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Right or Wrong?

My mother-in-law is a classy New Yorker, but I still worried a little when she treated my family to the off-Broadway opening of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, a play about an unyielding nun who questions the relationship between a progressive parish priest and the school’s first black student. Is a play about a possibly pedophile priest appropriate for a family with a young teen?

Did I feel ridiculous after the curtain closed on a gripping drama set in the Bronx that asks moral questions (what is right?), relives American history (the unrest of the 1960s), and makes people think (Father Flynn: guilty or not?). The play, starring Tennessee’s own Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius, moved to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre within months, earning two Obie Awards, four Tonys, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2005.

Doubt makes its regional debut on September 28th at Playhouse on the Square. The play stars local actors Ann Marie Hall as Sister Aloysius and Michael Gravois as Father Flynn, the affable priest trying to soften the strictures of Catholicism in 1964 with an accessible clerical style. Or is he more dangerous?

There are no clear-cut answers in Shanley’s play, rather a finely layered framework for considering faith, relationships, and human behavior.

“Audiences always leave Doubt with divided opinions about Father Flynn,” Hall says, crediting the playwright’s language and complex characters for the play’s thoughtful ambiguity.

“At first, it’s easy to discard Sister Aloysius as rigid, but she’s not that way at all,” Hall says. “She’s a woman caught in a situation who is working very hard to make the right decision, and this gives her character many different dimensions.”

“Doubt,” Playhouse on the Square, 51 S. Cooper, September 28th-October 21st. Call 726-4656 for reservations.

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We Recommend We Recommend

A Dramatic Solution

Outside the Nappi by Nature salon on May 30th, poet J’malo Torriel, the salon’s owner Sefu Uhuru, and three others say they were brutally attacked by Memphis police officers for no apparent reason. Following the attack, three officers were relieved of duty pending an internal investigation.

Ironically, the group was there to begin rehearsal for their play Why We Die, a serious look at why so many young African-American men face untimely deaths in Memphis.

Torriel (pictured at right with Jasira Montsho) is a member of the spoken-word group Brotha’s Keepa. He began writing the play three years ago in response to the homicide rate for that demographic.

“It’s a play about four young men who are childhood friends. They all end up putting themselves in harm’s way because of social engineering,” says Torriel, who also directs and acts in the play.

“It tackles parents being careful of what they do in front of their children and being economically independent, so kids don’t grow up thinking they have to make money off of crime,” Torriel adds.

Proceeds from the play will benefit Brotha’s Keepa’s Youth Prison Prevention program, their Summer Youth Theatre Camp, and their efforts to feed homeless people downtown.

“Why We Die,” Friday-Saturday, September 28th-29th, 8 p.m. and Sunday, September 30th, 3 and 7:30 p.m., Southwest Tennessee Community College Theatre, 737 Union (409-2655 or 859-4051). $15 advance/$20 door.

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Theater Theater Feature

Twain Wreck

Scott Ferguson, Playhouse on the Square’s frequent guest director from Chicago, knows how to turn our cultural detritus into comic gold. Over the years, Ferguson, the founder of the Windy City’s Theatrebarn and creator of Schoolhouse Rock Live, has served up deliciously trashy productions of The Mystery of Irma Vep, Saucy Jack & the Space Vixens, Bat Boy: The Musical, The Rocky Horror Show, and Return to the Forbidden Planet. No doubt about it, the man knows his kitsch from his camp and he knows how to milk the funny from all of it. Unfortunately, in spite of the broadly comic characters and a spot of cross-dressing, Big River, the sprawling musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is neither kitsch nor camp, and the gifted Ferguson seems out of his element. Why?

Okay, so it’s not completely fair to pigeonhole Ferguson as a kitsch specialist. Sure, he once staged Xena the Warrior Princess Live!, but he also directed Circuit Playhouse’s thoughtful production of Floyd Collins, an American folk musical about a deadly cave-in and the ensuing media circus. With its convincing country score by honky-tonk wit Roger Miller and a heady collection of intertwining themes about extraordinary friendships and man’s predictably inhumane treatment of his fellow man, Big River is certainly a comic ancestor of the more seriously conceived Floyd Collins. But instead of diving into Twain’s unsentimental world where childhood innocence meets moral ambiguity, Ferguson tries to knock us out with a one-two punch of silliness and sentiment. Mr. Clemens is surely spinning in his grave.

Former POTS company member Andrew Weir has a strong tenor voice and a winning personality, but he can’t seem to unleash enough of his inner rapscallion to make the legendary Huck Finn breathe onstage. Unlike the grubby river rat, who revels in the fact that a low life can lead to high times, the well-scrubbed Weir looks like you couldn’t make dirt stick to him with Super Glue. He most definitely doesn’t come across as the kind of person who might fake his own murder by killing a hog and dumping its blood all around the room. The internal conflict Huck faces as he chooses between his friendship with the runaway slave Jim and his conscience telling him its against the law to relieve others of their property is never much of a conflict at all. This Huck just has to pause sometimes before doing the right thing … even when the right thing is wrong.

Huck Finn is a juvenile Hamlet, and Twain wasn’t too subtle indicating as much. But in this Big River, he’s just a fun, spontaneous guy whose luck is often better than his judgment.

Ernest Hemingway once cautioned readers to stop reading Huckleberry Finn at the point where “Nigger Jim” is sold back into slavery for a mere $40. “All the rest is cheating,” Hemingway wrote. And Pappy wasn’t the first critic to charge Twain with losing his nerve in the book’s closing chapters. It’s almost like the misanthropic author of both Tom Sawyer and the heretical Letter From Earth looked deep into the future, figured somebody was going to turn his novel into a musical with a contrived happy ending, and decided to save all would-be adapters the trouble of ruining his masterpiece by ruining it in advance. If there is true kitsch to be mined, it’s probably from these last scenes, which play out like a mockery of all things romantic. Conversely, these are the moments Ferguson has chosen to play straight.

Keith Patrick McCoy’s Jim is a simple, easily wounded creation, whose boundless sweetness might lead one to wonder if the poor man was ever the victim of a bad brain injury. He’s allowed his moments of heroism, but he’s never allowed to be a man.

Each scene in Big River is set up like a Hee Haw skit and played out on a brown-on-brown set that is visually unappealing without the benefit of being particularly functional. As was always the case with Hee Haw, the artificiality of the characters and their performances is heightened to the level of burlesque. Only the Duke and King, a pair of con men and arguably the story’s most artificial characters, achieve any level of dimension. In these roles, Jeremy Garrett and John Hemphill excel. From their mangled Shakespeare to their larcenous schemes, they never fail to amuse or to revolt.

Is Big River a wild romp with a couple of well-known literary characters? Sure it is, and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. But it could be much, much more.

At Playhouse on the Square through July 22nd