beyond belief; In two powerful new dramas, writes Adam Green, playwrights John Patrick Shanley and Stephen Adly Guirgis bring questions of faith to the New York stage.(Doubt)(The Last Days of Judas Iscariot)(Theater Review)

Theatrical nuns have traditionally come in four flavors: winsome free spirit (The Sound of Music), emotionally fragile mystic (Agnes of God), holy-rolling hoofer (Nunsense), and catechism-spouting psycho (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You). None of these shopworn types turns up in Doubt, John Patrick Shanley's riveting new Church drama, which comes to Broadway fresh from a lauded run at the Manhattan Theatre Club. As a screenwriter (Moonstruck) and playwright (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea), Shanley is known for messy, bare-knuckle romances that boil over with unruly passions. Doubt, which marks his Broadway debut, is spare and restrained, its uneasy emotions simmering mostly beneath its well-made surface. "During rehearsals, the director, Doug Hughes, would sometimes ask me for a little more of this or a little more of that," Shanley recalls. "I kept telling him, 'I'm feeling really cheap, Doug-I just don't feel like giving you anything.' "

The formidable nun at the heart of Doubt, which is set in the Bronx in 1964, is one Sister Aloysius, a take-no-prisoners Catholic grammar school principal brought to vivid life in a pointedly unsentimental performance by the splendid Cherry Jones. Viewing the world with stark moral clarity, her Sister Aloysius holds fast to the certainty of her convictions amid the seismic religious, political, and cultural shocks of the era. The marvelous Brian F. O'Byrne (a 2004 Tony winner for his performance in Frozen) plays Father Flynn, a youthful parish priest whose relaxed, warmhearted approach to his vocation sets him at odds with the older nun.

When Sister Aloysius comes to suspect Flynn of molesting one of her boys (the school's lone African-American student, whom we never see), she bears down on him like a battleship, determined to do whatever it takes to stop him. "When you take a step to address wrongdoing," she says at one point, "you are taking a step away from God, but in his service." Caught in her wake are the boy's mother (Adriane Lenox), whose fierce protectiveness takes a surprising turn, and an idealistic young nun (Heather Goldenhersh) whose shaken belief in human goodness keeps her awake at night. "Maybe we're not supposed to sleep well," Sister Aloysius memorably tells her. Jones confesses that she has been tempted to "start doing that awful thing that all actors do, where they want to show the audience the inner struggle." But, she says, "I realized that I had to keep her lean and mean and certain-ice and nails."

Although he was the only cast member to be let in on the truth, O'Byrne plays his character with a measure of ambiguity. "If you are an accused person, you're always aware of being watched," he says. "So, guilty or not, I have to be ready to manipulate the other actors, and the audience, too, to keep them unsure." Once the run ends, says Jones, she's going to "pounce on Brian and make him finally tell us what really did happen in the rectory."

Not surprisingly, John Patrick Shanley is himself a product of a 1960s Bronx parochial school education. And though he eventually lost his faith in the Church (he calls monotheism "the Wal-Mart of religions-everything consolidated under one roof"), his admiration for the Sisters of Charity who taught him and to whom the play is dedicated remains undimmed. But he is not just looking back. Part of what led him to write his new drama was his bemusement with leaders who never question their own judgment and with what he calls the "ferocious partisanship" of public discourse. "If Chris Matthews had Confucius on, he'd consider him a terrible guest," the playwright says. "And Wittgenstein? Forget about it-he'd bomb all over the place." For Shanley, the real question behind Doubt is one not of guilt or innocence but of bravery: ...