Review of "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, published by EDGE Philadelphia

In academic circles, the heated debates about Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew focus solely on the misogynistic plot, completely ignoring the humor of the play. In their current production of the same, the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival takes the opposite tact-inserting humor at every possible opportunity, in a staging that occasionally comes at the expense of the play itself.

Shrew opens upon the young noble Lucentio (a smooth and mellow Zach Robidas) and his servant Tranio (Matt Pfeiffer) overhearing the laments of an awkward pair of suitors, Gremio (Wayne Turney) and Hortensio (Aaron Galligan-Stierle). Both fawn over the delicate and beautiful Bianca (Rachel Joffred), while railing against her father’s decision to withhold her hand until he can marry off his elder daughter Katherine (Grace Gonglewski). However, Kate’s foul tongue and temper make this a seemingly impossible task-her reputation and violent behavior scaring off all possible suitors in town.

Enter Petruchio (Greg Wood), an ambitious and equally abusive traveler seeking his fortune, willing to square off against Kate to secure her immense dowry. Petruchio plots to confound her every action with the opposite of her intent, and in the spirit of "perfect love," break down her stubborn contentiousness in order to make her into the perfectly submissive wife, even pausing to ask the audience if they can offer him a better way to tame a shrew.

Petruchio’s intent, and that he achieves it - Kate’s closing speech is an unmatched example of the victim’s compliance - is what enrages everyone, though to be fair, Shakespeare attempts to show in Bianca how an initial, yet manipulative docility, will lead later to a husband ruled by his mistress. Yet no one watching PSF’s production has the time to feel anger, let alone think about what’s being said, as they’re too busy laughing at the hilarious comedy crafted here by director Russell Treyz.

Drawing on every conceivable source - from Monty Python toSaturday morning cartoons - Treyz’s production capitalizes on every opportunity for humor. Wood’s initial entrance takes a self-referential poke at his age (in his mid-40’s, his character must nonetheless introduce himself as a "young man seeking his fortune"), and Gonglewski childishly torments with wet willies, Indian burns, and even titty-twisters. (I wonder if Treyz had Gonglewski do this to see just how many critics would write the word "titty-twister" into their reviews.)

But the bulk of the humor belongs to the superb ensemble, led here by Turney’s Gremio, and Chris Faith and Andy Wertner as the dimwitted servants Grumio and Biondello. If the servants can’t take Petruchio’s malice seriously, than neither can we, and the result is one long stretch of mirth and laughter, as even Wood and Gonglewski had to hide their amusement during Faith’s standout performance.

Unfortunately, the physical gags and comic inserts often hindered the dialogue, lessening the comprehension of Shakespeare’s lines, entertaining the audience while making them struggle to stay with the story. And with the cast assembled here, the dialogue and expressions deserved full attention.

From his first entrance, Wood strutted about the stage like a cat waiting to pounce-both relaxed and full of tension-and declaimed Shakespeare’s lines with the ease of a native Elizabethan. Likewise, both he and Gonglewski ignited the stage as the warring pair of lovers-she as the ferocious flame that threatened to consume the cast, and he as the explosive and pugnacious bully who set forth to extinguish her. Later, her Kate became a true delight, as the talented Gonglewski conveyed the whole of her character’s evolution from Shrew to submissive with just the lift of her eyes and the turn of her smile, melting both Petruchio and audience alike.

Besides making this one of the funniest and well-acted productions of Shrew I’ve witnessed (three so far just this year), Treyz attempts nothing new or different here. Or rather, he attempts an opening where the half-costumed cast mulls about the stage, some talking on cell phones, others listening to a radio, and where Alan Coates (brilliant and thoroughly underused in his minor part as Vincentio) interrupts this activity to welcome the audience to the "final dress rehearsal." An interesting approach, but unfortunately, Treyz does nothing else with it, neither integrating the notion of a dress rehearsal into the piece, or coming back around to this idea at the play’s end (Shakespeare already presents numerous opportunities to speak to the audience or break away from realism). All his device did was tack fifteen more minutes onto a play stuffed with the use of extras (as servants), added jokes, and Benny Hill inspired chases back and forth across the stage.

Beyond this attempt, Treyz presented an invigorating and funny, though fairly straightforward production of this play. However, given the truly magnificent cast, and the fact that most interpretations of Shakespeare range from mediocre to contemptuous, I’ll take the superb playing over bad innovations any day of the week, and highly recommend this production for the quality of the performances alone.

