The next afternoon Lady Rose and I went to the pay-what-you-can matinee of "Doubt" at Theatre Calgary. We blundered into some awesome seats and counted ourselves lucky. The show-thats-just-been-made-into-a-movie thing led to a lot of buzz about this show, but I have to admit I didn't think that much of it. Don't get me wrong, I thought the cast did a great job, and the set was pretty amazing, but for all the hype I thought the script was a little weak. Not, perhaps, the best pick for TC's first one-act in a long time. It felt like it should have been the first act of a two act play, where the real meat, digging down to the truth of the characters, and facing the real depth of the issue got done in the second act. As it was, everyone got off a little easy as far as I was concerned, with pretty minor consequences. Not that you go to TC for heavy psychological drama in general, but when you decide to take the plunge and face the dark secrets of the catholic priesthood you better damn well deliver. Nuff said.
That evening, we went back to our roots. A brand new community theatre company doing their first show in the Pumphouse. David Ives. Still weirds me out a little since Hidden Insanity's first show was at the Pumphouse and featured a script by David Ives - one of the plays from the set presented this evening. Perhaps its just the distance of a few years, but I really noticed how painfully shallow Ives is in this production. The actors did a good job with what they had - nice timing, clear characterizations, good energy and tight physicality. But its all just hyperintellectual sketch comedy and at that point I'd rather see original work than reruns of the now somewhat dated Ives material. Still it brought me back to a happy time in my life. In the last scene one characters prop cokebottle glasses broke on a particularly resounding death-of-trotsky and the audience couldn't help but laugh along as the cast valiantly tried to hold it together to finish the scene. These little disasters, it seems to me, are as vital as any success in making that show memorable for the company and driving them back to the theatre for years to come. If you doubt it, ask me about the "fringe flu" sometime.
2 comments:
ah fringe flu. I wish I could have seen what the audience had seen.
I haven't yet seen Doubt: The Movie (In Full Color Moving Pictures), but I am looking forward to the chance. Hopefully, I haven't missed it at the local art house movie house.
I want to suggest the play is not actually about "the dark secrets of the Catholic priesthood". After all, the main characters are the nuns. And in the same way that the priest is a secondary player in the script, so is the issue of his possible indiscretion.
Doubt, I think, is primarily about the question of whether one should trust in one's personal conviction or in the effective operations of an institution. It is the question at the heart of the Reformation and at the heart of this play.
If this play were only about whether priests mucked around with boys, then, I agree it is a bit vapid. But it is not. Instead, It is about how a person --especially a person who is marginalized in a specific institution -- should draw conclusions about events and behavior in that institution. It is effectively a play about epistemology.
So, from this perspective, the play works very well -- or the version I saw worked well in this respect. It leads the audience along a path whereby we eventually adopt each plausible perspective on what might have happened and, while there, we take that perspective to heart and seriously accept it as being valid and true. The net result is that we are confronted only with the fact of uncertainty.
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