{"id":147347,"date":"2024-03-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-20T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/behind-the-veil\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T09:19:52","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:19:52","slug":"behind-the-veil","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/behind-the-veil\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the veil"},"content":{"rendered":"

D<\/span>ou<\/span><\/span>bt: A Parable<\/span> (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<\/span> 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<\/span> presents us with the spectacle of what a vile woman might do to an innocent man she dislikes for what he represents.<\/p>\n

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 older, was supposed to play the role, but she dropped out at the last minute due to a health crisis.) Ryan, a veteran of television (The Wire<\/span>) and film (Gone Baby Gone<\/span>), stepped ably into the part with minimal preparation and is proving to be more than adequate.<\/p>\n

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Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan & Liev Schreiber in <\/em>Doubt: A Parable, 2024. Photo: Joan Marcus.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play starred Brian F. O’Byrne and Cherry Jones in its 2005 Broadway debut and was then adapted for film in 2008 with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep (and also Amy Adams and Viola Davis; all four actors were nominated for Oscars). The action begins shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, when a feeling of disorientation and the ascendancy of evil must have been in the air, particularly among Catholics. In a sermon that opens the play, Father Flynn acknowledges that doubt is having a moment but suggests that faith is ultimately strengthened by it.<\/p>\n

His frankness and humility crash into the utter certitude represented by Sister Aloysius, who urges an inexperienced teacher, Sister James (Zoe Kazan), to keep an eye on Father Flynn. She reports back that he spent some time alone with the school’s first “Negro” boy, Donald Miller (who does not appear in the play), who upon his return to the classroom acted a bit bereft and smelled of alcohol. This information is all Sister Aloysius needs to become convinced that Flynn is a child molester, and when a perfectly understandable explanation comes her way, she rejects it. Her initial instinct must be proven the correct one: Flynn must be ruined. Never mind that she has no evidence whatsoever; she keeps pushing until she finds a weak spot, a tool for dislodging Flynn from his position and thereby publishing to the world his supposed guilt. Shanley adroitly leaves the audience to guess whether Flynn has ever done anything inappropriate in his career.<\/p>\n

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Amy Ryan & Liev Schreiber in <\/em>Doubt: A Parable, 2024. Photo: Joan Marcus.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Sister Aloysius is, when we meet her, an amusing example of what today’s youngsters call, in other contexts, “based”: shamelessly adherent to her true nature despite its potential unpopularity. She thinks Frosty the Snowman<\/span> carries disturbing pagan connotations, she uses no sugar in her tea, and she believes even small infractions should be met with rigorous punishment rather than Christlike forgiveness. Ryan does a fine job with the part, eliciting laughs for her frankly reactionary views as she counsels the increasingly nervous Sister James about her failings.<\/p>\n

At the time the play was first performed, many audience members and critics would have harbored memories of Catholic schooling and cranky old nuns. But now that those schools’ special characteristics have largely been erased, the play has grown doubly powerful: Sister Aloysius isn’t just a product of the Catholic system, an overzealous moral cop. Today, as directed by Scott Ellis, she embodies every human-resources regulatory czar and sensitivity centurion looking to create a case that can justify her existence. In short, she is out to cancel Flynn, whether he has done anything untoward or not. She dislikes the cut of his jib, and for this he must be torpedoed.<\/p>\n

That the young Donald Miller stands to have his life upended by the sister’s baseless accusations—as a scene with the boy’s mother (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) makes evident—is of no consequence. The implications of this encounter could hardly be more up-to-date either; just as today’s white progressives call to “defund the police” to the mortification of black people who face the prospect of having their neighborhoods abandoned to the wolves, the actual interests of the person whom Sister Aloysius is supposedly trying to help don’t enter into her calculations. The main thing is that Flynn be punished, and the collateral damage done to the child is worth no more than a shrug. That Donald is, as his mother reveals, gay adds a twist that today can be labeled intersectional.<\/p>\n

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Liev Schreiber & Zoe Kazan in <\/em>Doubt: A Parable, 2024. Photo: Joan Marcus.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Shanley—who as a straight white Catholic male (gay theater folk derisively refer to him as “manly John Shanley”) embodies the most marginalized elements on the stage—crafted a play that was great when it premiered and has grown even greater with time. It wouldn’t be overstating matters to label it prophetic, and it has properly entered the canon of American theater.<\/p>\n

J. <\/span>T. Rogers, the author of Corruption<\/span> (at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center through April 14), has made the awkward decision to announce to us all that his work is important in a note to the audience inserted into the Playbill: the writer of Oslo<\/span> calls his latest piece the “origin story of our post-truth world” and a “pulling back of the curtain on the moment corporate interests decided that raising share prices and bending the government to their will should be put above democracy itself.” A strong claim, that.<\/p>\n

