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Sins of Our Fathers

The season opens with plays about children. Don’t take yours.
By Glenn Arbery |
illustration by Jeffrey Smith

 

In the summer of 1997, when my family moved back to Dallas from New England, the big news nationwide in the Catholic Church was the 37-day trial of a Dallas priest named Rudolph “Rudy” Kos, whose string of molestations was so extensive and so ugly that it shook the foundations of the Diocese of Dallas. How could church officials have been so remiss in allowing this man to become a priest, then to continue to work with children despite repeated complaints and warnings? What emerged was all too human, a record of neglect, expediency, and cowardice. The court originally awarded $119 million to eight former altar boys Kos had molested. Although the diocese successfully argued that such a penalty would bankrupt it, the local church still ended up paying out $23 million, money that could otherwise have gone for the support of local parishes, schools, and charities. Dallas was the tip of the national iceberg, as it happened. Revelation followed revelation from Los Angeles to Boston. Five years after the Kos trial, Dallas—where it had all started—hosted a highly publicized meeting of the American Catholic bishops to address these scandals in the church, some of which eclipsed ours by several orders of magnitude. But the bishops’ resolutions, widely considered watery and self-protective, soon had a metonymic name: Dallas. “Dallas showed that the bishops were unwilling to address the deeper problems,” commentators would write.

Glance at the October offerings in the new Dallas theater season, and three plays, taken together, look like a belated attempt, however accidental, to address those deeper problems on the stage, that “ritual arena of confrontation,” as Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka calls it. John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner, makes its area premiere this month at WaterTower Theatre. It’s the story of a hawk-eyed nun, the principal of a Catholic middle school in the Bronx, who suspects the charismatic Father Flynn of sexually abusing a student in the school. The play explores suspicion and uncertainty; it asks how one should act on behalf of children in the absence of hard evidence. It’s about the forms of faith and trust, including the sometimes doubtful generosity of thinking well of others. In The WingSpan Theatre’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, Mrs. Alving attempts to protect her son Oswald from learning about his father’s debased character, only to discover that the young man suffers from the syphilis he inherited at birth. A preacher named Rev. Manders helps cover up past and present sins, especially those that might implicate him. Martin McDonagh’s Kafkaesque The Pillowman, at Kitchen Dog Theater, the darkest and—oddly—the most comic of the three, centers on a storyteller arrested because several child murders in his neighborhood remarkably resemble the details of the murders in his stories. In a world without priests, the police act out the roles of inquisitor and confessor.

For Terry Martin at WaterTower, Doubt: A Parable is “a perfect play,” one of the few he’s ever read that struck him so forcibly. At stake in the play are two different ideas of the role the Catholic Church should play in people’s lives. The older, stricter one is embodied in Sister Aloysius, and a new, more accessible or familial “Vatican II” role finds its advocate in Father Flynn. Sister Aloysius’ suspicions stem in part from umbrage at the church’s change in emphasis. The brilliance of Shanley’s play lies in the way he conceives of the child in question, Donald Muller. He’s the only black student in the school, and if other boys pick on him, it could be because of race. Or it could be gay tendencies that his mother hints have already gotten him expelled from another school. I asked Martin how he understood the emphasis on the 12-year-old at the center of the controversy. “I think all of them are trying to save the child,” he says. “All of them are trying to save some portion of the child and in that way, saving some portion of themselves that they project onto what being a child is.” The deepest complexities of the play lie in the doubtful area between charity and self-interest, and Shanley leaves the audience in doubt about each character’s motives.

“The thing that I think is tricky is that it’s such a political hot button, child abuse,” says WaterTower’s Martin, who has already highlighted the issue onstage in last year’s production of Blackbird. “The child is not in the play, so it gives the audience a chance to project their own child into the play. What we need to do is allow every character to defend the child as they see fit and then allow the audience to defend the child in their own minds. Also, it should raise questions about how much children really need to be taken care of. As the father of a 4-year-old, I ask myself, ‘How much do I need to protect him? Am I doing him a disservice by protecting him?’ You know, there are lessons he has to learn. I know my obligation, personally, is to remember that it’s his life, and there’s only so much I can do.”

In Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, at WingSpan, Mrs. Alving tries to do too much. She wants to save her son from knowing how depraved his father is. Secretly in love with her minister, Rev. Manders, she fled to him years before when she discovered that her husband had impregnated Johanna, her maid, and in obedience to this man she loved rather than to her husband, she went home and maintained a show of the marriage. She encouraged her son to idolize his father, but she had to send him away for his entire childhood to do it. Now in his 20s, Oswald has come home. Soon, to her horror, Mrs. Alving finds him lusting for her maid, Regina, a very healthy and good-looking girl.

Ibsen cranks his symbolic machinery considerably past the breaking point, so it’s going to be a challenge to keep the play from turning into inadvertent comedy, so much gets revealed so quickly. He has Regina turn out to be Capt. Alving’s daughter with Johanna—Oswald’s sister, in other words. She leaves in a huff, and Oswald, his brain already eaten up with the syphilis his father bequeathed him at birth, succumbs to madness. Sally Vahle, steering the play for WingSpan, says that the odd thing is that Oswald could not have gotten syphilis from his father, only from his mother. Her very womb infuses him with disease; on a moral level, so does her protection of him later. It’s Ibsen’s symbol of the cultural ghosts—Vahle suggests “phantoms” as an alternative translation—that fatally lay hands on the young and ruin them before they have a chance to thrive.

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman takes ruination a step further, into murder and suicide. When I ask director Christina Vela how—as a mother—she deals with the horrendous stories in this play, she says, “When I first read it, the part of it about children being hurt really got to me, obviously.” But there’s also a comic feel. “The play’s so heavy already that we want the audience to laugh and keep those funny moments alive,” Vela says. “I myself have a very dark sense of humor. I was raised in a very strict Catholic family and was not allowed to do anything that didn’t have to do with church. I would stay home on Saturday nights and watch horror movies. So it’s never been difficult for me to separate this kind of thing from real life.”

Still, the stories ascribed to the main character, Katurian, are fables of utter hopelessness, most of them about the murders of children, including one called “The Little Jesus.” In the course of the play, Katurian finds that his abused brother enacts his stories, and McDonagh never allows the audience to be sure about the boundaries between fiction and reality in the play. It’s about how stories come out of the moral world—or lack of one—that people experience, and how the stories then form the expectations out of which others act. “I mean, what is art worth and how does it play into our society?” Vela asks. “Should art be counted as something completely separate from the person who creates it? To me, it’s more about the question of art than it is about the children.”
At the end of The Pillowman, a real child comes onstage, painted green. The question may be art, but the child remains the deepest symbol for the intersection of what we profess to believe and what we do, the vulnerable ground of possibility where our own weaknesses and faults, even our own evils, come in conflict with the deep instinct to save and protect. But save and protect how? That’s where the heart of dramatic confrontation lies, in exposing the ghosts, asking the hidden questions, fighting out what we understand the good to be.
This October, call that Dallas.

Doubt: A Parable runs October 2 through 26 at WaterTower Theatre, 972-450-6232, watertowertheatre.org. Ghosts runs October 9 through 25 at the Bath House Cultural Center, 214-675-6573, wingspantheatre.com. The Pillowman runs through October 11 at Kitchen Dog Theater, 214-953-1055, kitchendogtheater.org.

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