Theatre: Doubt: A Parable
There are no easy answers in John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable. In fact, there are no answers at all. The play, set in St Nicholas Catholic church and school in the Bronx, New York, in 1964, is concerned with the topical issue of clerical child abuse and the larger theme of managing uncertainty, says director Candice Moore.
DOUBT: A PARABLE
Sweet and Sour Productions
There are no easy answers in John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable. In fact, there are no answers at all. The play, set in St Nicholas Catholic church and school in the Bronx, New York, in 1964, is concerned with the topical issue of clerical child abuse and the larger theme of managing uncertainty, says director Candice Moore.
"You think you're going to get an answer to a certain issue or a character's dilemma, and then you don't," Moore says. "It leaves you hanging. Just as you think you're about to find something out, off you go in a different direction."
Doubt, first performed off-Broadway in 2004, went on to become a Broadway hit, and eventually a film starring Meryl Streep and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. This production by Sweet and Sour Productions is its Hong Kong premiere.
The play has only four characters. Rob Archibald plays Father Brendan Flynn, a likeable progressive parish priest. Vickie Rummun plays Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the school's principal and a conservative disciplinarian who dislikes the priest.