DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

Doubt: A Parable is a text that has been in my life for more than a decade. I first came across the movie adaptation as a teenager. My artistic sensibilities were rawer then, less refined, and I wouldn’t have been able to identify super-objectives or map out how the event of each scene fed into the next. All I remember was how it made me feel: floored.

Then, I read the play. As I grew up and learnt more about theatre, I revisited the text with more learned eyes. Over the years, the secrets of the play slowly unraveled before me, and I began to recognise the genius of its complex storytelling hidden within a disarmingly simple premise. To this day, I consider Doubt to be one of the greatest examinations of human motivation ever written for the stage.

The play’s intellectual project is presented in the title’s two halves: Doubt and A Parable. The first word looms large over the trajectory of its storytelling: did the priest act inappropriately toward the boy or not? The search for an answer causes our characters excruciating doubt as they wage a battle of wills within a structured institution.

Beyond this, doubt is refracted, repeated, and refocussed throughout the piece: Father Flynn opens the play with a sermon on the power of doubt when wrestling with one’s faith. The young, well-meaning Sister James doubts her pedagogical methods when questioned by Sister Aloysius, her senior and herself a woman doubtful of the students under her charge. Mrs. Muller, the mother of the alleged victim, doubts Aloysius’ intentions, openly questioning her methods of pursuing justice. Then, the play hurtles toward to the most famous closing lines in all American playwriting.

On the other hand, parables are simple, narrative stories that hold some sort of moral or spiritual lesson. They appear in both the Bible and the Quran; many other cultures contain parables to teach lessons as a sort of an extended metaphor. What can we learn from this play? Is it an excoriating denouncement of ‘cancel culture’, presciently written before the term ever existed? Is it a deep dive into gender politics, is it a metaphor for Vatican 2.0 and shifting religious mores?

To me, the parable is everything and nothing listed above. The parable is also our biases, our battles, and our selves. The moral lesson is that there isn’t one, and that in the great muck of existence, there isn’t always a clean-cut answer. Human beings are morally ambiguous and amorphously motivated. Occasionally, they become diametrically opposed to you, even if you worship the same God, eat the same food, or share the same bed. Sometimes, you cannot be certain of the moral rightness of your choices. The only certainty is doubt. Therefore, my interpretation of this piece purposefully eschews moral didacticism.

I have chosen to stage this in the round, without a realistic set. Each member of the audience faces another, with the action happening in between. You are in a bowl, a lens, a microscope, watching four humans duke it out below. The design isn’t meant to perfectly replicate a 1960s Catholic School in the Bronx. Indeed, in willingly avoiding perfect representation, I hope to bring renewed focus to the language and the questions raised.

Still, I have been faithful to spirit of the play. I have strove to not reinterpret but distill the piece by being a faithful steward of Shanley’s words. I have sought to treat the play as a classic – as one treats Miller, Chekhov or Shakespeare – and find fresh meaning in known words. In some ways, this production is a parable demonstrating the antiparable. I hope you do not walk out of this play with armed certainty. I hope that you do not leave the theatre imbued with any galvanizing force of moral clarity. I hope you walk out unsure about who was right. I hope to present the characters charitably, as people deserving of our pathos. They are doing their best with the moral compasses they have been provided.

They are human. They have doubt. I hope you will, too.

Many thanks to the cast, creatives, production, technical, and stage management teams for bringing your best to this play. Eternal gratitude to the Pangdemonium team for successfully staging our second show of the year. And of course, my undying thanks to Adrian and Tracie for being such supportive producers through it all! Thanks to my fam too for always being in my corner.