“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” These words, delivered in a sermon in the opening moments of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable, drop to the floor forgotten and unheeded as the play’s characters retreat into their fortified certainties. But they land in our fractured times with the weight of a wistful and elusive prophecy.
Wren Theatre’s production of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning masterwork (2005) transforms the Annex Theatre – a converted church built in 1888– into a crucible where certainty and doubt wage an eternal, essential battle. A stained-glass window looms above the stage’s twin staircases, and the exposed wall below presents an architectural metaphor: some sections of brick and mortar appear solid and unshakeable, while others are mere blotches of blackness – like doubt itself eating away at the foundations of certainty.
Set in 1964 at a Bronx Catholic school, the play centers on Sister Aloysius’s suspicion that the progressive Father Flynn is engaging in improper conduct. From this deceptively simple premise unfurls a sophisticated and layered exploration of truth, power, and the courage required to doubt one’s own convictions. Director Tatum Lee orchestrates their moral chess match with exquisite precision and nuance, yielding a quartet of outstanding acting performances.
Bonnie Anderson’s Sister Aloysius is the unbending avatar of “the way it is”. She masterfully portrays a woman who wields her convictions offhandedly and cuttingly, like a weapon — and knows, simply knows, that the idealistic Sister James, the progressive Father Flynn, even the pragmatic Mrs. Muller –must bend themselves to her way. Meanwhile, when Robert Notman’s smooth, sincere-seeming Flynn declares to Sister James that “the truth makes for a bad sermon” because “it tends to be confusing and have no clear conclusion,” we start to detect his own dangerous certainty — that he alone, like Christ, can dispense deeper truths through made-up parables. And Lizzie Moffatt brings a touching, increasingly tortured vulnerability to young Sister James, who is caught between these opposing forces of authority.
Finally, Jessica Myrie as Mrs. Muller delivers the production’s most shattering moments. In her brief but pivotal scene, Myrie crafts a masterclass in urgent, understated power that de-stabilizes the tug-of-war we have been watching. The only one who is truly advocating for someone else’s interests, she deploys a searing mix of fact, perception, and heart-rending emotion in her attempts to pierce the armor of self-righteous certainty with shared understanding — and yes, doubt.
What makes this production compelling is the painfully real way that these antagonists never speak directly or plainly to one another from a place of genuine curiosity and candour. Instead, we watch as they launch rhetorical salvos and misdirection from behind the battlements of their individual certainties. We develop our own rooting interests, but they ebb and flow because the uniformly strong performances of the cast members are finely tuned to illuminate character flaws at key moments – like inverse reflections of the sunlight shining through that stained-glass window, revealing the shadows that certainty can cast on the soul.
As we exit the Annex Theatre into a world where unshakeable convictions are literally threatening to tear our relationships, our nation and our world apart, Doubt feels less like historical drama and more like the parable which its subtitle tells us it is. Wren Theatre has mounted a wonderful production of an inscrutable and excruciatingly relevant play. It reminds us that doubt – the genuine, courageous shedding of our individual certainties, in favour of the collective curiosity and solidarity to explore our collective uncertainties – might be our last defense against the forces that threaten to fragment our society beyond repair.
Wren Theatre’s Doubt: A Parable is on stage at the Annex Theatre until October 25, 2025. Reserve tickets at wrentheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
