Don't Believe It's a Night of No Doubt

Tonight, while the country won't be distracted by basketball playoffs, another contest takes the court in the East: The Tonys. In the past Abby and I have watched the awards show like a sampler for upcoming trips to Broadway and New York's other theatre. There's no such trip on this year's calendar, but if there were, I'd want to see the play that could win tonight's Best Play Tony, "Doubt."

The Best Play award is the place where Broadway's invention has gone to live. So many of the theatres on Broadway fill their seats with shows that are sure bets. Half of this year's Best Musical-nominated shows rode the rocket of movie-based material, stories like the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Strong film background packs them in — just ask the producers of The Producers. The imitation has gotten so profound that Tonys have added "Best Revival Of" awards during the past five years, to re-award the likes of Twelve Angry Men, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, La Cage Aux Folles or Sweet Charity.

But at one point, all of those classics were lifting the curtain for the first time on Broadway, just like Doubt did this spring. The play, like many of the Broadway Best Play entries, had an earlier production debut on another New York stage, The Manhattan Theatre Company. Its author, John Patrick Shanley, has had a busy season in New York's theatre over the past year, with two other shows, Sailor's Song and a revival of his Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. This is the kind of season that creates a playwright's legend, the kind that All About Eve refers to when it describes its character Lloyd Richards, who's had a string of dramatic hits in that movie.

Shanley's play steps into some deep water. The New York Times sums it up this way:

Set in the Bronx in 1964, it is structured as a clash of wills and generations between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, the young priest who may or may not be too fond of the schoolboys in his charge. He is played by Brian F. O'Byrne (a Tony winner this year for "Frozen"), whose deceptively easygoing, layered performance is the perfect counterweight to that of Ms. Jones.

This is the sort of play the Tonys love, or ought to. High-octane talent, like the actress who plays Sister Aloysius, 49-year-old Cherry Jones, the first openly lesbian performer to win a Best Actress Tony back in 1995. The play explores a tough subject, handled by an expert author. And maybe, with the play's director and two stars also nominated, Tony voters will take some satisfaction in giving a former Hollywood screenwriter a Tony to go with his Pulitzer Prize for "Doubt." Shanley, after all, won an Oscar for the screenplay of Moonstruck. The Times theatre critic Ben Brantley is predicting multiple awards for Doubt. That's of little doubt. But what a season for any writer: To place a Pulitzer and a Tony in the same year onto a shelf that already holds an Oscar. Shanely's IMDB profile begins, "After he was thrown out of Catholic school in New York..." He's a purist in the sense of that Lloyd Richards character, too. His contract with Hollywood insists not a single line of his screenplays can be changed. A tough point to negotiate, without a doubt.