Jamestown College to present drama ‘Doubt’

The latest Jamestown College play takes a stern look at a serious issue and at the end it’s up to the viewer to decide.

“Doubt,” by John Patrick Shanley, is a contemporary play with four cast members, where a nun at a parochial school suspects a priest of molesting an altar boy.

“In my take on the play the setting is almost incidental,” said Mike McIntyre, show director. “The kinds of things that happen between these characters are possible in any kind of setting.”

Although the subject matter is serious, the director said people can relate to the human nature of the script.

“The play is a terrific exercise in investigating what we do once we have that idea of doubt in our minds, and what it causes us to do, and how we treat each other,” McIntyre said.

“Doubt” is a fairly new play and debuted in 2004. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2005.

“It’s that intelligent of a script and a script that’s that accessible for everyone to understand and relate to in a number of ways,” McIntyre said.

In the play Sister Aloysius, played by Beth Ryan, believes Father Flynn, played by Anthony Roth, is having a relationship with a boy at the school.

Eventually the boy’s mother, Mrs. Mueller (Briana VanZant), is brought into the situation. And Sister James, played by Lindsey Kuntz, walks a middle ground.

“She doesn’t like seeing the dark side of things so she’s trying very, very hard to have Sister Aloysius like her and be in her good graces,” Kuntz said. “So she kind of instigates the whole situation by bringing a situation up and it ends up snowballing in essence.”

The full title of the play is “Doubt: a Parable.”

Those parables come in the form of snippets of sermons the priest gives after earlier discussions, McIntyre said. The priest often draws up stories for sermons to relate to what he is going through.

“In doing research for the author I did find there are some things in his past similar enough to this situation that he felt compelled enough to write about them,” McIntyre said.

By the end of the play it’s up to the audience to decide what happened.

“There are repercussions that happened and it can kind of be up to the audience if the results are fair in the situation,” McIntyre said.

Tickets are $7 and can be reserved through the Box Office. Call 701-252-3467, ext. 5435, send email to tickets@jc.edu, or visit www.jc.edu and click on “Community” and “Reiland Box Office.” The Box Office is located in room 130 of the Reiland Fine Arts Center. Box Office hours are 3 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Sun reporter Ben Rodgers can be reached at 701-952-8455 or by email at brodgers@jamestownsun.com

Tags: diversions, arts