No Doubt about it (I crack myself up, seriously)

As had widely been predicted John Patrick Shanley's latest play, Doubt, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year (which means that, yes, the director of Joe vs. the Volcano now has a Pulitzer).

The play is currently being staged on Broadway with a cast that includes Tony winners Cherry Jones and Brian F. O'Byrne but it's also in its final week of a L.A.-area production at the Pasadena Playhouse.

It's a refreshing and complicated piece of work that is ostensibly about the hot button topic of pedophilia in the Catholic church but is much more interested in exploring the slippery slope of moral certainty, the elusive nature of truth and those nagging feelings of doubt we either acknowledge or deny.

Shanley creates four exceptional characters including iron-willed Sister Aloysious (Jones will likely pick up another Tony for her acclaimed performance, while Linda Hunt plays the role locally in a performance I found slightly disappointing). Some observers have seen the Sister as the villain of the piece, as she embarks on a sort of witch hunt to unmask a young priest as a pedophile. Others have been eager to draw comparisons between the play's content and the current political scene.

While I think many of the plays theme are worth a close look in Washington D.C. these days, I also think Shanley's work is far more complicated than those narrow readings. To see Aloysious purely as a villain is to miss her noble intentions, tragic history and underdog status within her own system. Each of Shanley's characters has their good and bad traits, there are absolutely no easy answers here. In life there's only so much we can ever know.

Doubt is the kind of work that is worth seeing because it's worth reacting to, and each reaction is likely to be a little different. It's interesting that the two most thought-provoking works that I've seen recently have both been in the theater, the other being Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?.

I'd like to see both of these works turned into films, hopefully for cable, where their provocative ideas might be uniquely appreciated and considered by a larger audience.