Building on clay

Now that we’re inch-thick and knee-deep, head over heels into rehearsals for “Doubt“, the weight and complexity of the play is beginning to make itself apparent.  John Patrick Shanley has written a parable on the topic of not knowing, and he has laden the script with evidence that provides no clear conclusions. My early instincts, before rehearsal started, were to try to play the script simply, in a Mamet “True and False” kind of way — but I fear this is impossible.  The play opens with the sentence, “what do you do when you’re not sure?”: at this point in rehearsal, I have no idea what to do.

I’m writing this post on the assumption that you know the play or at least the premise: in brief, a nun suspects a priest of abusing a child at a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and confronts the priest based on the inconclusive evidence she has.  I’m playing the priest, and I suspect I’ll be writing a few posts like this over the next while as I wrestle with the play.  In short, you’ll suffer while I try to clear my head.

The success of “Doubt” depends on leaving the audience in a state of not being able to draw a clear conclusion. As a cast, we must preserve the delicious ambiguity in the text. It seems to follow that the process of rehearsing the play depends on not making any firm conclusions on the truth  — not before we explore the range of possibilities, anyway.  We have to mine the information that’s on the page as completely as we can.

The early scenes in the play provide a trickle of information that raises questions.  These are (dare I say it) manageable.  As the story progresses, the trickles start to thicken and mix and impact one another; the questions get bigger and the answers to new questions become dependent on the outcomes of earlier ones.  Sometimes a choice made late in the play has implications that reach right back to questions raised at the beginning.  It is obvious to me now that it is impossible to navigate the play without eventually arriving at some truth — one that must be invented, since Shanley has created a puzzle with multiple solutions.  The truth that is eventually played may be different for every actor, and perhaps even the director.  The gotcha is that if we define any truth too early, in order to make things easier on ourselves, we block exploration of the questions, project the truths we have chosen, and ruin the play for the audience.

So.  No easy route.

One approach to examining the range of possibility is to try each scene two ways in order to figure out which actions support and refute any conclusion.  Try the scene as if Father Flynn is guilty; try it as if Father Flynn is innocent.  What we have found thus far is that the simple act of standing up at different points in a scene can swing the audience’s perception completely.  Terrifying.  And we have not begun to explore the fact that the range of possible truths is almost infinite: Flynn may be guilty of something — but of what?

It’s a muddle: in exploring “Doubt”, which is a parable on the topic of living in a state of uncertainty, we must live in uncertainty.  We’re trying to build a house on a bed of clay, and the clay layer gets more and more thick and unstable every day. Right now I don’t know how much of a house can get built before it all collapses and must be restarted.

I go from a full day of rehearsing the play to an evening of performing a clown-centric comedy, and have found that the roots that “Doubt” creates in my psyche are impossible to shake.  I can’t just shrug off one coat and put on another, much as I’d like.  Tonight, a full hour of stretching before “Midwinter’s Dream Tale” did nothing for the knots in my neck and back… and tomorrow we’re tackling scenes that will thicken the clay layer even more.

By the way: I do have several functioning definitions of the truth of this play. And I’ll never tell.

It will all resolve itself eventually; right now, it’s busting my head.  Writing about it helps.