocked together...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...the hunters had a field day."
It's a disturbing play. Many left the theater with the feeling of doubt that the playwright wanted them to leave with. Some, however, left with the uneasy feeling they had been taken for a ride, manipulated rather than enlightened.
Copy of "Doubt" The item arrived promptly and was in excellent condition, like new. Excellent customer service by the vendor. |  |
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