In and out of Doubt.

The past month has been frankly overwhelming. I am so proud of the work of the theatre company that's producing "Doubt" and it has been a great experience to work on the production with such a talented team of actors and designers...once we get production photos taken I will share some here. The big Denver and Boulder reviews are due out tomorrow, although a local student paper already published one that was quite positive.

The play itself has raised some heart-wrenching questions that audiences feel a (sometimes desperate) need to talk about. I have already met three victims of clerical abuse just in the week the show has been open, and am very glad I've had training to fall back on when met with this type of deep sharing from complete strangers. (The university's preparations for its instructors in terms of listening skills and redirecting to local counselling and other resources...well, they definitely generalize to other areas of life.) The play isn't really about abuse, though, and audiences recognize that.

To some extent it's about when humans open and close their eyes to suffering, and how much people choose to know or not to know about the lives of the people around them. It could be positioned as a play about how suspicion leads one to see evil where it does not exist; or as a play about the impossibility of maintaining innocence in a broken world; or in many other ways. I don't have a clean capsule summary worked out yet.

The first Monday after opening BETC sponsored an outreach panel, "Contemporary Catholic Culture: Faith in the Face of Scandal," and three speakers came to talk about Catholicism and the play. Because my blog is googlable I am choosing my words carefully here, but it is fair to say that there was a great gulf in interpretation between at least one of the speakers and the majority of our audiences in terms of the definitions and values of doubt and dissent in American culture.

Some people would like to return to the days of unshakable faith in institutions as well as in God. But study of history reminds us over and over that such faith is inevitably misplaced, and that even the most divinely inspired religious organization is still composed of humans. I see the role of questioning, of doubt and difficulty, as necessary to a critically examined faith, and it's not that the speakers at this event would disagree with me entirely. Perhaps they are further in their examination than I am given their ages and roles in the community.

But while the event was a great success in sparking community discussion, it was personally painful to see such a gap between the speakers and the audiences who wished to question their interpretations. (Audience members were very polite and were not aiming to challenge, but for example to provide evidence for alternate understandings of the play's events.) It is easy for a convincing speaker to dismiss a genuine, valid objection as "immature," for example...or to describe a character's choice as a "false dilemma" when no other options except two morally untenable ones existed within the world of the play. But basically most of the valid questions raised were left on the table without honest engagement, which was frustrating as an event moderator.

I will be reflecting on the issues raised for a long time to come, not least of which was one speaker's certainty that when doubt exists, the choice should always be made that protects children even if it means destroying an innocent man's reputation and career. She made this claim on her experience as a mother, but I am one too, and think that the danger of false accusation should not be dismissed so lightly.