Doubt Takes Five Awards
at Theatre Ontario

After winning six awards including Best Production at the Eastern Ontario Drama League Full-Length Play Festival in Peterborough in March, Domino's production of Doubt: A Parable has gone on to win five awards plus three nominations at the Theatre Ontario Festival in London May 19-23.

The awards were:

L-R: Sandie Cond, Christopher Sleeth and Sara Harrison

In a Catholic school in New York City, a scandal appears to be unfolding. A priest has taken a schoolboy into his home, alone. On returning to class, the boy appears upset and seems to have been drinking alcohol.

The school's authoritarian headmistress is determined not to let the impropriety pass, but to confront the priest who she believes has been abusing his position.

But the priest denies he has done anything wrong. Is he lying, or not?

The script of Doubt is subtitled A Parable. "It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things," writes John Patrick Shanley in his preface to the play. "When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he's on the verge of growth.

Sandie Cond (left) and Tamara Thomas

The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like you've gone the wrong way and you're lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the present."

Doubt was first produced by the Manhattan Theater Club in 2004, and had its Broadway debut in March 2005 at the Walter Kerr Theater. It was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Drama Desk Award and Tony Award for Best Play. It was made into a movie, which Shanley directed, in 2008.

John Patrick Shanley

Born in New York in 1950, John Patrick Shanley graduated from New York University. He had a number of jobs, among them house painter, bartender, furniture mover and U.S. Marine, before becoming a full-time playwright and screenwriter.

He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for the 1987 film Moonstruck.

His other plays include Joe Vs. the Volcano, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Welcome to the Moon, Beggars in the House of Plenty, Women of Manhattan, Savage in Limbo, Defiance and Romantic Poetry (co-written with Henry Krieger).