Doubt, a Parable on the Page and on the Screen
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THE PLAYWRIGHT AS A TRANSLATOR OF HIMSELF: DOUBT, A PARABLE ON THE PAGE AND ON THE SCREEN Sandra Sirangelo MAGGIO* Valter Henrique FRITSCH** Doubt can only be removed by action. (Goethe, 2005, p.105) ABSTRACT: John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt, a Parable (2004) revisits the world he knew as a child, the Bronx of the 1960’s. The story centers upon a Catholic Irish- Italian school community, and the plot relates to a doubt – that grows into belief, and ends up as certainty – on the part of Sister Aloysius, the principal of the school. She is persuaded that Father Flynn, the vicar, has been harassing the only Black student in the school. The play is an open-ended construct, allowing each reader/spectator to build his own interpretation of the facts implied. Shanley is more than the author of the play. He is also the producer of the stage version, the author of the screenplay and the director of the movie version. This essay examines the strategies used by Shanley to keep the possibility of interpretation open as he translates his own work into different media, on the page and on the screen. KEYWORDS: John Patrick Shanley. Doubt, a Parable. Contemporary American drama. Studies of the imaginary. When John Patrick Shanley (2004) devised Doubt, a Parable, he got engaged in writing a play about the world he knew in the 1964 Bronx – his own neighborhood. At that time, he was a boy from an Irish family inserted in a Catholic community that had its parish divided between Irish and Italian families. This scenery has played an important role in his plays. As one can notice, the Bronx is recurrent in Shanley’s works such as in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Welcome to the Moon * UFRGS – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Instituto de Letras – Departamento de Línguas Modernas. Rio Grande do Sul – RS – Brasil. 91540-000 – [email protected] ** Doutorando em Letras. UFRGS – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Instituto de Letras – Pós-Graduação em Letras. Rio Grande do Sul – RS – Brasil. 91540-000 – valter.fritsch@ yahoo.com.br Itinerários, Araraquara, n. 36, p.65-79, jan./jun. 2013 65 Sandra Sirangelo Maggio e Valter Henrique Fritsch and Italian American Reconciliation. In these plays, we find reflexes of Shanley’s childhood’s neighborhood, through characters that represent the kind of people the author used to observe when he lived there. Doubt, a Parable is not different from the other plays in this respect. The story is set in a Bronx Catholic community with its center at St Nicholas Church and School – attended basically by Irish and Italian students. The principal of the school, Sister Aloysius, is both a nun and the head of the school. The other characters are Sister James, a nun and a teacher at St Nicholas School, Father Flynn, the priest responsible for St Nicholas parish, and Mrs. Muller, the mother of the only African-American student in the place – Donald Miller. In this setting a number of dramatic tensions are articulated, involving as varied thematic lines as relations of power, sexuality, gender, color, morality and ethics. Despite the setting, however, Shanley (2004) says that this is not a play about Catholicism, Sisters of Charity1 or a discussion on religious beliefs or racial segregation. The author sees the work as a play about doubt. The plot develops around Sister Aloysius’s suspicion, which grows into persuasion and certainty, that Father Flynn is molesting Donald Miller, the Black Student. She is struck by that notion after Sister James – Donald’s teacher – comments that Donald came to the class from the church seeming frightened and with alcohol smell in his breath. This happens after a meeting he had with Father Flynn. This triggers the central conflict in the play, and can be interpreted by the reader or spectator in different ways, depending on the point of view he sides with. To Sister Aloysius, this is a case of pedophilia; Father Flynn denies the accusation and states his point; Sister James is pressed between two strong persuasive argumentations. The play unfolds as a series of dialogues, punctuated by three monologues – two of them delivered by Father Flynn to his congregation, on the subjects of doubt and gossip. These sermons are self-revealing and can be even taken as self-incriminating. The play Doubt, a Parable is a work about doubts. In this aesthetic construct we can see a combination of images that relate to questions that have been haunting contemporary ethics and philosophy. The two millennia of Christianity that have forged our history are now being deconstructed and analyzed by contemporary thinkers. As the good comes along with the bad, there is a positive side and a negative side to this process. On the one hand, the realization that there is no immanent truth, but rather a number of different approaches to the same phenomena, is redeeming and allows people to move in a freer and more independent way. On the other 1 The Sisters of Charity is a congregation of religious women in the Catholic Church whose primary missions are education and nursing, and who are dedicated in particular to the service of the poor. Shanley dedicates his play to the many orders of Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes. 66 Itinerários, Araraquara, n. 36, p.65-79, jan./jun. 2013 The playwright as a translator of himself: Doubt, a Parable on the page and on the screen hand, the price paid for that has impaired any possibility of mythical thought in the present day when people seem to have more difficulty in finding articulations between reality and imagination,2 reason and symbolic thought, technology and humanization. We have come close to an aporia where all our doubts seem to be meaningless. Shanley’s play invites us into an investigation of this present tension, by approaching the issue of doubt. The receptors (readers and spectators) are provoked into considering the different sides of the notion of Truth, which foments our uncertainties about what is real in a world that sometimes seems unreal. According to Shanley (2004, p.8), It is a doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like you’ve gone the wrong way and you’re lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present. As this is a wide-spreading discussion, ranging through the territories of Philosophy, Ethics, Morality, History, Religion, and Anthropology, our efforts will be constrained, as much as possible, to the limits of the fictional context ofDoubt, a Parable, lest we lose control of the discussion. The point to stress here is that we are not always aware about the extent of our doubts, or even about what doubts really are. According to Louis Althusser (2005), if we trust, we subscribe to a certain ideology; and if we suddenly find ourselves acting against the things we believe, that means that we have been exposed to more ideologies that the one we accept as the true one. Being exposed to a plethora of information is the trademark of our present time. As a consequence, uncertainty plays a main role in our perception of the world; this is the archetype of our days. But what is the role of individuality in this massively globalized society? What is true and what is not? What is doubt? Shanley’s work poses these questions. In his words, What is a doubt? Each of us is like a planet. There’s the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as you do. What was 2 In this work reality and imagination are treated as dichotomies, according to the philosophical views of Gaston Bachelard’s and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz’s (2003) Hermeneutics of the Imaginary. Reality stands for materiality, or those aspects that can be grasped through reason, whereas Imagination refers to images conceived by the human mind that do not have necessarily a connection to materiality. This also applies to Comparative Mythology, as approached by Mircea Eliade (1996) or Joseph Campbell (2002). Itinerários, Araraquara, n. 36, p.65-79, jan./jun. 2013 67 Sandra Sirangelo Maggio e Valter Henrique Fritsch your father like? Do you believe in God? Who’s your best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way (SHANLEY, 2004, p.8). We addresses such questions so as to put forward an argumentative balance involving the paradoxes of the imaginary3 as perceived through Shanley’s play, through a reading engaged with the Hermeneutics of the Imaginary. We do not mean to ask questions, but to provoke them. As Beatriz Sarlo (2004, p.15)4 suggests, questions are not always meant to be answered, Precisamente, los problemas que enfrentamos no tienen, como nunca tuvieron los problemas sociales, una solución inscripta en su enunciado.