Starting this week, I'll be writing about theater in these pages on a regular basis. As befits this paper, I consider myself an advocate for the theater—someone who loves the stage, respects and admires the work of the individuals and companies who tread the boards, and wants to see them thrive.
As a reporter, I'll try to cover the range and variety of theatrical offerings in the Valley and beyond—though even a weekly column can't do justice to the cornucopia of work on show. As a critic, I'll try, as I have for almost a quarter-century here, to be fair and constructive—an advocate for quality, an admirer of risk-taking, and a parser of imperfections.
I recently saw the term "critical thinking" defined as reconciling belief with doubt. That's how I see the critic's job—to match a generous belief in the enterprise with an openness to skepticism about the results.
Which brings us to previews of two shows playing in Northampton this weekend, both of them touching on matters of belief and uncertainty.
Reasonable Doubt
"What do you do when you're not sure?"
That's the very first line of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, and it sets the course for the whole evening. It also serves as a challenge and advance warning for the audience. The play grows out of the clergy abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, but it's not about crime and retribution. Though it revolves around a question of guilt or innocence, at the end it leaves us with more doubt than certainty.
When it premiered in New York in 2005, Doubt won all the best-play awards. It has since become a regional-theater staple, following on the heels of that other one-word puzzler/thriller, Proof—both of them portraying moral struggles over issues of truth and doubt. The production playing this weekend at Northampton's Academy of Music was originally staged last summer by Old Deerfield Productions.
Doubt takes place in the 1960s at a parochial school where one of the staff, a priest, is accused of molesting a male student. Father Flynn (Andrew Lichtenberg) is an informal, friend-of-the-boys sort of fellow, a priest of the new school that welcomed the doctrinal and liturgical liberalizations of Vatican II. His nemesis is the school's principal, Sister Aloysius (Maureen McElligott), a strict by-the-book traditionalist who views the modern trends with alarm and believes that what children (and souls, for that matter) need is discipline, not mollycoddling.
Her accusations against the priest are met with hot denials, and in the course of their confrontations—as well as conversations with the boy's mother (Heather A. Lord) and another teacher, an idealistic young nun (Marissa Sicley)—we learn things that give support to, and cast doubt on, both positions. The playwright never gives us the comforting luxury of finding out for certain who's right. In Doubt, the only black and white is the characters' clerical vestments. Shanley has been quoted as saying that act two of this 75-minute one-act takes place after the curtain call, in the discussions between spectators on the way home—or in this case, during the audience talkbacks that follow this weekend's performances.
Shanley sets his play in the aftermath of Vatican II and the JFK assassination—a time of soul-searching in the Church and the country as a whole, when the old certainties had been knocked over and people were grasping for answers. The play's subtitle is "A Parable," and that existential moment in the '60s, says director Linda McInerney, parallels the playwright's view of post-9/11 America, when the nation's shock and anger found expression in a drive for revenge fueled by stubborn certainty and entrenched preconceptions.
"So many mistakes were made at that time out of a lack of doubt," McInerney mused recently during a rehearsal. "What would have happened in this country if we had embraced the doubt of not really knowing where we stood in the world and how to move forward? If we had opened our hearts to others and said, 'Here we all are now, what's next?'"
That's the frame that resonates in this play. On one hand, it's an intriguing mystery which, as McInerney puts it, "offers a ride for the audience that tingles everything." But it's also a challenge to our capacity to tolerate insecurity, to welcome uncertainty, because it demands deeper thought and more responsible action.
Dead Again
It's all about rebirth. Some years ago, the barn at Shantigar, the mountainside retreat for meditation, theater and healing in Rowe, burned to the ground. Now Shantigar, along with its Ashfield neighbor, Pilgrim Theater, has mounted a production of The Tibetan Book of the Dead to raise money to rebuild it. It plays in Northampton this weekend on its way to LaMama, New York's temple of the avant-garde, later this month.
The choice of script is apt. It's a work by Shantigar's founder and director, the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie. And it's based on an ancient text of Tibetan Buddhism, a prayer spoken over the dead or dying that serves as a guide through the "intermediate state" to rebirth in the soul's next incarnation.
In van Itallie's loose-limbed adaptation, a kind of post-mortem Everyman is guided by a pair of ministering angels through six realms, or states of consciousness, on the journey between life, death and rebirth. Court Dorsey plays The Dying One as a Chaplinesque figure, carrying his earthly baggage in the form of actual suitcases. The spirit guides, played by Kermit Dunkelberg and Susan Thompson, are somewhat cynical escorts whose thankless job it is to shepherd this hapless rube through his passage.
The treatment is irreverent (the subtitle is "How Not to Do It Again!") and a bit psychedelic, according to Dorsey. "We've tried to take the didactic element out of the text," he says. There are also some tongue-in-cheek pokes at the more precious postures of New Age spirituality.
Directed by Pilgrim Theater's Kim Mancuso, the piece has original music by John vanEps and Steve Gorn. The set, by LaMama veteran Jun Maeda, is a giant latticework of tree branches woven around gaping holes to represent a human skull.
Doubt plays Friday and Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 2 at the Academy of Music, Northampton. (413) 586-5895. Across the street at the Northampton Center for the Arts, The Tibetan Book of the Dead runs Friday and Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 7. (413) 584-7327.
