Things were very different in 1964 — President Kennedy had been assassinated just months earlier, the Beatles had only recently landed in the United States, and obedience, following regulations and unquestioned authority were still national traits.
Those last three were particularly true at a small parish church school in the Bronx, where Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Lorri Holt) has some severe doubts about her priest, Father Brendan Flynn (Kevin Rolston), over what she sees as an improper relationship between the priest and an eighth-grade boy.
That's where the frightening cat-and-mouse game between the nun and the priest begins in Center Rep's astonishingly well-done production of "Doubt," John Patrick Shanley's 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winner.
At stake is Father Flynn's career, all based on the way Sister Aloysius has interpreted things she's observed, from the way another boy yanked his hand away from the father's grasp, a private meeting between the father and the boy at the rectory, and the fact that a younger nun, Sister James (Laura Morache), smelled liquor on the boy's breath.
Sister Aloysius makes a strong case, particularly to Sister James, even though the boy's mother refused to take part in any testimony against the priest, no matter what the nun alleges (the boy, she says, is happier in his relationship with Father Flynn than he had been without it).
Making things more ticklish is the fact that the boy in question is the school's first black student, and that Father Flynn is a young, good-looking, charismatic character popular with his parishioners.
As you watch the show, each angry exchange between the nun and the priest has you changing your mind about who the real guilty party here is. You whipsaw from believing he did it to being convinced she is railroading him.
And it's done so beautifully, with excellent performances by all, particularly Holt, who creates a memorable character of an old-school nun who hates Christmas pageants because last year the girl who played Mary wore lipstick, and that children should write with fountain pens because anything else makes it too easy, and that Father Flynn's fingernails are too long. Holt's characterization makes the nun a driven woman, relentless and deadly serious in her pursuit against evil in every form.
Rolston's Flynn is the exact opposite, generally happy and smiling, but nearly driven out of his mind by the nun's passionate fight against him. His is a wonderfully wrought characterization of a man who has given his life to the best interests of humanity, yet now finds himself fighting for the very job that lets him do that.
BW Gonzalez, who plays the boy's mother, has a small gem of a part — one scene in Sister Aloysius' office, where she verbally unburdens herself with a remarkably angry monologue rebutting the nun's comments.
