In the roughly six months after Doubt: A Parable premiered off-Broadway in 2004, the play swept the Tony Awards and won its author, John Patrick Shanley, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Arriving amid a wave of sexual abuse cases involving the Catholic church, the story of a priest accused of just that at a Bronx middle school in the 1960s teemed with relevance. (A 2008 film starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis—all nominated for Academy Awards—would later bring the story of Sister Aloysius’s crusade against Father Flynn to an even wider audience.) Now, as a new revival starring Liev Schreiber, Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine prepares to open on March 7, the ambitious questions at Doubt’s center still feel as relevant as ever.
Sister Aloysius (Ryan) is a hardened nun with a hunch: She suspects that Father Flynn (Schreiber) molested Donald Muller, the first and only Black student at their school. “She is a dog with a bone,” says Ryan. Yet while Sister Aloysius’s mission to reveal Father Flynn’s misdeeds turns into a gripping meditation on faith, vengeance, and, of course, doubt, the audience is purposefully left to wonder what and who to believe. (The alleged incident takes place offstage.)
“It feels strangely fresh to me,” says Schreiber of the piece, citing a few of its key themes: “How quick we are to go whole hog into an idea that is unresearched; misinformation, disinformation. Heated emotional opinions, and no one is willing to say ‘I don’t know.’” Though Doubt takes place 60 years ago, he compares its core concerns to the tribalism of social media and contemporary politics.
Schreiber has plumbed this territory in his work before. For seven seasons he played a Hollywood “fixer” who had been abused by a priest as a child on Showtime’s Ray Donovan; and in the 2015 film Spotlight he played Marty Baron, the Boston Globe editor who led a team of journalists investigating abuse in Boston parishes in the early 2000s. Initially, Schreiber was reluctant to take aim at the priesthood a third time. “I don’t want to kick the Catholic church any more,” he remembers thinking. (Coincidently, he got the call to do Doubt just after attending mass in Montauk with his in-laws.) However, after some reflection on the importance of institutions, like the church, that feel under attack, he signed on. “Increasingly we are taking organizations down; shared concepts and ideologies are being abandoned by a progressive ‘me’ thinking. Social media is helping it, using algorithms to divide us,” he says. “What if [Father Flynn] didn’t do it? And what does it say about this destructive cancel culture?”