And one hardly supported by the text of his ungainly effort, which is set in the years 2009 to 2011. Rogers’s target, and the alleged threat to democracy, is my longtime employer, News Corp, so I make no pretense of neutrality on the matter. But I’m confident that even those who share Rogers’s contempt for the company and all its works will note that, as staged by Lincoln Center’s favorite director Bartlett Sher, this talkfest can fairly be boiled down to dozens of characters lobbing ultimately low-stakes charges over an endless reshuffle of desks, rather than boiled up to the moment democracy itself became imperiled by corporate profit-seeking.<\/p>\n

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A scene from <\/em>Corruption, 2024. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Via characters clunkily announcing their job titles (“as general counsel,” the company’s general counsel keeps telling us), we learn that, fifteen years ago, it became known that reporters for the British Sunday tabloid News of the World<\/span> had, with the aid of a private investigator named Glenn Mulcaire, “hacked” (meaning guessed passwords in order to intercept voicemails) the phones of people in the news. A Labour MP<\/span> named Tom Watson (Toby Stephens) made it his mission to take down Rupert Murdoch, or at least his son James (Seth Numrich), or at least the ceo<\/span> of News Corp’s British division Rebekah Brooks (Saffron Burrows), or at least to succeed in using regulatory authority to block News Corp’s attempt to buy the remaining portion of a satellite-television service, BSkyB, that it didn’t already own. Watson achieved none of these goals, just as the play doesn’t establish that the antics of London tabloid reporters (which if anything are less tawdry today than in previous eras) made democracy wobble. The most salient outcomes were that an editor of the paper, Andy Coulson—who had gone on to serve David Cameron’s government as communications director but is likely unfamiliar to American audiences—went to prison for a few months for phone hacking and that News Corp shuttered the tabloid. Despite exhaustive investigation, Watson et al. simply couldn’t demonstrate that anyone above Coulson condoned or knew about the hacking, just as he couldn’t prove a sensational but false charge he loudly made a few years later, that a mysterious ring of pedophiles was operating in the high levels of the British government.<\/p>\n

Among the many clumsy elements of the play, which features thirteen actors portraying more than three dozen characters, is that it keeps telling us Watson is David battling Goliath as he struggles to get the country to focus on the paper’s misdeeds. The problem (though the play does not tell us this) was that it was widely accepted in Britain that reporters for the tabloids employed questionable means. Only when it emerged that NOTW<\/span><\/span> reporters had listened in on the voicemails of a missing girl, Milly Dowler, who turned out to have been murdered, did the public get outraged, though as Rogers admirably points out, the most alarming detail of that scandal was that NOTW<\/span><\/span> reporters had erased her voicemails, thereby freeing up space in her mailbox and signaling to her family that the girl must still have been alive, which created some agonizing false hope. This detail, however, turned out not to be true.<\/p>\n

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A scene from <\/em>Corruption, 2024. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The fascination with all things relating to Rupert Murdoch (who is not among the play’s characters) is such that some reviewers are bound to skip eagerly over the turgid, plodding earnestness of the play and simply use their eight hundred words to remind us of their loathing for the media mogul. Such writers will likely exhibit ignorance that other London outlets such as the Daily Mirror<\/span> and the Daily Mail<\/span> have also been hauled into court over alleged phone-hacking and pretend that the scandal was unique to Murdoch’s papers. But a play could hardly advertise its own lack of substance better than this one does when it ends its first act with characters excitedly yelping, in so many words, “George Michael retweeted us!”<\/p>\n

The<\/span> audience filing into The Seven Year Disappear<\/span> (at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center through March 31) is greeted by the sight of its two actors already seated on stage, staring at each other in their shapeless black jumpsuits on an eerie set. The signal that unbearably pretentious and self-consciously “difficult” theater is coming is unmistakable, and accurate. Rarely has a ninety-minute play dragged on longer.<\/p>\n

The work by the gay playwright Jordan Seavey feels like a throwback to the 1990s, when a presentation of gay life was assumed automatically to be interesting to the theater audience, no matter how little the playwright had to say. Disappear<\/span> is ostensibly about the mysterious exit from society of a conceptual artist named Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) on the eve of a major Museum of Modern Art exhibition, but Seavey isn’t much interested in her. He’s interested in her son, the Seavey stand-in Naphtali (Taylor Trensch, who played an especially punchable Mordred in Camelot<\/span> in last year’s Broadway revival at Lincoln Center). Like his creation, Seavey is the son of a female artist, and he evidently has a few things to get off his chest. He would have been wiser to save them for his therapist, as therapists get paid to be bored.<\/p>\n