Review of "The Mystery of Irma Vep" at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, published by EDGE Philadelphia

What’s a play filled with werewolves, ghouls, vampires, mummies, and feisty cross-dressing Victorian romance doing in a Shakespeare Festival? In Charles Ludlam’s 1984 off-Broadway hit, The Mystery of Irma Vep, the answer is doing what the Bard did best in his own time - packing houses with a play that’s as wildly entertaining as it is original. Initially spoofing the Hitchcock film Rebecca, Irma Vep’s "plot" centers around Mandacrest Estate, home to the newly married Lady Enid, the second wife who mysteriously sleeps all day, and Lord Edgar, an Egyptologist still recovering from the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his first wife, Ms. Irma. The staff - a prissy maid still attached to Ms. Irma, Edgar’s first wife, and gluttonous swineherd Nicodemus complicate the new arrangements through their conflicting desires to serve the household’s new mistress, or not, as the case may be. This staple of Victorian melodrama only serves as the backdrop for the bizarre occurrences that come to plague Mandacrest - the appearance of the vampires, werewolves, and spirits, any one of which may or may not be the presumed dead Ms. Irma, or her presumed dead pet wolf, Victor. Edgar flees these torments-both psychological, human, and undead-by travelling to Giza, Egypt, where he discovers a resuscitating mummy that he brings back with him to Mandacrest as one more surrogate for his dead first wife. It’s self-admittedly silly, dishing out one last parody of the genre in the senseless, quickly wrapped up collusion of loose ends. The humor holds the appeal in this play, and even the title becomes one more joke to exploit - a punch line that winks at the audience no less-as Irma Vep is an anagram of the word vampire. The humor ranges from sexual innuendo ("how do you take it?" followed shortly after by "your tea, Miss"), double entendres, cute cultural references (including Janet Jackson’s Superbowl wardrobe mishap), and the, while harping mostly on the campy artificiality in its spoofs of horror films and Victorian novels. An occasional bit of clever wit threads its way through the evening, reminding of Monty Python ("how old is the family?" rejoined by "I don’t know, they’ve been descending for centuries"), and other lines provoke laughter simply because they’re intentionally insufferable, as Lady Enid remarks, "it’s intolerable to marry an Egyptologist and find out that he’s hung up on his mummy." Here, the delivery counts for everything, and these actors do not disappoint. Chris Patrick Mullen, elicits laughter from the moment he walks in, playing the role of the snooty, yet devoted maid Jane Twisden in full drag, with a wig the size of his head and a fey accent that dribbles lines like "when hell freezes over and little devils go ice skating." Brad DePlanche struts in, belly-first, as the swineherd Nicodemus, sporting a goofy, pointy Mohawk and buck teeth, wagging his tongue after crude jokes, some of his lines barely audible from the laughter generated by just his facial expressions alone. Beyond the extraordinary comedic talent displayed by Mullen and DePlanche, the evening’s most entertaining (and difficult) challenge requires these two actors, through a series of quick costume changes and perfectly timed entrances and exits, to play all eight different roles. Here director Jim Helsinger delivers the solid backdrop of staging that allows both DePlanche and Mullen to effect all these changes quickly while never missing a line, even accentuating some of the quickest changes with opportunities for humor. At one of the dozens of stage cues, DePlanche hovers at a doorway as Lady Enid, feigning to weep in order to cover his mouth and speak the lines of the now "offstage" Nicodemus, lines that no one could hear through the incessant audience laughter. Given the two stages available for the PSF productions, Helsinger couldn’t have avoided staging this play in the round without severely diminishing the number of seats available in the smaller Arena Stage. But he could have avoided the unfortunate blocking that too often set both actors facing inward at center stage. Their close talking or whispering at these points, while maybe vital to the script, shielded everyone who didn’t sit in the center section from seeing DePlanche’s or Mullen’s facial expressions - a real loss here, as much of the humor stemmed from their contorted, goofy, or harried pantomime. This one minor, but irritating glitch aside, every aspect of the production contributed to the hilarity of the evening. Bob Phillips surrounded a Victorian parlor with evenly spaced hieroglyphic-covered tiles that made the play seem like some twisted place of banishment on a board game - a bizarre jail for actors in Ludlam’s imagination. Steve TenEyck’s eerie lighting design framed Mandacrest’s exterior with crackling thunderbolts (although someone forgot to raise the Mandacrest chandelier, which then hung inside an Egyptian pyramid during Act II), while Matthew Given’s sound design adroitly punctuated repeated phrases with organ beats in a mock inspiration of terror, and chimed in hysterically when referencing Indiana Jonesand Ghost. However, Lisa L. Zinni’s costumes and wigs provided the real treat, both in terms of technical functionality and contributions to the play’s hilarity, particularly the overinflated bust of the revived mummy that threatened to smother DePlanche, and the towering wigs that threatened both actors with whiplash. Building upon their successful trend of two actors in multiple roles from last year’s Sleuth, PSF has crafted a production here that’s a real blast to watch. While the humor isn’t necessarily of my favorite breed, silliness well done by an impressive cast still entertains wildly. I enjoyed the clever touches the most, especially the set change from Act II’s Egyptian locale back to Mandacrest Manor, where four stagehands appear dressed as mummies to move the furniture, only to suddenly break out into the dance interlude from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. Whoever chose that, cast these actors, or chose to stage this play, made this production into a two-hour laugh fest that’s well worth attending.

