On the Aisle: Mortal combat

The theatrical equivalent of a sea change can occur, and often does, but not in the case of John Patrick Shanley’s terse, compelling drama, “Doubt,” which has made the move from Manhattan Theatre Club on 55th Street, where it opened in November of last year, to the Walter Kerr Theatre on West 48th Street, where it reopened last week, in fine form.
“Doubt, a Parable,” to give it the playwright’s full title, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama on Monday. On stage, it has the distinct advantage of boasting four of the best and most original performances to be found in New York at the moment.
The members of director Doug Hughes’s four-actor cast have, thankfully, made the seven-block transfer intact, and, if anything, are doing subtler, more delicately nuanced work than they did at MTC.
The heart and soul of the play was and is, of course, the mortal warfare waged by a rigid, aging nun, Sister Aloysius, against a charismatic, humane young priest, Father Flynn, whom she suspects, with virtually no evidence, of having taken too great an interest in a 12-year-old student he has trained as an altar boy.
The lad, Donald Muller, is the only black student in the Bronx institution that the playwright, a son of that borough, has identified as “St. Nicholas Church School.” The time is autumn 1964, a point at which Shanley was an extremely obstreperous 14-year-old.
Less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the student body at St. Nicholas is still more or less evenly divided between Irish and Italians.
The world of St. Nicholas, flawlessly rendered by designer John Lee Beatty, features a convent and a rectory, constructed of rather forbidding stone masonry and separated by a hopeless-looking patch of garden.
New to the Broadway situation is a vast brick expanse rising above the back wall of the enclosure, and, it seems, a slight humanization in the personality of the old battlewagon of a nun, played so brilliantly by Cherry Jones.
That enhancement, to be sure, may well be in the eye of the beholder, which is to say the second-time beholder. The same situation applies to the subtlety of Brian F. O’Byrne’s multi-layered performance as the beleaguered young priest.
O’Byrne has been given three scenes requiring him to address the audience directly. Two are sermons in which his hearers are “cast” as St. Nicholas parishioners, and in the third the audience ‘becomes” the gaggle of children Flynn is trying to hammer into basketball players.
In each instance, the actor’s craft and intelligence combine to produce a demonstration of acting of an unusually high order, with particular emphasis on the timing he demonstrates in the sequence with the gym class.
If anything, Byrne, a native of the town of Virginia, Co. Cavan, has enriched and deepened his grasp of the Irish-American cadence heard in the Bronx since the play’s tenure at Manhattan Theatre Club.
The strong, resonant work being done by Jones and O’Byrne is of prize-winning quality, but it isn’t the whole show at the Walter Kerr, not by a long shot.
In smaller, but hardly insignificant roles, two fine actresses shine. Heather Goldenhersh, as the seemingly na