Indiana Wesleyan University Theatre Guild put on a show for Day of Courageous Conversations. The show was called Doubt: A Parable, and let me just say, it was great. The show took place in a black box theatre with the audience sitting mainly on one side. The story took place in a school run by a nunnery. There were only 4 characters in the cast: Sister James, the principal of the school, the reverend, and the mother of Donald Mueller, the first black student in the school. Other characters are eluded to, but they never make an appearance. That’s kind of how a lot of the play goes; there is a lot of eluding to something, but things are never outrightly spoken. Makes sense I suppose, considering it’s titled as a parable. I don’t believe this play will ever show again, but just in case, this is a warning for spoilers.
The play opens with a conversation between sister James and the principal. Right away it becomes very clear that the principal is incredibly conservative, almost villain-like, and she is telling sister James that she should be more strict in her classrooms and not show unequal enthusiasm in a subject, in fact, she should not be enthusiastic at all, but treat each subject she teaches seriously.
We learn some sleazy things about the reverend through sister James, who witnessed one of her students returning from a private meeting with the reverend. She tells the principal that Donald Mueller had an uncomfortable look on his face when he came to her classroom and she smelled alcohol on his breath. From there, the principal begins to take things into her own hands, trying to protect the boy and eject the reverend from the school. However, there is a hierarchy that the principal is expected to follow when it comes to handling such matters– she is not supposed to handle things herself, but tell the higher-ups, but she doesn’t follow this because she knows that the reverend and his position is being protected by those higher-ups. Sister James doesn’t like that the principal is trying to handle everything because she is very naive and innocent and she doesn’t want to be involved with everything. She wants to stay unaware of any sinister things that might be going on, particularly because she believes the reverend is good. The principal tells her, “innocence is only wisdom in a world without evil.”
The principal brings the reverend into her office with sister James as a witness and asks him to admit to whatever he did with Donald Mueller. The reverend hates the accusation methods that the principal used but tells her that the boy drank altar wine meant for communion and that is why he had alcohol on his breath and that is why he was talking with him privately because he didn’t want him to get kicked off the altar boys. After this, sister James thinks everything is solved. She is happy because she can now stay innocent because she has just been told that the reverend is good. But the principal doesn’t think that is the end of it. She thinks that the reverend has been having an inappropriate relationship with Donald Mueller. She calls in his mother, but she insists that the problem be left alone because of the good education that Donald is getting out of it and he is also protected from the other students. In the end, the principal tells the reverend that she called a nun at a different school that he previously worked at and she told her the truth of the relations that he had with students. She tells the reverend that he needs to resign or else and he does. Later we find out that the principal never actually called the nun at the other school and that she made it up to threaten the reverend. But since it worked, it was proof that he was having inappropriate relationships with the students. At the very end, the principal admits that she has doubts about whether what she did was right.
On the day of courageous conversations, Indiana Wesleyan University Theatre Guild performed a show called “Doubt: A Parable”. I have to say, every time I go to a theatre production at IWU, I’m never disappointed. While there were only 4 seen characters in this play, I was easily drawn into the world they created on stage. Other characters were talked about and eluded to but never seen and yet, they created a weight of their existence that made it easy to imagine them even though they weren’t ever seen on stage.
The writing of the play was incredible. At first, I wondered in what way the play was a parable for doubt, as that was the title of the play. But as the play went on I noticed how much ambiguity was being utilized. The characters spent a lot of time eluding to things that they would not say outrightly because of it being speculative, which was both frustrating and intriguing. The ambiguity of the story made it a parable. Doubt itself is having ambiguity. It is having some feeling that you must be right, and yet not really knowing for sure. This play expressed that on so many levels. It wasn’t only the characters on stage that had doubt, but even the audience, because the main problem in the play was never stated outright, the audience never really knew for sure if what they thought was going on, was really going on. In addition, the ambiguity of it all added all the more to the sleaziness that the audience picked up on; and yet still, we could never be sure. Was it incredibly sleazy? Or not as bad as we thought?