Review of PSF's Amadeus, published by EDGE Philadelphia

The seemingly smallest choice a director makes can impact the quality and effect of a production immensely. This proved especially true in the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival’s current production of Amadeus, where director Dennis Razze cast Salieri, the ostensible villain of Peter Shaffer’s play, with the most physically striking actor in his ensemble. After watching their production, and thinking about this choice for three days and it still strikes me as both misguided and brilliant all at once.

In Amadeus, envy’s rule of "if you can’t beat ’em, destroy them," plays out in Shaffer’s psychologically penetrating story of the competitive relationship between two 18th Century musicians - Vienna’s Court Composer Antonio Salieri, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though taking more factual liberty with history than Bush’s press secretary, Shaffer portrays the younger Mozart as an ill-mannered, inspired genius who never revised music against the upright musical mediocrity of his elder contemporary Salieri. When Mozart begins to compose and perform in Vienna, Salieri, though eminently more successful at the time, hears the superior quality of Mozart’s music and vows to destroy him.

In the play, Salieri’s hatred stems from two sources, one unfortunately common-that mediocrity rebels against superior talent; and the other particular to the play: in his youth Salieri made a bargain with God. He tells us that he offered God the following: If you let me become a great composer, I will be your voice in the world, and live my life in virtuous service to your glory.

It’s a clever, powerful and easily understandable dramatic device. Whether in hospital emergency rooms, waiting for test results, or hoping a team wins the Superbowl, everyone’s made a similar compact with the heavens. However, once Salieri hears Mozart’s music, he realizes (imagines, really) that God only pretended to agree to the bargain, giving him early success only to throw him down from a greater height. Mozart, it seems, is how God’s voice truly enters the world, and Salieri vows to become "God’s instructor" and destroy Mozart, who God favors over him.

Though inspired by the story of Cain and Abel (and a smattering of Job), Amadeus is not a religious play, but the story of envy’s wrath played out in the larger context of late 18th century ideas. Steve Burns plays Mozart perfectly (as Shaffer wrote him), the uncouth, brash genius, who lacks diplomacy, and inadvertently offends the entire Viennese Court, particularly her composer Salieri. The look of sheer innocence in Burns eyes and smile as he takes a piece of music written by Salieri and improvises upon it after one hearing, even asking, "that sounds better, doesn’t it," captures the degree of insult laden in Salieri’s later assertion that "what I did to Mozart was nothing compared to what he did to me."

But the role of Salieri is the real challenge in a play that even spites him in the title (though who would go see a play called "Salieri, patron saint of mediocrity?"), and requires a Herculean effort from any actor who must not only narrate the entire play, but rarely leave the stage while featured in nearly every scene. A megalomaniac’s role, Salieri’s journey plunges him from the exaltation of early success, to the envy and frustration that stems from being shown up by a superior talent, to the rage and madness that drive him into thinking that by destroying the life of one man, he can thereby thwart God on earth.