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Cynthia Nixon & Taylor Trensch in <\/em>Seven Year Disappear. Photo: Monique Carboni.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The play—which begins with a promising scene, the only funny one in the play, in which Miriam rants about how a rival conceptual artist won a key gig at the Whitney—considers Naphtali’s feelings of being used by his mother throughout his life as part of her art projects, but he doesn’t seem to have been deeply scarred by his unusual upbringing. He merely has some complaints about his mom. Miriam is an exhausting, demanding, ridiculous person; she likes to talk about her struggles as a Jew, but she converted to the faith and is from Peoria. Isn’t escaping the oppression of Peoria sort of like fleeing Pharoah, though? To her, maybe.<\/p>\n

Directed in science-fiction style by Scott Elliott on a black stage decorated with video screens that periodically show both live feeds of the performers and still photos of the two principals, often sliced into segments in a weak effort to amp up the drama, the play relies heavily on a conceit its author apparently thinks clever and unusual but which simply comes across as irritating: events are told out of sequence. As we leap around in time, each scene lasts about five to ten minutes, with Trensch consistently playing Naphtali but Nixon effortfully sliding from one character to another, occasionally playing Miriam both just before she disappeared and just after she returned, but more often playing Naphtali’s bedmates—men he meets in bars; a bishop to whose apartment he reports for sex; Wolfgang, a bisexual German art specialist who also dated Miriam. One of his dates mocks the political appeal of Hillary Clinton, for whose failed presidential campaign Naphtali worked as an lgbtq<\/span>-outreach coordinator. There is a little chatter about whether incoming President Trump will deport immigrants, but the political content never rises above the level of cocktail-party talk and serves primarily as a means to anchor us in time (Trump and Clinton were indeed the main items on the conversational agenda in 2016) rather than lending the play any kind of thematic resonance.<\/p>\n

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Cynthia Nixon & Taylor Trensch in <\/em>Seven Year Disappear. Photo: Monique Carboni.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Nixon, a very limited performer who enjoyed a stroke of immense good fortune when she was cast as the uptight lawyer Miranda on Sex and the City<\/span>, is so disastrous when the play calls for her to reach out and switch characters—her efforts to portray men invariably come across as a sort of cabaret lesbian act—that it takes the first few minutes of each scene for the audience to work out who she is supposed to be. Though the actors are wearing microphones and the theater is small, her approach to her various characters is either to use a comedy foreign accent or to shout a lot, and her voice at maximum volume is unpleasant. Moreover, since the play keeps flitting around in time, the audience also has to struggle to figure out where we are in the chronology.<\/p>\n

This would matter less if the play had an actual plot—if following developments amounted to putting together a narrative jigsaw puzzle, yielding the pleasure of completion. It doesn’t. Disappear<\/span> simply comes across as a chopped salad of vignettes about gay life in New York—drugs, drinking, hookups, a visit to a nail salon. The audience learns, for instance, that some gay men like to prepare for sex by getting high on methamphetamine, which they call “Tina,” along with a gay party drug called “G<\/span>” (ghb<\/span>, apparently), which leads to increased sexual arousal. G<\/span> shouldn’t be combined with alcohol, which is why the play contains lines like “I don’t drink. I just do drugs.”<\/p>\n

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Cynthia Nixon in <\/em>Seven Year Disappear. Photo: Monique Carboni.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Perhaps some gay men in the audience will be thinking, “Ah, such a true portrait of a gay man’s life.” But that’s hardly enough to constitute a satisfying evening at the theater. Early on, there’s a dispute about a Max Ernst painting owned by Wolfgang, later we hear what the work displays (a gruesome image), and later still we are present when Wolfgang acquires it, but there’s no storytelling here, merely details being parceled out. Mirroring that development, there are scattered mentions of Naphtali’s absent father, whose identity Miriam has decided to withhold from her son for his entire life. Only at the end, long past the point when the audience has been bored into a stupor, does Seavey deliver the play’s supposed big secret, which is the story of who the father was and why he isn’t around. Like everything else in the play, it falls flat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On <\/i>Doubt: A Parable, <\/i>Corruption & <\/i>The Seven Year Disappear.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2156,"featured_media":147383,"template":"","tags":[],"department_id":[556],"issue":[3319],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":48,"value_formatted":48,"value":"48","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"Liev Schreiber in <\/i>Doubt: A Parable, 2024. 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