The Vancouver Plank Panel experience doubt

Your Plank Panel of doubters: Alex Ferguson, Allyson McGrane & Andrew Templeton

ANDREW:
“…to live in a state of doubt is to live in a dynamic present tense.”

Playwright John Patrick Shanley said this and it’s quoted by Rachel Ditor (the director) in the program for the current production Doubt at the Arts Club. To evoke doubt as a positive force in our lives is an interesting idea; especially in our era of “conviction politics” where leaders are meant to have clear and absolute opinions and to never back down. Although, on reflection in a world that is constantly plagued with uncertainty, maybe we’ve always wanted these qualities from our leaders.

I don’t know about you guys but I didn’t see a lot of doubt in either the script or this production of Doubt. The principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964 is convinced that a priest is “interfering” with one of the students, a 12 year old black boy who has just arrived at the school. Her instincts prove right. But in the end she’s wracked with doubt. Shanley describes Doubt as a “parable” inspired by the invasion of Iraq and his dismay over the behaviour of American leadership. So, um, okay. That means that Jonathon Yong is Iraq, Gabrielle Rose is George Bush, Sasa Brown is the American people and Michele Lonsdale Smith is, I dunno what.

I’m sure Shanley didn’t mean for this literal analogy – but I’m at a loss for seeing how this play was any more than a movie-of-the-week showdown between a nun and a priest. Help!

ALLYSON:
I agree with Andrew – there just wasn’t much doubt about who was guilty in this play. The most interesting part was when the mother of the 12 year old boy was called into the principal’s office – and she pleaded with the principal to leave her son alone. As a mother, she recognized that her son was different – and she had transferred her son to a private school to protect him from bullies at his public school. She raises this deep, dark question about the child’s sexuality and his desires. It certainly caused the most questions for me when I left the theatre… much more than the central drama of the principal’s worry over whether she did the right thing.

I also had questions about the production as done by the Arts Club. I wondered if this play would be more touching without such an elaborate set and lovely costumes. The actors strutted on the stage and nothing felt nearly desperate enough. It also had that element of theatricality often present in large theatre work in Vancouver – I could clearly see the hand of the director which sometimes made the movements of the actors seem forced. For example, when the priest sinks slowly to the floor in despair, you can almost hear the director saying: “Okay, now you need to collapse onto the stage because your character is making a futile attempt to plead with this overbearing woman.” It felt theatrical, sure, but not authentic.

ALEX:
What drew me to this production was John Patrick Shanley's previous work. In the two other plays of his that I'm familiar with, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and The Big Funk, Shanley digs right into his subject. Here, he seems to be dancing around something for the longest time. When he finally hits it, in that scene between the mother and the principal, I can see why. This is a taboo of taboos. A black mother in the early 60s is forced to make a brutal choice: watch her son, the first ever black kid accepted into this prestigious all-white catholic school, get turfed out and end up with a no-wage dead-end life because of a priest's transgression—or allow him to be abused for a time (by an abuser who is at least kindly in his abuse) so that he can then get accepted into the kind of school that will allow him to escape both poverty and the regular beatings he is suffering at the hands of his father. The mother suggests that it is the 12-year old child's own "nature" that is drawing the priest's improper attention to him, thus blaming the victim. But given the complexity of the circumstance (as well as the beautifully nuanced performance of Michèle Lonsdale Smith) I couldn't dismiss her argument. But hey, no wonder Shanley was edging around his subject for so long. Are we ready for this kind of discussion? It was a glorious scene in an otherwise forgettable script.

But here's where it gets really challenging for me. Allyson, in a conversation we had after the show you said you had a hard time finding local resonance for this piece. I agree. So I tried to transpose the story. If this were a Canadian story, I might transfer it to a residential school, and make the mother an aboriginal woman. If an aboriginal woman were to make the same case — "It's okay to abuse my son because it's the only way out of a cycle of poverty and violence" — I'm sure we'd all get up and scream! We wouldn't let the playwright get away with it. But here we have a white playwright, Shanley, putting the most explosive material in the mouth of a disenfranchised African-American mother. It kind of legitimizes the issue he's exploring, it gives him permission to say it, but it's very manipulative. And then here we are sitting in Vancouver — what do most of us really know about race politics in the US in the early 60s? It's almost the stuff of myth. Shanley, on the other hand, is American, and the actress playing the mother is giving us the full dimensionality of the situation, so it all has the ring of authenticity — if you don't think about it too hard, that is. I mean, yes, the theatre should be a safe place to explore such issues, but I mistrust the exploration, maybe because Shanley kind of snuck his issue in under a bunch of diversions.

ANDREW
You’ve both gone for the single moment in the production where it flared into life: the confrontation between the mother and the principal and the potentially uncomfortable issues that it explores. Alex, I think your analogy with the residential school system is probably accurate and useful. The only problem I can see is that, as you indicated, the play is not really about that power dynamic. The central tension is between the priest and the principal. The issue of the boy’s sexuality and relationship to the priest seem like an after thought rather than embedded (to use a Gulf War term) within the thematic stuff of the piece – it just happens to be more interesting.

The fullest exploration of the priest/principal tension takes place in the scene immediately following the (single) scene involving the mother. I thought it was an equally strong with the playwright giving the priest some wonderfully nuanced arguments against the principal’s attacks. It was this scene that started to make me wonder if Ditor and her company had made a serious miscalculation with this play. We all agreed after the show that there was no doubt that the priest was guilty at least as far as the Arts Club was concerned. Yet there was something within this scene that made me, um, doubt whether we were meant to have this confidence. To wonder if the priest was – perhaps – dealing with his own issues of sexual identity (and this was the source of any guilt he was emotionally responding to) and there was a possibility that he really had done nothing physically to the boy.

I’ve had the good fortune to talk to someone who saw the original New York production and I asked them whether the priest was guilty. They said “the whole point is you’re not supposed to know”.  For whatever reason, the Arts Club has chosen to make a clear choice: the priest done it. I think this choice undermines not just the central argument of the piece – the “doubt” in Doubt – but also the issues that spiral off from it as you’ve outlined Alex.