John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award®-winning Best Play has blazed back to Broadway starring Academy Award® and Tony nominee Amy Ryan and Tony winner Liev Schreiber. This “excellent new revival, directed by Scott Ellis, affords the pleasure of watching two supremely good actors going toe to toe” (The Wall Street Journal). “Ryan and Schreiber are electric on Broadway (Entertainment Weekly).”.
The fireworks begin as the exacting principal of a Bronx Catholic school—feared by students and colleagues alike—suspects improper relations between a charismatic priest and a student. She’s forced to wrestle with what’s fact, what’s fiction, and just how far she’ll go to expose what she sees as the truth. As the New York Post says, “It keeps the audience guessing and second-guessing through the play’s famous final line.”
Director Scott Ellis is happy not to push past the expected. David Rockwell’s set dutifully revolves between stony, ivy-twined cloister courtyard and massy mahogany office. Ryan wears the same severe bonnet and glasses that Streep and Cherry Jones wore before her. Mikaal Sulaiman’s straightforward sound design gives us crows cawing, children at play, and kyries between scenes. And, while one needn’t belabor the point, seven of the eight-person central production team are men. The famous faces onstage are new, but much of what’s been packaged here feels intensely, and intentionally, the same as it ever was.
In the two decades since John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” premiered—winning a best play Tony and a Pulitzer Prize—the mystery at its core, whether a priest has molested a child, has hardly grown less grave. But cultural changes now cast their own shadows over Mr. Shanley’s taut, gripping drama. The excellent Broadway revival, directed by Scott Ellis for the Roundabout Theatre Company, starring Amy Ryan and Liev Schreiber, presents the play without any intentional new slant on its ideas, but it gives audiences a chance to consider them in an altered context.
Digital Rush
Price: $48
Where: On the TodayTix app.
When: 9am on the day of the performance
Limit: Two per customer
Information: Subject to availability.
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