Check out the trailer for Doubt, the new movie from John Patrick Shanley, based on his Pulitzer-winning play. A plot summary of the film (nun suspects priest of sexually abusing schoolboy) may sound like a scandal-mongering depiction of the Catholic Church, but, based on what I’ve read about the play and on what I’ve seen of Shanley’s previous work (the play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and, oddly, the movie Moonstruck), I expect a nuanced and meaningful treatment of the topic. Plus, the cast has “Oscar” written all over it.
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Carissa Turner Smith is a compulsive reader, writer, and Irish dancer. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Penn State and currently teaches literature and composition courses there. At age three, she announced that all she wanted to do was “sit at a desk and read and write,” and she has been trying to make good on that promise ever since. Fortunately, she is occasionally distracted from this mission by her husband Stephen and their cheese-obsessed cat. A loyal native of Arkansas, she has always loved the fact that Jesus dwelt in an underappreciated corner of Galilee (see John 1:46). 
This is such a superb play. I am very excited that the movie is coming out. I had the opportunity to see this on Broadway and I fell in love with it. It really speaks to the way we as people jump to conclusions without knowing what is truly happening. It also deals with the issues of crises of faith and the dangers of witch hunts which all too often the American Protestant community love to take up. The topic is much more broad than the Catholic Church sex scandal. It is primarily a vehicle to the story. It truly is a superb play. I can only hope the movie is as good.
Good to hear from someone who’s actually seen the play! Yes, from what I’ve read, the play is in some ways more about the nature of faith and, well, doubt in general.
Here’s hopin’! Fortunately Shanley has experience with the screenplay medium (oddly, also ‘Joe vs. the Volcano’). I worked on ‘Doubt’ with a friend last year, and love how it doesn’t beat you over the head with what to think about the “issue” – I think it’s a step forward for Shanley artistically in that he takes a scenario to which the audience comes with preconceptions, then dismantles their judgments and certainties. ‘Doubt’ takes a greater risk than his previous plays, which didn’t interact much with topics outside of the characters’ emotional lives.
Interestingly, his previous work deals with very inarticulate characters (playing one of them, I was amazed at how many different emotions and ideas I had to convey using one word: “f–k”) – the people in ‘Doubt’ are educated, experienced, and mature (and have wider vocabularies). And the flaws they show make you identify with them to the point where you *want* to doubt them because you want to keep liking them!
I wouldn’t say the play is about the nature of faith, however. The alternative to ‘doubt’ is not presented as ‘faith’ but as ‘certainty’. Though the story is placed in the church and is asking questions of religion and morality in community, it doesn’t investigate the relationship of the human to the divine.