John Patrick Shanley packs a lot into this one-act play, and Caldwell Theater Company does well by Doubt, a Parable.
It's 1964 at a Catholic school in the Bronx, and the nuns who run the school and teach there struggle with emerging Vatican II changes as their parish priest preaches compassion. There's a fear of pedophilia within the structure of authority, the consequences of action and inaction, and of certainty and doubt.
A world-wise principal, mistrustful of the priest, instructs an eager young teacher to be on the lookout for unusual behavior among her eighth-grade students and cautions her as well against trying too hard to be liked by her students, who will graduate in a few months. "You're showing off," Sister Aloysius tells Sister James. "You like to see yourself 10-feet tall in their eyes."
To their credit the four actors of Doubt never show off: Caldwell stalwart Pat Nesbitt as suspicious Sister Aloysius; Amy Montminy as trusting and torn Sister James; Josh Foldy as suspect Father Flynn; and, in a single, heartbreaking scene, Pat Bowie as a student's mother.
Tech is good. The courtyard design, complete with stone bench, suggests the heavy walls of a neo-Gothic church even as the principal's office suggests an appropriately unfussy place. But -- a quibble here, perhaps -- the stained glass windows and priest's vestments distractingly come off more as heraldic than Catholic.
