‘Doubt’ Broadway Review: Amy Ryan & Liev Schreiber Resurrect A Modern Classic
08.03.2024 - 02:17
/ deadline.com
Time has tipped the scales a bit in the did-he-or-didn’t-he question at the heart of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play Doubt: A Parable, opening tonight in a Roundabout Theatre Company revival at the Todd Haimes Theatre. Since the play about a possibly child-molesting priest made its Off Broadway debut 20 years ago, real-world events and ugly truths have lessened both its shock value and the likelihood that audiences will side with the man in black.
In short, “Yeah, he did it” is a much more probable audience response when the tough-as-nails Sister Aloysius begins to suspect, on the flimsiest of evidence, that the charming and beloved Father Flynn has been abusing an altar boy. Our inclination to immediately side with the crusty, suspicious nun might well upend the entire premise of Shanley’s play, which is, after all, titled Doubt, not Certitude.
That the play holds up as well as it does – and it really does – is due in large part to a top-tier cast that the Roundabout Theater Company has assembled, an ensemble that keeps us guessing from beginning to end. As most in the audience will know, Amy Ryan was a last-minute fill-in for an ailing Tyne Daly, and she takes to the role (and the stage) as if she’d been prepping for months. Her performance betrays not a hint of eleventh-hour jitters.
Ryan, of course, plays Sister Aloysius, the stern, no-nonsense principal of a Bronx Catholic elementary school in 1964. Her philosophy on education is simple: Keep ’em scared, keep ’em in line and keep ’em safe till they graduate.
Sister Aloysius shares this outlook in the play’s opening scene with the much younger, and more generous of spirit, Sister James (Zoe Kazan). But what seems at first to be the elder