Copious Notes

Lynn Nottage’s Ruined has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, besting the Broadway hit In the Heights, by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes; and Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, which had its world premier at the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Lynn Nottage.

Lexington has actually seen quite a bit of Nottage’s work and even the playwright herself. Early in the Fall of 2002, Nottage seemed to be all the rage in the Horse Capitol. KET filmed her short play Poof!, about a woman whose abusive husband spontaneously combusts, with Rosie Perez and Viola Davis, at the same time Actors Guild of Lexington was preparing a production of her play, Crumbs from the Table of Joy.  The film brought Nottage to town, and she paid the Actors Guild cast a visit, talking to them about Crumbs’ clash of blues and be-bop culture. During Deb Shoss’ tenure as AGL artistic director, the theater also produced Nottage’s Mud, River, Stone and in 2006, the University of Kentucky presented her Intimate Apparel.

Nottage can add the Pulitzer to a list of a highly prestigious grants she’s received, including a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2007 MacArthur Genius Grant. Ruined, currently playing at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club, is about women during a brutal civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ashley Smith who plays Sister James, left, worked through a scene with Courtney Collier, center, who plays Sister Aloysius, and Jim Trujillo, playing Father Flynn, during dress rehearsal of UK Theatre's production of "Doubt." Photos by Mark Cornelison | LexGo.

Click the play button to hear a podcast of our interview with the director and actors in UK Theatre’s Doubt:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

There are different ways to see Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play about a scandal in a Catholic school.

You can say that literally in Lexington, this month.

The play will be presented by the University of Kentucky Theatre Dec. 4 to 7 in the Briggs Theatre in UK’s Fine Arts Building.

Later in the month, or possibly early next year (Lexington release dates are to be announced), the film version will hit theaters with Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Father Flynn and Meryl Streep playing Sister Aloysius, who accuses the priest of inappropriate conduct with a boy at the school.

Another couple of ways to see it are as a tidy mystery or a lingering question. Shanley and critics seemed to prefer the latter. New York Times critic Ben Brantley complained that when the cast for the Broadway production changed all doubt had been removed from Doubt.

Andrew Kimbrough.

UK theater professor and the play’s director, Andrew Kimbrough is certainly going for the less-certain interpretation.
“I don’t think Shanely wants the audience to reach a conclusion,” Kimbrough says. “I think he wants the process of investigating and formulating evidence and the difficulty of arriving at a conclusion to be at the forefront.

“In the introduction to the play, he points out a very common human phenomenon, and that is that all of us tend to be opinionated people. And we tend to make up our minds about what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s inappropriate and what’s not and stick by those opinions, even when fact should convince us to the contrary.”

That tendency is embodied in Sister Aloyisus, who is certain popular Father Flynn has stepped out of line but cannot build an airtight case. In just four years, the characters have become highly sought after roles.

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