Two plays, two successes

CHAPEL HILL -- After more than two decades, PlayMakers Repertory Company puts its middle name back into service with alternating stagings of two award-winning plays. The regional premieres of John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt" (2005) and Suzan-Lori Park's "Topdog/Underdog" (2002) show the company at the top of its game.

There are links beyond the Pulitzer Prize for these plays. Both grapple with right and wrong, race and gender prejudices, broken families and broken dreams. Each is a stimulating experience, and in tandem they demonstrate the vibrancy of contemporary playwriting and the artistic heights that UNC-CH's resident professional company can achieve.

Shanley has written the more satisfying play. His tightly wrought script, set in 1964 New York, thrusts the audience into a gripping battle between Sister Aloysius, head of a church school, and Father Flynn, the local parish priest. Sister Aloysius, fanatically upright and intensely suspicious, turns an observation from a novice teacher about a black male student's apparent distress into an accusation of molestation after learning the student has been alone with Father Flynn.

The priest vehemently denies it, but Sister Aloysius determines to prove his transgression, casting aside grave doubts from the teacher and the boy's mother. The battle becomes not just about morals, but also about male dominance in society, the protective buddy system among Catholic clergy and racial discrimination.

Shanley's dialogue is fraught with double meanings, which keeps the audience in a constant quandary as allegiances shift on every line. There's genuine humor in Sister Aloysius' outrageously stern manner, but the play's serious core chills and disturbs, leaving ultimate judgments to the viewer.

Julie Fishell takes on the role of a lifetime with Sister Aloysius. With this astonishingly self-righteous and coldly calculating character, the smallest gesture or glance adds volumes. Fishell expertly makes Sister Aloysius neither villain nor hero.

Jeffrey Blair Cornell makes a worthy opponent. His easily likable Father Flynn is cagily wary with Sister Aloysius, which raises questions about his true nature.

Janie Brookshire movingly portrays Sister James' conflict of loyalties, while Kathryn Hunter-Williams challenges traditional parental love as the student's mother. Director Drew Barr keeps the pace taut and easy answers at bay.

The production is breathtaking. Sudden appearances of a huge office, a lonely garden or a church altar are magically wrought by designer Marion Williams, vividly lighted by Justin Townsend and subtly enhanced by Michel Marrano's sound picture.

"Doubt" is close to perfection.

'Topdog/Underdog'

Suzan-Lori Parks' early plays are considered experimental, with their abstract settings, commingling of historical characters and language used like jazz riffs. "Topdog/Underdog" moves toward the mainstream without becoming fully conventional.

In a squalid one-room apartment, African-American brothers Booth and Lincoln (named by their father as a joke but with fateful appropriateness) try to live out their dreams while scratching for existence.

Lincoln, a former card hustler, has a safe but humiliating arcade job. Booth, a petty thief, yearns to become a successful card hustler like his older sibling and eventually persuades Lincoln to help him learn the tricks. Through their constant joking and arguing about the parents who abandoned them, the women they've had, and their big plans for changing their lives, the brothers reveal much about the circumstances they've grown up in.

Parks still uses fanciful language and near-absurd situations, but this play is more formal, complete with arc and big climax. But she breaks it into different, unconnected parts -- some outrageously funny, others moodily abstract, others starkly dramatic.

Brandon J. Dirden's Booth and Tyrone Mitchell Henderson's Lincoln are alternately vulnerable and hardened, lovable and frightening, in beautifully crafted performances. Raelle Myrick-Hodges' energized direction emphasizes the script's discrete segments, highly entertaining but not fully realizing the darkly disturbing connections between the brothers nor giving them consistent characterizations.

Still, the production team's dazzling use of light and shadow and the actors' winning personalities make the play an intriguing partner in PlayMakers' return to rep.