Doubt (movie tie-in edition)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Now a major motion picture! Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer Prize–winning play.

“The best new play of the season. That rarity of rarities, an issue-driven play that is unpreachy, thought-provoking, and so full of high drama that the audience with which I saw it gasped out loud a half-dozen times at its startling twists and turns. Mr. Shanley deserves the highest possible praise: he doesn’t try to talk you into doing anything but thinking-hard-about the gnarly complexity of human behavior.”—Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

“A breathtaking work of immense proportion. Positively brilliant.”—Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly

“#1 show of the year. How splendid it feels to be trusted with such passionate, exquisite ambiguity unlike anything we have seen from this prolific playwright so far. In just ninety fast-moving minutes, Shanley creates four blazingly individual people. Doubt is a lean, potent drama . . . passionate, exquisite, important and engrossing.”—Linda Winer, Newsday

John Patrick Shanley is the author of numerous plays, including Danny in the Deep Blue Sea, Dirty Story, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia, Sexualis, Sailor’s Song, Savage in Limbo, and Where’s My Money? He has written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Congo; Alive; Five Corners; Joe Versus the Volcano, which he also directed; and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for best original screenplay.

About the Author

John Patrick Shanley is from the Bronx. He was thrown out of St. Helene's kindergarten, banned from St. Anthony's hot lunch program and expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. When asked why he had been treated in this way, he burst into tears and said he had no idea. Then he went into the Marine Corps. He did fine. He is still doing ok.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group (December 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559363479
• ISBN-13: 978-1559363471
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,447 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There are some things you just know....., April 6, 2005

By	Matt C. (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Doubt: A Parable (Paperback)

There's something about Father Flynn (Brian O'Byrne) that doesn't sit right with Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones). The year is 1964. The shadow of the Kennedy assassination hangs in the air like a thin fog, integration has begun to spread throughout the country, and, at a Catholic grammar school in the Bronx, the traditions Aloysius relies upon are slipping away. No person represents this progression of time and society more than Flynn. He personalizes his sermons, takes three sugars in his tea, and treats the students with a familiarity that Sister Aloysius believes can only lead to disrespect. However, what makes Aloysius most uneasy about Flynn is the relationship between him and the school's first African-American student. It's a relationship she believes has gone too far. Though she has little more than her gut to go on, Aloysius, with the ambivalent assistance of a young, idealistic fellow sister, goes about a private investigation to correct the wrong she knows has occurred.
The brilliance of Doubt (John Patrick Shanley's funny, suspenseful and finally devastating play) is its combination of Aloysius's forward drive with Flynn's compassionate intellect. Sister Aloysius could have been painted as a fire-and-brimstone kook, but Shanley allows us to see the steel rod of principle that supports Aloysius's stern demeanor and almost maddening certainty. Similarly, Father Flynn stands in for the forward-thinking, tender man of the cloth many long for in the wake of the sex scandal's of the Catholic Church. Yet there is also a subtle manipulation to Flynn's innocuous quirks that draws us in. We like Flynn while, like Aloysius, instinctively analyze his every word and action, for clues to the truth of the matter at hand.
Clocking in at around an hour-and-a-half, Doubt is a marvel of compact, streamlined narrative. There isn't a superfluous action or misplaced word, and the characters speak with the no-nonsense cadences of individuals who actually grew up and around the streetlights and subways of the Bronx. Shanley's depth of character and comprehension of narrative is made all the more stunning by his play's brevity. He is certainly assisted by director Doug Hughes's elegant staging and two towering performances by O'Byrne and especially Jones. If one can see this play live (currently at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York), I highly recommend it. It was one of the most powerful theater-goeing experiences I've ever been privileged to attend.
Even if you can't, however, the piercing complexity of Shanley's words are worth every cent. We never do find out the truth behind Flynn's relationship with the young boy, although there is evidence for and against that can lead a reader to induce what they like. Shanley's ultimate vision is of the elusiveness and impossibility of the truth, and the price of certainty. And all the while, he never forgets the terse mystery and fascinating character study at the play's heart. It's a tribute to Doubt's ingenious construction and peerless insight that the play's final moments are its most revealing. A lie is uncovered, a resolution is decided upon, and the battered heart of a seemingly inconquerable woman is layed bare with a revealing, haunting final line.
In an age of theatrical uncertainty, the astonishing Doubt is beyond reproach.

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.", October 14, 2005

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Doubt: A Parable (Paperback)

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Doubt is, by turns, funny, shocking, stimulating, and ultimately, wise. Capturing the conflicts within St. Nicholas Church and its school in the Bronx in 1964, the play revolves around Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a rigidly doctrinaire school principal in her fifties who strictly controls both the staff and her students. A late entrant into the religious life, Sister Aloysius was married to a man killed during World War II, and the school has become her life. Sister James, a young teacher in her twenties, is temperamentally her opposite, a young woman who loves her students and is warm and generous towards them.

When Sister Aloysius concludes that Donald Muller, the first black student at the school, is getting too much attention from Father Brendan Flynn, she sets the play's central conflict in motion. Though she has no evidence that anything untoward has occurred, she proceeds as if Donald has been sexually abused by the priest, never doubting her conclusions. Sister James doubts Sister Aloysius and has faith in the priest.

The issue becomes more complex when both Sister Aloysius and Fr. Flynn approach the same church hierarchy--she to ask for an investigation and he to protect his reputation. Questions of doubt multiply, both for the characters and for the audience: Does something called "the truth" exist? How much should one accept on faith? When is an issue so important that one must put aside doubts and act? When do one's doubts lead to growth?

Set during a time when sexual abuse was not receiving the attention it has received in recent years, the play shows the damage which can occur when someone believes too easily in a specific "truth," whether that be the "truth" as defined by a prevailing culture, such as the church, or the kind of "truth" which one seeks in a courtroom. As the author points out in his preface, "We've got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word."

The play's four characters interact in a series of powerful and often moving scenes in which the "theatrics" are deliberately restrained. Shanley avoids easy answers to the mystery at the heart of this play, forcing the audience to think about the action as it unfolds, expanding the audience's vision, and showing that "It is Doubt that changes things." At the end of the play, the audience will be full of doubts about the central conflict, and that, according to Shanley, is good. n Mary Whipple

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfectly constructed examination of doubt, June 2, 2005

By	Peter D. Thompson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Doubt: A Parable (Paperback)

John Patrick Shanley has written a short, but superb play. Not one word is unnecessary. Power seems to just evaporate from the pages and I would love to see it on stage. Shanley writes like Tennessee Williams, suspenseful and yet still full of meaning.

Two nuns suspect a priest of foul play with the Catholic school's first black student. One nun continues to persecute the priest further, seemingly certain of his guilt, but later we learn she was never really very certain. Another nun is torn between the seemingly harsh nun and seemingly kind priest. We also see the priest certain of his position and his superior who would never doubt the priest's merits. The boy's mother also appears. The play may not seem that dramatic, but it is and not only does it deal with the characters' doubt it also deals with our own up through the very last page.

This play provokes great thought about certainty, whether it exists, and what it does for us.