The new revival of Doubt, its first on Broadway since it premiered there in 2005, is freighted with shadows: of suspicions, secrets and intimations. But also of years of headlines about endemic sexual abuse in the Catholic church and of the original Broadway show, which garnered a Pulitzer prize for playwright John Patrick Shanley and several Tony awards, and of the 2008 film adaptation, an acting tour de force with Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and one career-defining scene from Viola Davis. It’s a show heavy with context, personal and otherwise; you can feel the weight of precedent and judgment as Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) emerges from the dark at the Todd Haimes Theatre in his vestment, vital before a faux-stained glass window, preaching to his flock – the audience – about the connective power of doubt.
And yet this new production, directed by Scott Ellis and starring Schreiber and Amy Ryan, stands on its own. Like its forebears, the revival, which runs through mid-April, keeps things simple – four well-acted performances with a powerful alchemy of faith and righteousness, judicious costumes by Linda Cho, a set by David Rockwell that economically transforms from principal’s office, exterior walled garden and spare pulpit at St Nicholas’s parish in the Bronx, 1964. The stage version carries the subtitle A Parable, and Shanley’s play remains a provocative and absorbing examination of intuition, institution and uncertainty in a cloistered powder keg of local power. It’s a testament to the magnetism of the performances and the play itself – its pared-down structure, its tension of agendas at odds – that the 90-minute show breezes by in what feels like half that.
