Doubt

So last night I went to the Free Night of Theater. It’s this thing that’s done in about 100 cities around the country, where theaters offer free tickets to get people out seeing live performance. Or if you do go to shows, go to a theater that you haven’t been to before. That would be me. So I got tickets for a show at the WaterTower in Addison. I’ve been meaning to see one of their shows before, but you know how you just never get around to stuff? But since this involved my favorite four-letter word beginning with ‘F’ (free!), I made the effort.

The play was Doubt. It’s in the same play cycle as Defiance, which I saw a few weeks ago at Theatre 3. It’s about a nun who suspects that her school’s priest is “interfering” with a male student. You’re never supposed to know for sure how much you should trust anyone’s perceptions or assumptions in the show.

And I decided 5 minutes in to the show that I would have been a better audience if I hadn’t had 2 teachers who “interfered” with female students when I was a teenager. (My niece, who went to the show with me, asked me, “Where the heck did you go to school?” Unfortunately, it seems in this regard, no place all that unusual.) Not that I was one of their victims. Turns out there actually are advantages to being a goofy looking, overly-cynical teenager. But the fact that I’d seen 2 of these people in operation kind of colored my reactions to everything the priest said or did. I never held any doubts. I was on the nun’s side from jump street.

Not that not being the ideal objective observer made the show un-enjoyable. The play itself balances light and dark, using humor to both draw you into the drama, and to throw it into darker contrast in the harsher moments. The actors were all very good. The nun was played as one of those tough old birds who ends up isolated by her need to do things the right way. By the end of the show, I just wanted somebody to reach out to her because she was breaking my heart. (I’ve heard that Doubt will be in theaters fairly soon, starring Meryl Streep as the nun. And I can tell you right now, La Streep will rock balls in that role.) The priest on the other hand, was one of those characters that I have trouble separating the actor from the role. It’s probably to his credit that by the end I wanted to jump on stage and push his face in. Objectivity was completely out the window.