The Cardinal Stage Company wraps up their 2008-2009 season with Doubt, John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play. It's set in a Catholic School in 1964 and pits a popular priest against a strong willed nun in a battle with dramatic and comic aspects that turns into a gripping mystery.
The cast includes veteran area and regional actors. Diane Kondrat plays Sister Aloysius. She observes that, "Students should only be learning penmanship with true fountain pens. Ball points make them press down and when they press down, they write like monkeys.
Mike Price takes the part of the young priest and spoke directly about the central theme, "Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone."
Although there is a much praised film version of Doubt, the founder of the Cardinal Stage Company, Randy White, says, this production brings the drama back to the stage, where it began and where it works best.
In addition to Kondrat and Price the cast features Indiana University grad Lilia Vassileva a familiar face for fans of the Indiana University Department of Theatre and the Brown County Playhouse. She plays a young nun who's torn between the two principals. As Kondrat said, "the poor thing doesn't know who to believe."
The 2009 Cardinal Stage Company production of Doubt directed by Fontaine Syer in the John Waldron Arts Center Auditorium plays this Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then continues through May 10th with Thursday through Sunday performances.