Doubt: A Parable (at the Todd Haimes Theatre, formerly the American Airlines Theatre, though April 14) may be the finest play yet written about the impulses underlying the #MeToo movement. Crucially, Doubt debuted years before that phenomenon got its name in 2017, when events scrambled many minds about whether it’s desirable to create a society where evidence-free allegations of sexual misconduct can destroy a man who is disfavored for unrelated reasons. Just as this magazine’s newest contributor, Woody Allen, was bounced out of the American film industry and invited to seek another publisher by the house that was about to print his memoir after the revival of an almost certainly spurious child-molestation claim undergirded by a jealous ex-girlfriend’s quest for vengeance, and just as Brett Kavanaugh’s path to the Supreme Court was nearly derailed when a Bernie Sanders donor offered up an unlikely story backed by no one and publicly denied by a longtime friend, Doubt presents us with the spectacle of what a vile woman might do to an innocent man she dislikes for what he represents.

We’re at a Catholic middle school in the Bronx in 1964, where Father Flynn (warmly underplayed by Liev Schreiber) is the kind of manly, wise, steady, practical teacher from whom boys crave guidance. Father Flynn has a problem, however: his personality is entirely too modern for Sister Aloysius, who is sternly played by Amy Ryan in a fortunate bit of casting. (Tyne Daly, who is more than twenty years