While William Elsman nails the sarcasm and aggrandizing self-importance of the role, he never emanates the sense of frustrated anguish at his comparative mediocrity. Instead, the audience sees a man, not only physically superior to Mozart-he’s more robust, much taller, and because of his good looks, even seems more the libertine than Burns’ boyishly impassioned Mozart-but a composer far more popular in his own time, showered with the trappings of wealth and position. In this, Elsman’s Salieri appears as merely afflicted by an unexplained hang-up stemming from his personal recognition of a superior talent gone unremarked by all those who praise his mediocrity instead.

Unfortunately, this lack of a key component of Salieri’s psychology disengages the audience, making the second half of the evening (showing Salieri’s torment while destroying Mozart) much slower than the first act, which shows the events leading up to and motivating his revenge. Elsman only gives us the effect in words, but never the why in portrayal of a sorrow seemingly out of proportion to his station in life. Yet strangely enough, this fault, though a lack on Elsman’s part, becomes a virtue for Razze’s overall production-playing a Salieri tormented by a superior genius that only he recognizes would probably alienate the audience more.

The remainder of the cast delivers solid performances, particularly Alan Coates’ upright "Baron Fugue," and the amusingly noncommittal "well there it is" attitude of Carl N. Wallnau’s Emperor Joseph, both of whom flesh out the other challenges that Mozart’s genius faces at Court. Only Janine Barris’ delightful turn as his wife, Constanze, adds any humanity and sympathy on Mozart’s side. In this production there isn’t a moment where we side with Mozart’s genius, as throughout, making it hard not to grant Salieri’s request when he asks for "not forgiveness, but understanding."

Of course, Razze eliminated any possibility for the audience to sympathize with Mozart the moment he cast Elsman as Salieri. Beyond the psychological power of the "halo effect" (the notion that physically beautiful people are also morally good), Razze’s decision, and Elsman’s completely sympathetic portrayal illustrate the idea that in the game of envy, there are no villains. Elsman never displays any spite or rancor, no bitterness in how he destroys Mozart (but of course, little regret either), and in this, the director enables every self-righteous member of the audience to see themselves sympathetically-whether when standing in the way of a younger, more qualified co-worker gunning for a promotion, or hindering their better-suited friend chasing the same object of affection.

But perhaps that’s a good thing. If we always sided with the "genius" or person of superior quality, we couldn’t laugh at Paris Hilton while sending her off to jail, we wouldn’t endorse the notion in (little-league) sports that "everyone should play equally," hell, we probably wouldn’t have the whole welfare state, and maybe not even democracy. So maybe Salieri is the hero that our unspoken, envy-driven aspirations deserve, and that idea makes casting the heroic looking Elsman as Razze’s best choice of the evening.

"I am the patron saint of mediocrity," Salieri declares, and Elsman’s portrayal must thereby find a mostly compassionate and understanding audience on any given performance, providing not only an enjoyable evening, but ’moral’ reassurance as well.

Review of "The Winter's Tale" published by EDGE Philadelphia

Philadelphia theatres have closed their doors for summer, enabling some of the area’s best actors to join theatre professionals from around the country at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, where productions rarely fail to dazzle. Their 2007 season opens with Shakespeare’s seldom produced, misleading described as a comedy, yet thoroughly compelling, The Winter’s Tale.

When "all’s true that is mistrusted," jealousy spirals into vicious paranoia as King Leontes suspects his pregnant wife Hermione of infidelity with his childhood friend Polixenes. In his madness, Leontes plots Polixenes murder, denies his son’s parentage, imprisons Hermione, and banishes their newborn daughter Perdita. After a mock trial condemns his wife of treason, the son commits suicide, Hermione dies of grief, and these tragedies shock Leontes back to reason. Chastened by guilt, Leontes devotes his life’s remainder to celibacy and repentance, threatening the future of his kingdom.

Scholars consider The Winter’s Tale one of Shakespeare’s "problem plays" with good reason, as the play seems like a younger Shakespeare, working out elements he later perfected. The first half differs in content, theme, and balance from an episodic second half that appears more modern than Elizabethan. Act One spans a few months, focusing on the tragedy of self-prophesized imaginings, where misapprehension leads to destructive behavior, the effects of which only serve to confirm earlier delusions. Act Two skips sixteen years during intermission, becoming at once light and romantic comedy. Here, the exiled Perdita has grown to discover true love with Florizel, Polixenes’ son. Only forgiveness and past outrage bar their happiness, and through several hastily thrown together episodes, contrition and repentance lead once more to amity amongst the lives Leontes nearly destroyed.

