Last night I went with my friends Steve & Ali to go see the San Diego Repertory Theatre's production of Doubt, a play that debuted off-Broadway in 2004 and is, as I'm sure you know, now a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis - all four of whom are nominated for Academy Awards this year.

I had seen the film a few weeks ago, and was floored. (I'll be publishing my own Top Ten Movies of 2008 list before Oscar night - check back to see where Doubt ends up.) The stage provided a distinctly more intimate setting, however, to ruminate on the issues presented in the play. The story revolves around a Catholic school & church in 1964 where a hard-nosed and fiercely traditionalist nun begins to suspect the parish's new progressive priest, Father Flynn, of molesting the school's first and only black student. That's already a pretty heavy-handed, packed production. But there are so many more layers to the story, and I find myself thinking mostly about one issue in particular - that of gender roles in an institution like the church, and the varied restrictions & freedoms that men and women have placed on them when they commit to a life of service for God.

I don't want to give too much away about the story. It's definitely worth seeing if you haven't yet. But I'm left (as I think we're meant to be) with my own doubts - doubts about devotion to the church as an institution, about the price of vigilance against evil, about our ability to discern evil in the first place, about how the knowledge of evil takes away our innocence and whether innocence itself is a good thing or not. This play is probably the most thought-provoking material I've seen performed in a couple of years. The questions it raises are good ones to ask. I hope you and more people will see it so that the discussion can be elevated.

-M