Press Release

DOUBT, A PARABLE

by John Patrick Shanley
Directed by Barbara Evans
Show Dates: October 10,11,16,17,18 at 8:00 pm October 12 at 2:00pm
All Tickets $15.00 (Not included in any subscription series)
For reservations and information call 249-0289

We trust those with power and authority. We trust them to be honest. We trust them to protect us. Sometimes there are things they cannot tell us, but when they deceive us, they shake our faith. Sometimes doubt can strengthen our faith as we choose to reject temptation, but sometimes doubt brings down what we previously believed to be pillars of authority. Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.--- Father Flynn in the sermon with which Doubt opens.

Rarely a month went by without fresh reports about the Roman Catholic Church and its attempts to cover up the child-abuse cases brought (often decades after the fact) against priests. Committed as it is to the idea of divine forgiveness and the second chance proffered to the least of sinners, does the Church have the right to cheat the state of evidence that might bring the abusers to justice?

Director and Players by the Sea Board of Director member Barbara Evans (Batting Cage, Coyote on a Fence, Suddenly Last Summer and Dead Eye Boy) assembled a powerhouse of Jacksonville actors to flesh out this sensitive and gripping drama.
It's intriguing that Doubt: A Parable which won the Tony and Pulitzer prizes in 2005, opts for the dimensions of a chamber piece and comes at the topic from an unusual angle. The play dramatizes a battle of wills between its main character, Sister Aloysius, played by Robyn Neal (Cabaret, The Lion in Winter and Three Tall Women) the redoubtable old-style head of a mixed Catholic school, and Father Flynn played by Michael Lipp (Children of a Lesser God, Once Upon a Mattress, and I Never Sang for My Father), the charismatic priest and basketball coach whom she suspects of interfering with 12-year-old Donald Mueller, the school's first black pupil.

Caught between the two is a young, idealistic nun Sister James played by JU Senior Laura Peterson (Picasso at the Lapin Agile, The Grapes of Wrath, Lysistrata, Dog Sees God) who imparts the ambiguous information that causes the clash and the muted upheaval. Melody Patterson Jackson, (Raisin in the Sun, Blues in the Night, Cavedweller) who plays Mrs. Muller, the boy’s mother, completes the cast. In one of the play's best and least expected confrontations; she refuses to be scandalized by the supposed revelations and supports Flynn's protective friendship with her son. We never meet Donald and never know whose take on the situation is the most accurate – or least inaccurate.

Even more interesting is the playwright's ambivalent response to Sister Aloysius, which brings her alive as a watchful, leathery-with-experience, wryly conservative stickler for impersonal values – such as the idea that a teacher should not be a bleeding-heart performer but the catalyst that causes the pupils to perform.
The play is deft at showing how the battle between nun and priest exemplifies a larger ideological conflict. It also makes you aware that Sister Aloysius is frustrated by an institution in which priests always take precedence, even though nuns are often required to be twice the men that they are.

For reservations call 249 0289 or click here for online reservations.