Compounding the play’s structural defects, The Winter’s Tale mixes many themes that by themselves unify earlier works-the battle of the sexes, jealousy and infidelity, justice, guilt, and redemption. However, unlike Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Othello, or The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter’s Tale plumbs greater psychological depths along these moral lines, as Shakespeare intensifies these themes by concentrating them all in the actions and consequences of one character, Leontes. This results in a psychologically compelling first act, filled with pessimistic despair, which yields to Act Two’s optimistic (and surprise) ending, one that balances the consequences of unintended tragedy with the hope that one can finally absolve themselves of past deeds. In this regard, the sixteen-year gap between the acts allows a passage of time that buries Leontes’ past sins, without which no audience member would accept a greater or earlier redemption.

But the uplifting ending, unbalanced against and seemingly tacked on to the tragedy of Act One, still presents difficulties for any director or production. Luckily, the cast and production give ample reason to think that Shakespeare knew what he was doing.

Greg Wood, though giving no explicit reason for Leontes jealousy, dives headfirst into his character’s madness. Speaking lines in frenzied bursts of rage and anguish, deteriorating physically in gait and posture, he dominates the play’s first half in a masterful portrait of the delusions suffered by anyone who ever suspected that his neighbor "fished his pond in his absence." A Philadelphia favorite, appearing in his 20th PSF show this summer, Wood gives one of the finest and most penetrating performances of his career as a King wracked first by suspicion, later humiliated in contrition by guilt.

If Wood presents the ideal, the rest of the cast proves an equally capable reach. In multiple roles, Tony Lawton and Wayne S. Turney convey humor and humanity, and newcomer Erin Partin charms as the exiled Perdita. Only Anne Lewis gets and gives the chance to equal Wood as Paulina, the lone member of court brave enough to challenge his irrational behavior. Though she easily captures the humor in her role as an outspoken woman among submissive men, she commits to the play’s surprise ending in a strained voice that implies something less than the aggrieved and righteous outrage warranted by the deaths Leontes causes. A minor deficit in her performance, she nonetheless proves that occasionally, truth must yield to dramatic effect.

Director Patrick Mulcahy speeds three hours of staging through a production that contrasts Steve TenEyck’s terrifying lighting that mirrors Leontes obsession against Bob Phillips’ sumptuous, pastel-rich set that proves the reality his suspicions deny. Mulcahy’s only error lies in allowing Lawton to frame the play’s halves in playful audience interaction, then in the same breath trying to convince us that a shaman’s spell causes the misery-producing delusion that follows. While amusing, these unnecessary flourishes only added incoherence to a play where directors need to focus more on surmounting existing difficulties rather than creating them.

However, Mulcahy far more than redeems this minor fault in an ending that effects one of the most fantastical and moving scenes I’ve witnessed on PSF’s stage. This exhilarating moment of redemption-for both Leontes who needs it, and a production that needs none-makes the journey to Allentown worth the trip, from removes far beyond Philadelphia.

Review of "Lookingglass Alice," at the Arden, published in the News of Delaware County, 5-23-07

Middle school composition teachers often employ the following assignment: Each member of a group of students writes a sentence that hopefully proceeds from what the last member of the group had written. This student in turn passes it on to another, who adds a sentence of their own. The pattern continues until the group finishes a full composition, presumably upon a single theme or topic. While some sentences leap off the page in their brilliance, the overall result is usually haphazard in order, with many mediocre and bad lines interspersed among the good.

The Chicago based Lookingglass Theatre Company (in association with the Actor’s Gymnasium) seems to have undertaken a similar task. At the Arden Theater, this group is currently touring “Lookingglass Alice,” a collaborative piece strung together by the designers, actors, stage managers, and crew, receiving multiple updates in each theater where it appears.

The result? Somewhat similar to the assignment mentioned above.

Based upon the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll, the production careens its way through a series of skits, dances, trapeze and robe acrobatics, lively uses of stage curtains draped horizontally, clever word play, and even a unicycle. Through all this lies the central story of Alice, who has plunged down the rabbit hole into the Red Queen ruled Wonderland, and must now work her way through a chessboard of lighted squares, each one representing a stage along the way to becoming a Queen herself. In her travels, she meets the lively characters from Carroll’s novels—The White Queen, for whom time runs backward; the ever-grinning Cheshire Cat, now a jazz parlor denizen; the irksome twins Tweedle-Dee and Dum; and of course the Mad Hatter, Humpty-Dumpty, and the habitually late White Rabbit.

