DOUBT Guest Post by Diane_in_MN

 

No one falls passionately in love (or even passionately in hate), is stabbed or shot or burned at the stake or locked up or driven mad.  There are no hummable stand-alone melodies, no soaring love duets, no impassioned monologues, no great choruses, no production numbers.  There’s no climactic exposition scene where secrets are revealed and everything is made plain.  There’s no comedic movement into a new world, no tragic catharsis.

This is a terrific opera.

DOUBT is based on John Patrick Shanley’s award-winning play of the same name, with music by Douglas Cuomo and libretto—his first—by Shanley.  It was commissioned by Minnesota Opera and premiered this week.  The play appeared in 2005 and its film adaptation (also written and directed by Shanley) in 2008, so the outline of the story is probably familiar to a lot of people.  The setting is a big-city Catholic parochial school in 1964.  The school’s principal, Sister Aloysius, becomes certain that the new priest, Father Flynn, has an unhealthy interest in the school’s eighth-grade (twelve- and thirteen-year-old) boys, and may have gone further than that with one boy, the school’s first and only black student.  She has no proof.  Father Flynn denies any wrongdoing; his behavior and responses could be perfectly innocent, or could be the practiced behavior and lies of a child abuser.  We never see him alone with any boy; we have no evidence of anything.

Shanley has said that the impetus behind his play was the climate of certainty that led up to the American invasion of Iraq: the expressed conviction that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that this justified military action.  This conviction turned out to be entirely wrong.  But placing the action of DOUBT in the context of clergy sexual abuse prevents any facile identification of Sister Aloysius with the mistaken true believers in Iraqi weapons: by the time the play was written, the extent of that scandal was well-known and might be guaranteed to put the audience squarely in Sister Aloysius’ camp.

There are four principal characters in DOUBT: Sister Aloysius; Father Flynn; Sister James, the new young eighth-grade teacher; and Mrs. Miller, the mother of the black student.  When writing the libretto, Shanley added a small adult chorus of parishioners and a small children’s chorus, but they make only brief appearances, and the four principals carry the performance.  I’ve never seen the play, so I can’t comment on any differences, but I thought the libretto was fine—without being forced into unnatural speech patterns or rhyme, it was very singable.  Because the opera is sung through, the arias and duets aren’t set apart from the action but occur as conversations—although Sister Aloysius has three brief soliloquies in response to Father Flynn’s three sermons.  Widowed in World War II, a nun with almost twenty years’ experience in different parish schools, she speaks with the authority of experience.  Father Flynn is glib, chummy, sure of himself and his position for most of the opera.  Sister James first noticed his possibly problematic behavior with the student Donald Miller, but wants to believe nothing wrong has occurred; Father Flynn finds her sympathetic and persuadable.  Mrs. Miller is protective of her son, although not in the obvious way: she wants him to graduate from the school, and because his father is contemptuous of him and physically abusive, she is grateful that Father Flynn has taken an interest in the boy.

Douglas Cuomo’s music reinforces these characterizations, pretty straightforwardly for Sister James and Mrs. Miller, more ambiguously for Father Flynn and especially for Sister Aloysius.  Shanley described the score in an interview as “Hitchcockian” in the sense that dissonances and tonal shifts are used to undercut surface meaning.  The forceful Sister Aloysius won’t or can’t admit to any doubt about Father Flynn’s guilt when acting to remove him from her school and its students, but while Cuomo gives her music that’s equally forceful, it’s edgy enough to suggest other possibilities.  Is she sure of her interpretation?  Does that matter, if there’s even the possibility that she’s right?   Does she want to get rid of Father Flynn because she really thinks he’s targeting children, or does she resent him as a challenger whose place in the hierarchy puts him outside her control?  Shanley doesn’t provide any answers in the text, to these questions or to the ultimate one of Father Flynn’s guilt or innocence, and Cuomo doesn’t provide any musical answers, either.   Listener, you decide, if you can.

I’m not familiar with Cuomo’s music, even though he’s written for several television series; program notes describe his jazz background as well as a number of classical compositions and forthcoming commissions, and reviews call his style “eclectic.”  This is not always promising, at least when it comes to opera.  But to my mind, the score of DOUBT is clearly operatic, not overblown pop or disguised Broadway.  Libretto and score worked together to produce a fully-engaging musical/theatrical experience, the goal of any opera, whether written two hundred years ago or last year.  I think that a performance of DOUBT was filmed for HD distribution at some future date; if this should be true, I highly recommend it.

I would happily attend Mr. Cuomo’s next opera if given a chance to do so.  And John Patrick Shanley has said that he’s so pleased with the product of his first opera collaboration that he’d like to do it again—he thinks his screenplay for MOONSTRUCK would make a good comic opera.  I’d see that one, too.

Pictures and video clips from DOUBT are available on the Minnesota Opera web site.