As bizarre as the stories of Carroll may seem, no one could ever accuse them of incoherence. But this is the chief problem of Lookingglass’ Alice—not so much that director David Catlin didn’t focus the various scenes around a single idea, but that the entire production lacks a coherence of presentation. As a result, the evening appears stilted and sloppy, as some of the skits entertain cleverly (the tea party), others are boldly inventive (lawn crochet with hedgehogs), while others fall flat (most scenes with the Red Queen), or fail to work altogether (the ball scene).

Some of this stems from the company’s insistence on visual storytelling—where each of the skits looks wildly different from the next. The result, like Alice says to the caterpillar at one point, “is all just confusing changes,” as the different elements (a dance, a chair-throwing tea party, etc.) jumble together. This, coupled with randomly called out lighting and stage cues, only furthered the general sense of confusion that clouded the entire evening, making Alice less like a piece of theater, than a circus production—except here with no Ringmaster to guide the performance.

I truly enjoyed some of it—the two aerial plunges (though expected), still thrilled, and Lauren Hirte was quite endearing, and Anthony Flemming entertainingly sly, as Alice and the Cheshire Cat. But my moments of enjoyment came like the good sentences—infrequent and random—and certainly weren’t enough to carry an entire evening by themselves.

Review of "Doubt" at the Merriam Theater, published in the News of Delaware County

John Patrick Shanley’s recent play, “Doubt: A Parable,” is dramatically very powerful. An investigation filled with difficult choices and demanding paths drives the plot, this further heightened by the superb performances given at the Merriam Theater.

Unfortunately, it’s dramatically a cheat on a number of levels, none of which involves the lack of certainty achieved at the final curtain.

Set in a Catholic school in 1964, “Doubt” begins as a conflict over teaching styles, with the elder (and seemingly cynical) Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones) condescendingly warning the fresh-faced (and quite naïve) Sister James (Lisa Joyce) that “every easy choice hides within its consequences tomorrow.” However, Aloysius quickly shifts to her real concern—the well being of Donald Muller, their first Negro student—who has fallen into the protective care of Father Flynn, a pastor transferred through three parishes in five years.

Doubt, suspicion, and gossip dominate the play from here, as Flynn shows all the signs of guilt, but credibly defends himself at every turn—winning over James, and threatening Aloysius’ future. When the boy’s mother appears, she partially acquiesces to the alleged abuse. Already thinking her twelve year old son is gay, she only wants him to make it to June, so he can graduate to greater opportunity.

After a final verbal battle, Aloysius confirms her suspicions, while Flynn receives a transfer to a better parish, leaving both nuns in fear, distress, and doubt.

While this ending mimics what we now know often occurred, the play projects so many modern sensibilities onto its characters that it’s a wonder Shanley set Doubt in 1964 at all. Beyond the attitudes of the boy’s mother, the older Aloysius—who’s a staunch defender of everything else Catholic—nevertheless rails against the “power structure” dominated entirely by men. Instead of showing deference to Flynn, as she would have, she constantly challenges and insults his authority, and the priest, who forty years ago would have been beyond suspicion, now becomes guilty on mere shards of evidence. This last point, which drags the “constantly expecting Flynn’s guilt” audience throughout, is something Shanley only gets because of the recent scandals.

Like I said, it’s a cheat. More to the point, it’s a wish fulfillment that also fails. The play seems to say, “Oh, if only there had been this completely implacable Mother Superior to weed out these bad priests forty years ago!” And yet, because of the ending, it does so without completely saying that as well.

In this, the twist at the end fails too, as it only represents what happened, contradicting a line in Shanley’s own play, “that the truth doesn’t make for good parables.” But then what instruction emerges from a parable that basically argues, “even with the best people, guided by our best lights, things still go badly, the wicked go unpunished, and the good must suffer?” What moral should anyone take from such a tale?

Shanley managed to take the Tony and Pulitzer Awards for Best New Play. I’m not surprised; this is the sort of thing the people who make those decisions love: a powerful melodrama about a foreign and corrupt institution, presented through the scrim of modern sensibilities. Did Shanley deserve these awards? The play closes on Sister Aloysius crying, “I have doubts, I have doubts.” Yeah, I have them too.